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The lost art of admitting what you don’t know
Even large language models are starting to show this worrying human unwillingness to admit that we don’t know the answer to something.
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Efforts are under way to teach LLMs how to say “I don’t know”, or to at least express their level of confidence for a given answer.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Sarah O’Connor
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When I applied to Cambridge University, my first interview was with a professor who invited me to sit, pressed his fingertips together, looked at me searchingly, then said: “Is the nation-state in decline?”
My heart fell. Not only did I not know the answer, I didn’t even really understand the question. But I had heard – possibly from my state school, or else from the university – that these interviews were “not testing what you know, but how you think”. So I took a breath and said: “I’m not sure what a nation-state is.”
