The opposite of "b**llshitter" isn't someone called "truthful" but someone called "arrogant". - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I then completely gave up reading newspapers and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts mounting).

"Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty." - Taleb

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point