[abhiv]

I generally enjoy admitting ignorance and asking questions that seem dumb as a way of educating myself. You do have to be mindful of who you do this with. The person you're speaking with has to have a certain level of maturity themselves in order to not consider you stupid for your admission of ignorance.

In an ideal situation, you're speaking with someone who will allow you to probe them on the subject with a series of "stupid" (sounding) questions till you have a good basic understanding of the topic.

Unfortunately, many people are not like that. They will simply think that you're stupid and move on to the next topic. Sometimes these may be people you want to make a good impression on, for a variety of reasons, so some diplomacy is required.