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Understanding complicated ideas can be difficult and boring
Life on our planet is complicated and dangerous. Individually we strive to remain alive. Collectively groups of us do likewise. We depend on leaders who understand important issues and can make helpful decisions about them.
As our brains grow from our experience and education, and as our ability to communicate with one another improves as we grow, we become more able to acquire information indirectly through language rather than directly through sensory experience. That enables us to cooperate in groups that are led by effective communicators. Such leaders explain as they can both the dangers and opportunities that we face.
But there are limits. Some important ideas are so complex and difficult to describe that they are hard to explain easily or briefly. As listeners or readers we can lose patience when people try to persuade us about things in complicated language, even though complicated language may be necessary to explain them accurately.
Instead most of us prefer brief, easy-to-understand explanations, even of complicated ideas. That’s why many people tend to value ignorant speakers and writers who provide glib but apparently authoritative communications more than they value other speakers and writers whose understandings of dangers and opportunities are more accurate and nuanced.
We are endangered by our own limited abilities to communicate and understand each other. We often let glibness trump expertise.
