The Parable About the Bricks

Reading popular science books or news articles not a substitute for understanding, and may make you stupider by filling your mind with narratives that don't represent your own synthesis of the thing. Try going for information, dense sources with high amounts of detail and facts, and then reason up from those facts. On foreign policy, read books published by university presses, not the atlantic or the economist. And then you so fit the narratives in the economists into your existing models and findint the parable about the bricks tells us that understanding is not a bindary, yes or no. It has layers of depth.