Anytime you try to learn something beyond your current understanding, it isn’t as simple as pouring “new knowledge” into an otherwise empty vessel. We come into any new endeavor with a pre-existing foundation: things we’ve learned, been taught, or have put together for ourselves previously. When that new knowledge arrives, we inevitably attempt to integrate it into our pre-existing framework, and that isn’t always a smooth process. Sometimes, our foundation is riddled with misconceptions, misunderstandings, or prior teaching that were outright wrong; we have to correct and “unlearn” those ways of thinking before we can progress. At other times, that knowledge arrives in an incomplete fashion, and so our brains fill-in-the-blanks with whatever makes sense to us: with a story that’s often erroneous. Oftentimes, we recognize that we need an expert — someone possessing bona fide expert-level knowledge — to help us separate fiction from reality. Frustratingly, sometimes the sources we turn to for expertise can even lead us astray. That’s happened to me, myself, many times along my journey as an astrophysicist, and that’s …