PeterGriffin2
We do the same thing in OOP (without the "spooky action from distance" you've noticed) with the Decorator & Strategy patterns, very simple patterns, even those who don't know about patterns are probably using them without knowing.
Kidding aside, I get your frustration. Trivia questions by necessity have the format of "one short question" = "one short specific answer".
Real facts usually don't work this way. Historians argue or change the date of various historical events over time as more data emerges. The Solar System "lost" a planet few years ago, and so on. "Facts" are in constant flux.
There's also a complicated, detailed context, there are a lot of "depends" in a real answer. Say, "how fast a horse runs"... domesticated & trained or wild, what breed, on a road or on a meadow, with horseshoes or without, etc.
So when faced with trivia questions the last thing I could say is I feel "overconfident" answering. Especially when the answer is a number. The designated correct answer is just an arbitrary data point that the author stumbled upon earlier in a book or online and wrote down as the answer.
It's apocrypha masquerading as facts.
But the only thing I learned is to look up answers to trivia questions on Google, and to drag chart bars to match the text above.
Overconfidence isn't the problem people have when obviously faced with questions they don't know the answer to (I've never milked a cow, and I don't intend to), and the inferences the protagonist was making from his trip were very suspicious and arbitrary, so that was disengaging in a tale about using proper logic.