it's hard to frame questions about what you don't know

Admitting things that I personally don't know is hard, because it feels like admitting a weakness or failing. But ignorance isn't a character flaw and we shouldn't be afraid to recognize it in ourselves.

Asking good questions is hard, though. It's one thing in class, where a professor is setting up an intellectual framework, and you are asking them questions about what they mean. It's harder to do organically, where you look at the blurry pieces of your own intellectual framework. To even notice, you have to be constantly inspecting and testing your own intellectual framework. To have work that allows you to do this, and a community to help you, is a privilege that many people don't have.

Framing things that academic fields don't know is even harder. When I was a student I would look at professors saying 'we don't know X' for some high-level thing X, and I would think either that it's not very interesting (of course we don't know X!) or that their framing seems self-interested, or biased towards their own research programs in that they're asking the questions they themselves know how to answer. But part of good framing is to ask questions that we at least plausibly do know how to answer, or make progress on. Doing this well is essentially the skill of coming up with a research program.