Agreed, I did not find the "Intuitive Explanation" to be particularly intuitive even after multiple readings. Understanding the math and principles is one thing, but this post actually made me sit up and go, "Oh, now I see what all the fuss is about," outside a relatively narrow range of issues like diagnosing cancer or identifying spam emails.

Now I get it well enough to summarize: "Even if A will always cause B, that doesn't mean A did cause B. If B would happen anyway, this tells you nothing about whether A caused B."

Which is both a "well duh" and an important idea at the same time, when you consider that our brains appear to be built to latch onto the first "A" that would cause B, and then stubbornly hang onto it until it can be conclusively disproven.

That's a "click" right there, that makes retroactively comprehensible many reams of Eliezer's math rants and Beisutsukai stories. (Well, not that I didn't comprehend them as such... more that I wasn't able to intuitively recreate all the implications that I now think he was expecting his readers to take away.)

So, yeah... this is way too important of an idea to have math associated with it in any way. ;-)