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TheOtherDave comments on The Illusion of Sameness - Less Wrong
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Being tactfully noncommittal about your own beliefs until you've scoped out the lay of the land is a learnable skill.
Unfortunately, it's actually not the most important component. In many communities, it's the shibboleths that will trip you up... things the community tacitly expects all right-thinking people to already have a familiarity with. It's possible to spin one's ignorance of such things as an unfortunate personal deficit that one is eager to have corrected, and that can often overcome the barriers to entry... but it's a lot of work.
I think you're right, but suspect I will have more difficulty with the first than with the second. I am honestly curious about almost everything, which is a decent stand-in for spinning lack of knowledge as a personal deficit, but I am very bad at not speaking. I work at it, but I remain someone whose default setting is to babble at random people on the street. I'm better at "tactfully noncommittal" than I used to be, but I'm still pretty bad at it.
(nod) I used to be really bad at it; I'm now only mildly bad at it. As I say, it's a learnable skill. Training the habit of substituting questions for assertions -- genuine questions, ones that don't presuppose a specific answer -- has worked pretty well for me.