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Nobody knows what's going on

A major online publication once reported in a profile on me that I had retired at 33. A few old friends and acquaintances reached out to congratulate me on my financial independence. I think it was an honest mistake on the part of the reporter. I told her I had quit my job to write full time, and I guess

Why do we expect reporters to learn about a suddenly newsworthy situation, gather information about it under deadline, then confidently explain the subject to the rest of the nation after having known about it for all of a week? There are ways to carefully gather, scrutinize, and compare high-quality second-hand sources, and maybe learn something reliable, but this is extremely difficult for the groupish, emotional creature we are. It is incredible what we’ve achieved in spite of this — almost entirely by carefully combining and testing our respective reliable slivers — but as a species we remain supremely untalented at knowing what’s true outside the range of our senses.

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