advance of progress, and placed in doubt the naïve faith, which I originally shared, that data and knowledge were identical. Even then, the problem was framed by

trust. Every presidential statement,

Every statistic you come across, everything you read in a textbook, everything you learn from parents or teachers, everything you see or read in the news or on social media, every tenet of conventional wisdom—it’s all indirect knowledge. That’s why perhaps the most important skill of a skilled thinker is knowing when to trust.