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The Wrong Newsletter

The Wrong Newsletter: Sure Things

By Phil ·

Three questions this week where the crowd was very sure and very wrong.

The Narrative That Played Itself — 92% wrongness

92% of us thought the Fever would win their home opener Saturday. They didn't.

Dallas won 107–104, with Paige Bueckers (20 points), Arike Ogunbowale (22), and 59% shooting from the field.

Here's the thing: 92% was never really a basketball prediction. It was a narrative prediction — home opener, sold-out Gainbridge Fieldhouse, Caitlin Clark back from injury. The story wrote itself so completely that the actual game felt like a formality before it was played. I think about weather fronts sometimes. Every signal says rain — the clouds, the humidity, the wind off the lake — and then the system just keeps moving. The obvious read is often right. But when 92% of the room agrees on something, it's worth asking what isn't being weighed.

Clark hit 1,000 career WNBA points in the loss. The Wings were still better on Saturday.

The Document We Assumed Would Stay Buried — 86% wrongness

86% of us said the Epstein suicide note would stay sealed through May. A federal judge released it on May 6.

The New York Times had formally filed to unseal it on April 30 — not a rumor, an active court filing in the Southern District of New York.

The error is understandable and worth naming: we assumed the default would hold. Secrets stay secret. Most records requests go nowhere. Both of those things are usually true. But the prior for “once a major news organization formally files to unseal something in federal court, sometimes the judge says yes” is real — and that signal was sitting in plain sight before the question resolved. We read it as noise.

The note itself, once released, was a fragment. Handwritten, unverified, brief. More strange than revelatory. What it means is a different question.

The Promise That Actually Came True — 83% wrongness

83% of us said Trump’s UFO files wouldn’t arrive before May 15. The Pentagon posted 162 of them on May 8.

I understand this one. UAP disclosure has been “imminent” across multiple administrations and political cycles. Promise-then-nothing is well-established, and historical base rates deserve real weight.

But I missed a tell: bureaucratic specificity. A dedicated government website (war.gov/UFO). A formal public affairs statement about rolling releases. A real URL with a name and a timeline attached. Vague promises evaporate. Specific machinery tends to get used.

The files are modest — 162 documents, most cases unresolved, nothing confirmed extraterrestrial. But they exist, they’re public, and 83% of us didn’t see it coming.

All three of this week’s biggest misses were things we were confident wouldn’t happen. Worth holding onto when you’re reading next week’s questions.

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