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.…