The question ‘What is going on here?’ sounds banal, but it is not. In our careers we have seen repeatedly how people immersed in technicalities, engaged in day-to-day preoccupations, have failed to stand back and ask, ‘What is going on here?’ We have often made that mistake ourselves.

The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert described a study conducted at Yale where graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of their own toilet at home. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the device works. Once they’d attempted to explain the inner workings of a toilet, they were asked to rate their

complexity is that we feel subtly discouraged before we even try anything. More and more people in this overheated environment will be tempted to opt out. They will develop a greater taste for ease and comfort; they will increasingly settle on simplified ideas of reality and conventional ways of thinking; they will fall prey to seductive formulas