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army1987 comments on Open thread, 25-31 August 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is there an existing post on people's tendency to be confused by explanations that don't include a smaller version of what's being explained?
For example, confusion over the fact that "nothing touches" in quantum mechanics seems common. Instead of being satisfied by the fact that the low-level phenomena (repulsive forces and the Pauli exclusion principle) didn't assume the high-level phenomena (intersecting surfaces), people seem to want the low-level phenomena to be an aggregate version of the high-level phenomena. Explaining something without using it is one of the best properties an explanation can have, but people are somehow unsatisfied by such explanations.
Other examples of "but explain(X) doesn't include X!": emotions from biology, particles from waves, computers from solid state physics, life from chemistry.
More controversial examples: free will, identity, [insert basically any other introspective mental concept here].
Examples of the opposite: any axiom/assumption of a theory, billiard balls in Newtonian mechanics, light propagating through the ether, explaining a bar magnet as an aggregation of atom-sized magnets, fluid mechanics using continuous fields instead of particles, love from "God wanted us to have love".
What the goal of having an explanation?
Do you want the explanation to change your model of the world in a way that allows you to have the right intuition about a subject matter? Do you want the explanation to allow you to make better predictions about the subject matter?
Beliefs are supposed to pay rent.
If someone without a physics background hear about quantum mechanics they are supposed to be confused. If they aren't they would simply project their old ideas into the new theory and not really update anything on a deeper level.
I'm not aware of a published theory of emotions as an extension of biology that describes all aspects of emotions that I observe on a day-to-day basis.
Understanding hardware does need solid state physics but you also need to understand software to understand computers.