It's not lying. For some people "fact you know" is not a well-defined category. If you are smart and good at inferring stuff, and you know some facts, then mayb

It's not lying. For some people "fact you know" is not a well-defined category. If you are smart and good at inferring stuff, and you know some facts, then maybe you can go further. Maybe you can provide insights. You can certainly appear more knowledgeable than you are (you aren't, you're working things out as you go along, which isn't guaranteed to be correct.) What it is unfortunately is intellectually arrogant. I saw a great comment from roel_v (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535064 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1535064) about this (reproduced below). If the benefits are working out for you (you look smart, you're right often enough) then great. But if you keep getting called out, and you're worried about that, then you need to equivocate more. You also need to become more aware of the unknown unknowns. It's all very well knowing some things, and guessing others, but you also need to know what you actually know and what you don't, otherwise you'll not only look stupid, but at some point you'll also do something really dumb too. "95% of legal chatter amongst technical people on the internet is meaningless to lawyers ('meaningless' as in 'jibberish', 'flux capacitor'-style nonsense) - because the fundamental assumptions and reasoning methods are so vastly different"