Beyond Nobody Knows
How Mindful Sceptics Act Responsibly With Imperfect Information
Environmental policy development demands clarity, purpose, and explicit value statements to address unanswerable, value-laden questions that often plague the process. You can’t have a ’nobody knows’.
Your local council wants to cut down 300-year-old trees for a development. The debate in the chamber gets heated, then someone says, "Well, nobody really knows what the impact will be."
Everyone nods with visible relief. Decision postponed.
I've witnessed this intellectual escape hatch open far too many times in government advisory rooms and community meetings. What decades of policy work taught me is that "nobody knows" is almost always intellectual laziness masquerading as scientific humility.
It’s not information that is missing, no matter how big the sigh of relief when it’s invoked. What is missing is the courage to engage with what we do know.
While we play this card, opportunities slip away.
What if we treated "nobody knows" as the beginning of better questions instead of conversation-ending wisdom? That's where mindful scepticism comes in.
Better questions, thoughtful evaluation of existing evidence, and recognition of when we have enough information to act responsibly become influential conversation builders.
In this week's Mindful Sceptic, we will examine intellectual surrender and find some ways to overcome it.
Playing the ‘nobody knows’ card in natural resource management
Audiences love trivia, especially when smart, funny people deliver it.
The wonderful Stephen Fry hosted the popular panel show QI (Quite Interesting) for over a decade, and the equally delightful Sandi Toksvig has filled his oversized shoes with aplomb since 2016.
The producers introduced the “nobody knows” card in one of the many QI series. Panellists play this card when they think that one of the questions is so crazily obscure that nobody, now or through recorded history, knows the answer.
Stumped for an answer, someone will suggest that this especially obscure question is so wackadoodle that ‘nobody knows’. Hilarity usually follows because panellists rarely play the card correctly.
In one of my past day jobs, I advised governments on the science behind natural resource management. This involved helping a range of public servants who might have legal, policy, technical, management, or political proclivities understand the ecology behind the best use of the landscape for human needs and wants.
You would be pretty surprised at how often I was tempted to play the ‘nobody knows’ card on their behalf.
Here are a few choice examples.
It seems that nobody knows…
How many koalas there are in Australia?
Will cutting down some trees result in saline soils?
What is the economic effect of drought on the social fabric of rural communities?
If some invasive shrubs that folk like to call woody weeds are thinned, will it increase grass cover and improve livestock production?
What do the majority of people think about removing paddock trees from the landscape?
Will the Swift Parrot go extinct anytime soon?
Is ‘weed’ a label for plants or is it innate to certain plant species?
How can a field officer reliably identify a critically endangered ecological community?
I will stop as the list could career down a rabbit hole of cynicism and become very dull, but you get the idea.
In a world of policy increasingly populated by technocrats and policy wonks, the details of the natural world and the human use of natural resources are unknown, at least by the people in the room.
Why Environmental Questions Hide Value Judgments
Look closely at the ‘nobody knows’ in the random list above.
They are just examples, yet they are fundamental to key policy planks that governments and political parties from all sides of politics have promoted over decades in my neck of the woods (the state of New South Wales in Australia). It might be acceptable that nobody in the room knows, but surely somebody would have to know or could find out before a new policy is developed.
Only there is a snag.
As you can see, many of these ‘nobody knows’ questions are part factual and part value because that is what the human use of natural capital, what Australians call natural resource management, sets up.
There are always challenging choices around the balance between using nature and basking in it from your villa on the coast that you purchased with profit from last year's bumper crop or timber harvest.
Even questions that could be explicitly answered, like the number of koalas, are precursors to qualifying perceptions of value.
And the thing about value is that everybody knows.
The human condition is that we are value-laden. Only what each person knows is different from the next, so in fact, it is true that ‘nobody knows’ because there isn’t one value but many, as many as there are people answering the question.
This is not a new revelation or some outstanding insight.
It serves as the foundation for all policy development. There are numerous values, and the balance between them is what makes the political landscape interesting.
Interpreting the ups and downs in politics is easy enough, but there shouldn’t be too many unknowns in the development of the policy. The value proposition must be clear by the time the law is made.
