How do we know that something is true? I find it mesmerizing how many facts people believe to be true, despite having evidence to the contrary or having no evidence at all.
During my master's, a professor taught me a lesson I've never forgotten. After a PhD student's research presentation, while the rest of us sat in silence when asked for questions, he held up pages of notes he'd filled with questions. "I've spent decades in this field, and I have so many questions, but you have none?" That moment changed something for me. In many environments, asking questions is seen as weakness, an admission of not knowing. But the people who are genuinely good at what they do are never shy to ask questions. They know there are gaps in their knowledge, and they're eager to fill them.
There's a kind of performance of knowledge that's almost like gossip. Wow, did you know that bumblebees violate the rules of physics? You see the bumblebee fly, so either you have no concept of what flying means, or you don't understand which laws of physics are supposedly violated, or you don't trust your eyes. But people repeat it anyway because it sounds impressive and scientific.
When you study engineering, you learn to begin with simple assumptions and revise them as you gather evidence. This ongoing, iterative process is what builds real understanding. Many people avoid this effort and accept what others say rather than thinking for themselves. If you simply repeat someone else's conclusion without grasping it, I'm not really having a conversation with you, I'm talking to whoever you're quoting. And because you don't understand the underlying reasoning, I can't even ask you questions to clarify or challenge your thinking. It's a kind of conversational plagiarism: presenting someone else's ideas as your own, without doing the work to truly understand them.
If we want to get something done, especially in an ambiguous scenario where the path forward isn't clear, parroting unexamined facts is useless. The real test of knowledge isn't whether you can repeat it, but whether you can do something with it: whether it enables you to model the world in a way that helps you navigate new situations and solve problems you haven't seen before.