my exact state of knowledge

You did that well. It is perhaps unfortunate that people respond more positively to confident assertions than well calibrated ones!

(since if I don't do this I tend to get myself into trouble)

Sometimes the trick is to do things that might get yourself in trouble. You may get in trouble because confident assertions from a (not yet) dominant individual feel like a status incursion that needs to be beaten down. In those cases doing things that push the limits of the status people assign you even though you may experience trouble is a rather direct way of making people give up giving you trouble. You may also get in trouble because you make a mistake. In that case people will be eager to correct you, which leaves both you and the other readers better informed.

but it seems like I might have let this lead me to a somewhat uninteresting place.

I sometimes suspect that 'interesting' is a lot to do with the expected social reward or penalty for paying attention or ignoring the speaker in the context. I have a hunch that if while you were writing your post you imagined yourself speaking in a deep, slow and firm voice then that would have come across in your writing style and made a difference in the mind of the reader.

By the way, I am interested in how you think your 'Mental Models' fits in with 'maps of the territory'. I obviously have my own take but I'd like to hear how it fits in with your mental model of mental models. I obviously have my own ideas but of course I absorbed your 'mental model' description by hacking it on to the conception I already have. ;) Maybe you see it differently!