I like the reminder that research is hard, and unless you check whether your sources knew what they were doing, you'll be building on foundations of sand. It's

I like the reminder that research is hard, and unless you check whether your sources knew what they were doing, you'll be building on foundations of sand. It's so easy for one party to say "there were X people here, I guess", and for the next person to take that number and plug it into some complex formula without ever checking how reliable the number is in the first place.