| As a young man, I read a quote by the French novelist Honoré de Balzac that struck me like a thunderbolt. "The world belongs to me because I understand it." For the longest time, those words haunted me. They seemed to explain why so many people struggle, not just as investors but as human beings. We lack knowledge. We lack wisdom. We lack understanding. I made it my personal mission to get at the truth of things. Alas, capital-T truth is elusive. Sure, we're pretty confident that the earth revolves around the sun and the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. But some things we don't know. (Like the meaning of the Mona Lisa's smile.) Some things we can't know. (Like how everything sprang from nothing.) And sometimes different interpretations are equally valid. Yet to the extent that I can know important things are true - or, at least, the things that are important to me - I really want to. "Me too!," some will say. I applaud the sentiment. But I've come to doubt most folks' sincerity. If you really want to know the truth about something - to the extent that it can be known - you must not be just willing but delighted to learn that a previous belief was mistaken. This is a big deal for some folks. Although I really don't understand why. When I admit that I was wrong about something I believed, I'm simply acknowledging that I know more today than I did yesterday. What's so bad about that? Fortunately, the ascendancy of AI over the past few years has made it easier to verify things. Yet it has also revealed something that many readers already know or probably suspected: Most people do not want to learn that they hold mistaken beliefs. They would much prefer believing that their convictions are true. And - this is the surprising part (at least to me) - no amount of evidence can convince them otherwise. (No wonder psychologists call the confirmation bias - the desire to favor only supporting evidence for beliefs - "the mother of all biases.") This is particularly true of strongly held political or religious beliefs. Yet, for many, it also applies to conspiracy theories, quack medical advice or dubious health claims. Today - thanks to the internet and social media - you can easily find a community of people who share your beliefs, even if you think the earth is flat, the moon landing was faked, or 9/11 was an inside job. Fortunately, we now have superhuman intelligence - AI - to help us sort things out. True, AI makes mistakes and answers must be verified. But I've been using these platforms every day for over three years now and they are much, much better than they used to be. AI platforms are learning - and correcting their mistakes - at lightning speed, 24/7. If I run a question through several platforms and get an answer I don't like, it's far more likely that I am wrong than that all the world's top AI models are mistaken... or biased. People who won't accept this premise must have no clue why hyperscalers are investing hundreds of billions of dollars on new data centers... or why AI is transforming the world. Yet I've noticed that when I show friends or family members how to get disconfirming evidence about a strongly held belief, they virtually always dismiss it. "AI doesn't know," they'll say. Or "this platform has a liberal (or conservative) bias." Or "this must be one of those hallucinations." Then they shove the phone back in their pocket and go on about their business, the erroneous belief still dearly held. I've come to realize that my particular superpower just may be the world's most annoying. (Of course, it's one thing to discover for yourself that you're mistaken. It's something else entirely for someone else using AI to demonstrate it.) However, the quality of the answers we get from AI depend, in part, on how we ask the question. In my next column, I'll show you how to ask questions in the most neutral way possible - to get the most accurate information possible - and fact check the answers instantly as well. Good investing, Alex | 
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