Image source: Chinese American Association of Solano County

Confucius, the Chinese sage who traveled throughout China offering advice, doesn’t get a ton of attention in the daily blogosphere in the United States.

Stellar athletes or glamorous movie stars can top the list.

For one thing, as some young people might say and type: He. Looks. Way. Too. Old.

And what’s going on with his hair? And that robe? Hasn’t he heard of Barneys?

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I want to chime in on one area with which I agree with the wise, though controversial, philosopher from Qufu in Shandong province: Admitting what you know and what you don’t.

I say controversial because his views on women in society certainly are open to debate.

I raise the issue of knowing because I’ve had conversations – not only as a journalist but with some customer service representatives on the phone – in which I asked a question.

But the answer lacked any relationship to what I inquired about.

Then, the person continued on this tangent, which crowded out my question. I had to politely return to my point.

Sometimes, the cause is a good, old-fashioned listening problem. Other times, especially with some customer service representatives, people didn’t want to admit they lacked an answer.

I know: We all hate admitting ignorance.

With journalism, there were cases in which the person was never going to answer no matter what I asked.

But the scholar who goes by Kongzi in Mandarin has one quote that you might have heard:

“Zhi zhi wei zhi zhi. Bu zhi wei bu zhi. Shi zhi ye.”

Basic translation: You know what you know. What you don’t know is what you don’t know. Which means you know.

Another way to say it in Mandarin is: “Ni zhidao ni bu zhidao.”

Or, you know what you don’t know.

There have been numerous times when I’ve uttered the sentence: ”I don’t know.”

It’s actually yielded great results.

When I covered biotechnology and was relatively new at it, I interviewed Johnny Stine, who founded a Seattle company that was known at the time as Spaltudaq.

He started talking about antibodies and asked whether I was familiar with them.

For some reason, philosophy came to mind when I thought of “bodies” and “antibodies.”

I asked whether he meant something along the basic philosophical lines of “I am” and “I am not.”

He could have laughed during the conversation. He probably did after we finished talking.

But his next question was logical and helpful: When was the last time that I studied biology?

“High school,” I told him.

He scaled the conversation back so I could write this short piece on his company.

His patience enabled me to note this:

Researchers, Stine said, currently take a tumor and study its DNA to find out how to attack it. But by looking at an antibody, which is a body’s reaction to the tumor and an attempt to fight it, researchers can determine what the body is detecting on the cancerous growth.

Another time, news was breaking that Alaska Airlines had just purchased 35 737-800 models to help Boeing in its competition with Airbus.

I admitted my lack of knowledge to a Boeing spokesperson who asked how much I knew about the aerospace company’s 737 passenger jet.

“Just about nothing,” I recall saying. “Nothing?” the spokesperson replied.

I had free time that day. My editor tapped me for the story.

That answer, though, helped the spokesperson give me the details to write a pretty solid daily story about the important sale.

Had I tried to bluff my way through both conversations, I would have hung up the phone each time and thought: What am I going to write about?

By the way, my editor sat one desk away.

And on the note of saying things that you would like to say more often, I’d like to add: I hope my family and friends are doing well in health and spirit.