Now I should explain why it rarely is.
The Real Reason We Don't Have Answers
There are things about natural capital that we should know and are knowable, like the number of koalas or what happens to the chemistry of each different soil type if the trees growing on it are cut down and replaced by a wheat crop, but we don’t because we have not set enough of our IQ on finding the answer.
You can imagine how hard it is to provide advice when most of the questions asked of you are either value-laden or lack research evidence.
It is very easy to become frustrated and even begin to question your knowledge, especially if you are trained as a scientist, the discipline of the sceptic.
Should a scientist decide to answer any of the questions in the list above, here is what she needs to do:
She would pull together what humanity knows about the subject matter of the question by reading everything she could get her eyes on from the literature on the topic. Only she doesn’t have all the time since Noah’s flood, so she is selective and relies more on her past understanding of the literature refreshed by reading a few more recent examples.
Next, she thinks carefully about the question. What does it mean? How is it constructed? Can it be made into a meaningful statement or hypothesis that could be tested? Great if it can, and if not, how can it be broken down into smaller questions that could be answered?
Once she has some hypotheses, she figures out if they are testable through the structured gathering of evidence in an experiment. And if this proves too difficult, she will adopt the less popular observation approach without specific manipulation. Arguably, the latter approach, which is called inductive reasoning being after the fact, is all you can do in landscapes, but she will try for the experimental approach if she can.
Next, she will design her study that will gather the evidence and go on to complete the work using whatever specific methods her training has equipped her to use. She might go to the bush and throw some quadrats around or survey at night for the reflectance in marsupial eyes, or stay in the office and instruct the computer to play with the millions of coloured pixels on a remotely sensed image.
After some time, she will return to her question with the new information she has gathered. She will let the question guide her analysis of the information and conduct some analyses, typically involving probabilities. This turns the information into inference.
Finally, she takes the inference and applies it to her question. If everything went well and her design was tight, her study was well-executed, and her analyses were on point, she will have an answer.
She presents her answer in a research paper, explaining how she arrived at it and putting it into context. Much of the context discussion will be about the quality of the inference. Remember, the scientist is a sceptic, so she will not know the definitive answer. It must be qualified by the sources of error in both the design and the data. She most likely admits that her answer is equivocal and recommends more research.
By the time this sequence of events has played out, the public servants have retired, and a new crop of bright young technocrats are in a conference room ordering coffee, ready for the break in the program logic workshop.
Their technical advisor is pulling out the ‘nobody knows’ card again.
How a Mindful Sceptic Thinks about… the Nobody Knows Card
A mindful sceptic rarely has the luxury of a research career to answer big questions. She might need a few shortcuts to objective answers.
Rather than gather the evidence from scratch, she evaluates what humanity already knows about the question.
She might follow a different process that looks a bit like this:
Engage in evidence-based inquiry.
Critically evaluate multiple evidence sources.
Consider the methodologies behind population assessments.
Acknowledge potential biases in data.
Recognise the complexities inherent in estimating wildlife numbers.
Ensure a well-informed and nuanced understanding.
Avoid accepting a single, possibly incomplete narrative.
Rather than use her knowledge and skills in the scientific method, the mindful sceptic relies on critical thinking and evaluation of existing knowledge.
The premise is something like this.
Given the prevalence of unanswered, value-laden questions in natural resource management and environmental policy development, I need to take a more thoughtful approach to seeking answers.
I also know that values are everywhere, given the complexity of balancing human needs with ecological considerations and the inherent challenges in addressing these uncertainties.
I can access and evaluate existing research with critical thinking and evidence-based analysis while being mindful of the value propositions and the diverse perspectives involved in policy development.
Rather than play the ‘nobody knows’ card, which is the lazy option, the mindful sceptic evaluates whatever evidence there is and uses it to answer the question, even if that means accepting uncertainties.
Naturally, we now have large language models that can speed up the evidence access and evaluation by orders of magnitude. Helpful so long as there are checked for accuracy as they still tend to make things up.
