Homo sapiens’s environment of evolutionary adaptedness (a.k.a. EEA or “ancestral environment”) consisted of hunter-gatherer bands of at most 200 people, with no writing. All inherited knowledge was passed down by speech and memory.
In a world like that, all background knowledge is universal knowledge. All information not strictly private is public, period.
In the ancestral environment, you were unlikely to end up more than one inferential step away from anyone else. When you discover a new oasis, you don’t have to explain to your fellow tribe members what an oasis is, or why it’s a good idea to drink water, or how to walk. Only you know where the oasis lies; this is private knowledge. But everyone has the background to understand your description of the oasis, the concepts needed to think about water; this is universal knowledge. When you explain things in an ancestral environment, you almost never have to explain your concepts. At most you have to explain one new concept, not two or more simultaneously.
In the ancestral environment there were no abstract disciplines with vast bodies of carefully gathered evidence generalized into elegant theories transmitted by written books whose conclusions are a hundred inferential steps removed from universally shared background premises.
In the ancestral environment, anyone who says something with no obvious support is a liar or an idiot. You’re not likely to think, “Hey, maybe this person has well-supported background knowledge that no one in my band has even heard of,” because it was a reliable invariant of the ancestral environment that this didn’t happen.
Conversely, if you say something blatantly obvious and the other person doesn’t see it, they’re the idiot, or they’re being deliberately obstinate to annoy you.
And to top it off, if someone says something with no obvious support and expects you to believe it—acting all indignant when you don’t—then they must be crazy.
Combined with the illusion of transparency and self-anchoring (the tendency to model other minds as though the were slightly modified versions of oneself), I think this explains a lot about the legendary difficulty most scientists have in communicating with a lay audience—or even communicating with scientists from other disciplines. When I observe failures of explanation, I usually see the explainer taking one step back, when they need to take two or more steps back. Or listeners assume that things should be visible in one step, when they take two or more steps to explain. Both sides act as if they expect very short inferential distances from universal knowledge to any new knowledge.
A biologist, speaking to a physicist, can justify evolution by saying it is the simplest explanation. But not everyone on Earth has been inculcated with that legendary history of science, from Newton to Einstein, which invests the phrase “simplest explanation” with its awesome import: a Word of Power, spoken at the birth of theories and carved on their tombstones. To someone else, “But it’s the simplest explanation!” may sound like an interesting but hardly knockdown argument; it doesn’t feel like all that powerful a tool for comprehending office politics or fixing a broken car. Obviously the biologist is infatuated with their own ideas, too arrogant to be open to alternative explanations which sound just as plausible. (If it sounds plausible to me, it should sound plausible to any sane member of my band.)
And from the biologist’s perspective, they can understand how evolution might sound a little odd at first—but when someone rejects evolution even after the biologist explains that it’s the simplest explanation, well, it’s clear that nonscientists are just idiots and there’s no point in talking to them.
A clear argument has to lay out an inferential pathway, starting from what the audience already knows or accepts. If you don’t recurse far enough, you’re just talking to yourself.
If at any point you make a statement without obvious justification in arguments you’ve previously supported, the audience just thinks you’re crazy.
This also happens when you allow yourself to be seen visibly attaching greater weight to an argument than is justified in the eyes of the audience at that time. For example, talking as if you think “simpler explanation” is a knockdown argument for evolution (which it is), rather than a sorta-interesting idea (which it sounds like to someone who hasn’t been raised to revere Occam’s Razor).
Oh, and you’d better not drop any hints that you think you’re working a dozen inferential steps away from what the audience knows, or that you think you have special background knowledge not available to them. The audience doesn’t know anything about an evolutionary-psychological argument for a cognitive bias to underestimate inferential distances leading to traffic jams in communication. They’ll just think you’re condescending.
And if you think you can explain the concept of “systematically underestimated inferential distances” briefly, in just a few words, I’ve got some sad news for you . . .
It's been nearly a century since relativity and quantum physics took the stage, and we have gathered considerably more data, and filled in a great many areas since then, yet we are still waiting for the next big breakthrough.
The problem may be in the way we approach scientific discovery.
Currently, when a new hypothesis is advanced, it is carefully considered as to how well it stands on its own and whether, eventually, it is worthy of being adopted as a recognized theory and becoming a part of our overall model of how everything works.
This might be the problem. Suppose the next advance cannot be made in this fashion? By this I am proposing that the next breakthrough may involve not a single new concept, that can be tested independently for worthiness, but several that cannot be tested individually.
For example, when you build a stone wall, you can test its strength and stability with each new stone placed. When you build a stone arch, attempting to test its strength and stability after each piece is going to get you labeled as an incompetent as the uppermost pieces will always fall if you merely try to set them in place, one at a time. Insisting that there are several pieces that must be placed at once before it can be tested is necessary, yet in theoretical physics, it well get you labeled as a crackpot.
For example, suppose one were to approach a transportation company with a radical new idea on how to improve airplanes, and even air travel in general. The company would want to test it and validate the concept before adoption. But suppose you told them that the idea could not even be evaluated unless it simultaneously includes the research and development of radical new ideas in such seemingly unrelated fields as personnel management, inventory control, and submarine transports. Chances are they would politely (or perhaps not politely) decline any further involvement.
Yet that is precisely the problem with the Standard Model.
We have conundrums in explaining consciousness, the dual-slit experiment, Schrodinger's cat, the number of spatial dimensions required, the expansion of the universe, the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, dark matter, dark energy, quantum uncertainty, the speed of light, singularities, the Big Bang, the heat-death (or Big Chill) of the universe, the Big Rip, gravity, entropy, and the list continues. Anyone that attempts to address more than one or two of these things at one time is likely to be dismissed at once as a crackpot.
Yet is fairly well believed that Einstein's classic papers, submitted in today's climate, would go straight to the crackpot slush pile.
There is also the problem that, for proposed idea in physics to be given a hearing of any sort almost invariably requires advanced degree work in physics, with appropriately degreed instructors and sponsors. A paid position in the field is very nearly a prerequisite as well. Further, given the preoccupation with string theory that has consumed so many of them, and so restricted the opportunities of those who are not adherents . . . I've heard there may be less than 200 individuals in the world employed as theoretical physicists that are not dedicated to string theory (which doesn't seem to yield useful results in terms of advancing or redefining the Standard Model).
Additionally, given that they all go through a similar process to become recognized theoretical physicists, it almost certainly channels and colors their thinking on the subject, which is the same thing as saying that it limits them.