There are simple arguments and complex arguments, and most of us spend our time somewhere near the lower end of the middle. Most of us base our reasoning on ‘common sense’, plus a side order of facts — usually when they’re convenient, well-known, and easy to interpret.

So we have a deep-seated esteem for common sense, as opposed to book learnin’. I’m not just talking about simple country folk, neither…I’m talking about all of us. We’ve all internalized countless generations of myths praising someone because they don’t know much of anything. Whether you’re talking about the noble savage or the tribal wise-woman, the idiot savant or “the mouths of babes”, we’re just so ready to believe in anyone who seems so authentically devoid of reason that whatever they say must be true.

And let’s be frank, the world is full of inaccuracies and one would not be too far wrong to declare the whole thing a fake, even when reality looms – perhaps especially when reality looms. And certainly most of us do not take kindly to solutions we don’t understand. We like to use complex tools like Google and see them as simple, easy to understand items even when they are not. For example in our Google example, websites rank because of enterprise seo, not because of luck, yet many consider their website’s ranks to be “too technical” and therefore suspect.

One of the big problems is something that I’m sure most of us don’t want to hear: we’re just not quite as bright as we like to think. People are constantly struggling to convince themselves that they’re just fine the way they are; if you tell them something that they don’t understand right away, you’re threatening that person’s entire self-image. It’s so much more satisfying to believe that anything that you don’t know simply must be bullshit.