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army1987 comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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I am finding the same problem with all articles in this sequence that I find with the explanation of Bayes' Theorem on Yudkowsky's main site. There are parts that seem so blindingly obvious they don't bear mentioning.
Yet soon thereafter, all of a sudden, I find myself completely lost. I can understand parts of the text separately, but can't link them together. I don't see where it comes from, where it's going, what problems it's addressing. I find it especially difficult to relate the illustrations to what's going on in the text.
I seldom have had this problem with the blog posts from the classical sequences (with some exceptions, such as his quantum physics sequence, which left me similarly confused).
Am I the only one who feels this way?
EDIT: upon reflection, this phenomenon, of feeling like there was a sudden, imperceptible jump from the boringly obvious to the utterly confusing, I've already experienced it before: in college, many lessons would follow this pattern, and it would take intensive study to figure out the steps the professor merrily jumped between what is, to them, two categories of the set of blindingly obvious things they already know and need to explain again. Maybe there's some sort of pattern there?
That's more or less how I felt about Penrose's The Road to Reality.
The great thing about talking with someone in person (or at least, in real-time one-to-one conversations) is that you can first assess how large the inferential distance is, e.g. “What are you working on?” “Cosmic rays. Do you know what cosmic rays are?” “No.” “Do you know what subatomic particles are?” “No.” “Do you know what an atom is?” “Yes.”
You just have to hope they won't Wheatley they way around your questions and try to feign understanding things they don't, treating knowledge like a status game. That can really put a damper on meaningful communication.
I don't think that ever happened to me -- at worst, they incorrectly believed that the understanding they had got from popularizations was accurate. But pretty much everybody at some point admits “I wish I could understand everything of that, but that sounds cool”, except people who actually understand (as evidenced by the fact that they ask questions too relevant for them to be just parroting stuff to hide ignorance).
(I guess the kind of people who treat everything like a status game would consider knowledge about sciency topics to be nerdy and therefore uncool.)
One way to treat knowledge like a status game is to be a "science fan." This is a game you play with other "science fans," and you win by knowing more "mind-blowing facts" about science than other people. It is popular on Quora.