The Courage to Say “I Don’t Know”

Across science, politics, and technology, our institutions seem increasingly afraid of the most honest sentence a human being can utter:

“I don’t know.”

Public discourse today is delivered with certainty, authority, and reassurance. Experts appear on screens, reports are published with definitive language, and systems are presented as though they rest on firm, unshakeable ground.

But certainty is not the same as understanding.

And authority is not the same as wisdom.

Learning the Value of “I Don’t Know”

It was Simon and Paul who taught me this, the architect’s of MoneySuperMarket.com and arguably successful folks In a traditional institutional fashion.

Despite working in high performance teams who built one of the UK’s most influential technology businesses, I was never afraid to say, plainly and without ego: “I don’t know.” Not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a genuine intellectual position.

It struck me that real power and intelligence are often quiet, provisional, and self-aware. The bravado comes later, layered on by institutions and narratives that prefer confidence over curiosity.

That lesson stayed with me: the willingness to admit uncertainty is not weakness, it is a marker of serious thinking.

Institutional Narratives and the Performance of Confidence

Figures like Brian Cox or David Attenborough are not unintelligent, nor ill intentioned. They are exceptional communicators, translating complex ideas into accessible narratives for millions.

Yet they speak from within powerful institutional frameworks, media, academia, funding structures, and cultural expectations, that reward coherence and confidence. These systems prefer narratives that feel settled, reassuring, and unified. Doubt, ambiguity, and foundational questioning are harder to package, harder to broadcast, and harder to monetise.

This is not a personal failing.

It is a structural one.

Institutions are built to stabilise knowledge, not to publicly destabilise it.

When Science Becomes Belief

Science, at its core, is not a collection of truths. It is a method, a disciplined way of asking questions, testing ideas, and correcting itself over time.

But when science is presented as a finished product rather than a living process, something essential is lost. It becomes something to believe in, rather than something to practice. Inquiry gives way to reassurance. Hypotheses harden into doctrine. Models quietly become metaphysics.

In public culture, science risks being treated as a new form of institutional faith, trusted, but rarely interrogated.

The Vast Territories of Ignorance

The deepest thinkers, Roger Penrose and many others, both within and outside the mainstream, consistently remind us how little we truly understand. Consciousness, intelligence, cosmology, the nature of matter, the structure of reality itself, these remain profoundly open questions.

To acknowledge this is not to weaken science.

It is to honour it.

Humility is not anti-scientific. It is the starting condition of science.

Power, Uncertainty, and the Politics of Knowledge

Institutions struggle to say “we don’t know” because uncertainty does not travel well through power. Governments must reassure. Corporations must project confidence. Media must deliver clear narratives. Academic careers depend on publishable claims.

But truth has never been obliged to be convenient.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it is also the birthplace of discovery.

Questioning as an Act of Care

I don’t want less science in public life.

I want more honesty, more humility, and more courage to say:

We have powerful tools, but we do not yet understand the world as well as we pretend.

Questioning dominant narratives is not cynicism.

It is care, for knowledge, for society, and for the future of inquiry itself.

To say “I don’t know” is not to retreat from truth.

It is to step closer to it.