Let’s trim this down into three steps.
Three Actions When Someone Plays the 'Nobody Knows' Card
When you hear "nobody knows" in environmental discussions, take these three actions...
Action 1: Probe the Specifics
Ask: "What specific aspect don't we know?"
Most "nobody knows" statements crumble under gentle specificity. Back in that heated council meeting about urban tree removal, when a developer confidently declared that "nobody knows if these trees improve air quality," all it needed was a simple follow-up question."Do you mean we don't know the exact particulate reduction rate, or are you questioning whether trees filter air at all?" It instantly revealed he was conflating measurement precision with basic ecological understanding.
The magic happens in the specificity.
Often, what "nobody knows" is actually a narrow technical detail, while the broader principle is well-established. This distinction matters enormously for decision-making. We might not know exactly how many tonnes of carbon a particular forest stores, but we certainly know that forests store carbon.
The next easy step is…
Action 2: Inventory What We Actually Know
Ask: "Given what we do know, what can we reasonably conclude?"
This is where the mindful sceptic shines. Instead of accepting the knowledge void, map the knowledge landscape.
During my consultancy work, I would often conduct ‘Rapid Evidence Reviews’ involving a rapid scan and filtering of the research literature on a topic to summarise what is known.
These short efforts tell us that we know a great deal about most questions in resource management. For example, wetlands reduce flood risk, filter pollutants, and support biodiversity.
Even a brief catalogue of what we understand is sufficient to choose a suitable action. Perfect knowledge is the enemy of good decisions.
After the perceptive question and the evidence inventory, the third step is…
Action 3: Expose the Underlying Values
Ask: "What values are driving the need for this answer?"
This is the most revealing question, and often the most uncomfortable.
When someone insists we can't act because "nobody knows," dig into why that particular piece of knowledge matters to them. Behind most "nobody knows" statements lies a values conflict someone doesn't want to acknowledge.
Take the koala population question from our earlier list. The uncomfortable truth? Sometimes it's strategically useful not to know. Precise numbers complicate fundraising narratives or policy positions. The real question isn't about koala counting methodology or the numbers it generates; it's about how we balance conservation goals with economic interests and whether we're comfortable making decisions with the uncertainty that characterises all living systems.
These three actions give you intellectual courage.
In a world drowning in information yet starved of wisdom, refusing to accept "nobody knows" as final answers demonstrates the engaged thinking our complex challenges demand.
Next time you encounter this conversational dead end, remember that somebody usually does know something useful, and that something is often enough to move the negotiation forward.
Not playing the ‘nobody knows’ card
As an experienced scientist with extensive knowledge of natural capital, I wouldn’t be invited to the workshop in the conference room. After a while, my reputation for asking pointed questions preceded me.
However, I didn’t always escape. I was asked what I knew about some of today’s questions, which ranged from how many farmers are empowered by a given policy to where in the landscape we can find the highest biodiversity value.
I could have said, “Nobody knows,” but instead, I would answer where I could or say, “I’ll take that on notice and get back to you.”
I would have preferred to say, "Before you ask, give it some thought.”
What is the value? Why is that specific question that needs an answer, and why?
Often, I would refine the questions and offer them back to the technocrats for comment with phrases like “Is this what you want to know?”
Once this to-and-fro is tidied up, I applied some critical thinking and evaluation to find answers fit for purpose. It is surprising how a little extra thought and clarification make finding answers much easier, even if there is a need for an answer at all.
For example, it turns out that it is better not to know the number of koalas because then it is easier to spin the extinction yarn. If the numbers were known reliably, it might be much harder to leverage public sympathy. So the real question is about values and distraction, not the population ecology of a cute-looking marsupial.
In the end, the ‘nobody knows’ card should only appear because, beyond idle curiosity, there is no need to know so nobody bothered to find out.
Mindful Momentum
The Weekly Nobody Knows Detective
For one week, keep a simple tally every time you hear "nobody knows" in conversations, news, or meetings.
When you spot it, quietly ask yourself the three evaluation questions…
What specifically don't we know?
What do we actually know?
