I have a recurring sensation that vasts swaths of mathematics and logic in the academic literature are more complicated than their underlying ideas, which while extermely abstract are in the end quite simple.

From this sensation, I have a fear…
I fear that to learn some of the schemes (ways to explain and think about the abstractions) found in the literature I end up crippling my ability to fully realize the simplicity which I seem to understand intuitively.

In the moments before before having fully understood the abstraction I still have an intuition about them. In a certain way, I already understand them but do not know how to communicate with others about them. I consider that this is the main thing that I’m learning; the knowledge surrounding the abstract concepts. Knowledge which has been accrued by tens of thousands of thinkers over many hundreds of years.

I consider knowledge distinct from understanding. For knowledge concerns communication with others wheras undesrtanding is personal and concerns doing or comprehending. In the case of abstractions which exist in language, I consider comprehension (fully realized undesrtanding) akin to perception with the ability to manipulate (or otherwise interact) with the understood abstractions.

And so my motivation for absorbing knowledge is to communicate with others and coordinate ourselves in regards to our collective use of the abstractions which I have learned to percieve.

In my fears, the most likely mechanism by which knowing how to talk about something will diminish my capacity to remember its simplicity hinges on a soft phenomenon: That because I have learned the languages I won’t feel a need to make them any simpler. That in the time I spend learning these langauges (and making them simpler?), life will run me by.

And with the paranoia that these langauges (schemes of knowing) are intentionally designed to resist my own desire to make them simpler; futher, sometimes (when tired or frustrated) I think they’re purposely obfuscated.

However, I undesrtand that it’s more likely that the pioneers who first made such schemes of knowing (which perhaps once fully comprehended turn into perception) could not do anything better, after all it’s easier to create complexity than something simple and elegant. Usually, it seems to me, a complicated idea gets simpler by later iterative refinement.

I have a sense that the more objective mechanism by which overly complex ways to explain persist is better explained in terms of incentives.

What is my incentive to refine a simple way to understand something I already managed to grasp?