Julian Sanchez has an excellent blog post about how our current media culture undermines understanding:

It’s something of a cliché, but the older I get, the more I find that learning more about an area where I once held a strong opinion will often mean realizing just how limited my own understanding is. No doubt if you look back to the earliest days of this blog, you’ll find me ranging across a much broader array of topics with much more confidence. There is, as Yeats reminded us, a certain perversity here: People who actually know something are more likely to be fairly tentative and circumspect, while people ill-informed enough to think everything is quite simple will be confident they know all they need to.

Read the whole thing.