What values are driving this question?
At week's end, reflect on patterns. You'll be amazed how often "nobody knows" masks incomplete thinking or uncomfortable value conflicts.
This exercise transforms passive listening into active critical thinking practice.
And if that momentum is a little onerous, try this instead.
The Evidence Archaeology Project
Choose one environmental issue you've been told "nobody knows" about from local news or a community debate.
Spend 30 minutes searching for what researchers, practitioners, and communities do know about similar situations.
Don't aim for PhD-level expertise; aim for enough understanding to have an informed conversation.
You'll likely discover that somebody, somewhere, knows quite a lot about your supposedly unknowable topic.
Key Points
"Nobody knows" has become environmental policy's most problematic escape hatch, allowing policymakers and communities to avoid wrestling with difficult value-laden choices despite sufficient information often being available for reasonable decisions. From urban tree removal debates to species conservation discussions, this phrase consistently appears when stakeholders encounter uncomfortable complexity, creating intellectual paralysis that stalls meaningful progress on pressing environmental challenges.
Most environmental "nobody knows" claims mask fundamental conflicts about competing values rather than genuine data gaps. Questions about koala populations, soil salinity risks, and ecological community identification often represent deeper disagreements about economic development versus environmental protection that communities find easier to frame as technical knowledge problems rather than acknowledge as difficult trade-offs requiring explicit value judgments.
Mindful scepticism offers a more practical approach than lengthy research cycles, focusing on evaluating existing knowledge through critical thinking and evidence-based analysis rather than conducting new studies from scratch. This method recognises that environmental decisions rarely require perfect information and that the extended timeline of traditional scientific research often leaves urgent policy problems unresolved while new cohorts of decision-makers repeat identical avoidance patterns.
Three practical actions can transform "nobody knows" paralysis into productive inquiry: probing for specifics to distinguish narrow technical gaps from well-established principles, inventorying existing knowledge to map what is actually understood, and exposing underlying values that drive the demand for particular answers. These tools enable communities to move forward with thoughtful decisions despite uncertainty, replacing intellectual surrender with engaged problem-solving that acknowledges both scientific evidence and human values.
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Curiosity Corner
This issue of the newsletter is all about…
When environmental discussions hit the "nobody knows" wall, mindful sceptics use three simple questions to transform intellectual surrender into productive action that moves communities forward despite uncertainty.
5 Better Questions from this issue of the newsletter…
What soil types and climatic conditions make salinity risk higher when trees are removed? This shifts from the broad "will cutting trees cause salinity" to a specific, actionable question that helps landowners make informed site-specific decisions based on known soil science principles.
Which community resilience factors help rural areas weather economic shocks from drought? Rather than seeking impossible predictions about drought's social impact, this focuses on identifying and strengthening existing community assets that demonstrably reduce vulnerability.
What population trend data do we need to make informed koala conservation decisions? This transforms the endless koala counting debate into a strategic question about what specific information would actually change conservation actions, forcing clarity about decision-making criteria.
How can we design land management policies that acknowledge ecological uncertainty while still protecting biodiversity? Instead of demanding perfect species identification protocols, this embraces uncertainty as a design constraint, leading to more robust and adaptive policy frameworks.
What values are we really weighing when we debate removing established trees for development? This cuts through the technical smokescreens to expose the fundamental trade-offs between economic development and environmental preservation that communities must openly negotiate.
In the next issue
What If Everything You Know About Environmental Priorities Is Backwards?
While we pour resources into saving charismatic species that contribute little to ecosystem health, the invisible army of soil organisms that sustain human life goes ignored and unprotected.
The next issue exposes why your backyard dirt matters infinitely more than polar bears for your survival and how to spot the difference between conservation theatre and biodiversity protection.
Time to flip your environmental worldview upside down.
Behind every piece of mindful scepticism are countless hours of research, fact-checking, and wrestling with complex evidence.
I'm grateful if these insights sparked your curiosity, challenged an assumption, or made you think differently about an environmental issue.
Your support keeps me caffeinated for the next attempt to upend humanity's predicament.