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Luke_A_Somers 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".
The one thing missing from that video (at least up to 4:23 when I got frustrated - and he had explicitly disclaimed talking about the Pauli Exclusion Principle before this point) which gets really to the heart of it is that the Pauli Exclusion Principle kicks in when one thing literally runs into the other - when parts of two things were trying to occupy exactly the same state. If 'couldn't go any further or you'd be inside the other thing, but you can't do that' isn't 'contact' then the word has no meaning.
The interviewer is exactly right at 4:17 - he did the demonstration wrong. He should have brought them into contact. Only when he was pushing inwards and the balls were pushing back hard enough to balance -- that's when he'd say they're in contact.
So this isn't a great example because the proper explanation does include a smaller version of what's being explained.