I like the general direction of this thought. Some things are hard to communicate from a cold start. You need to already be thinking in certain terms in order t

I like the general direction of this thought. Some things are hard to communicate from a cold start. You need to already be thinking in certain terms in order to understand. Probabilistic ideas and arguments are often like this. An interesting example is science and scientific methods. Something starts as a theory (eating fat makes you fat) and accumulates evidence for and against it. Evidence "against" the theory doesn't necessarily outright disprove it. It just weakens the claim in different ways. It can lower the probability that it is true (maybe it just seems like eating fat makes you fat, but it really doesn't). Sometimes the magnitude is smaller (eating fat makes you a little fatter, but not much). Sometimes it's kind of true, but the whole story is more complicated and the statement in the their theory needs to be made more precise (increasing fat consumption makes you fatter if everything else stays the same, but it also makes you feel full which makes you eat less of other things the effect only exists in controlled conditions). The above example needs to be considered from multiple dimensions. People who haven't been thinking about this as a multidimensional thing have a hard time evaluating your statement in this way from a cold start. Experts used thinking the way they are explaining things think the public is stupid or uninterested. Even if they humbly agree that the public are just not experts, they still conclude the same thing. The public want everything boiled down to a simple statement that hides the texture. X Causes Cancer This KXCD style graph subtly conveys a little of that texture. I think this is a good thing. I really like XKCD. It's very good art for a very interesting definition of the word art.