I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

—Blaise Pascal

I was listening to a podcast the other day. The speaker had developed a theory that had really pushed his thinking. It was right on the edge of his ability to comprehend. I gave myself a self-satisfied pat on the back; I could understand it no problem.

But then I thought about it some more. I could understand the idea fully formed, but only because someone else had done the difficult formulating work.

Could I have come up with that idea on my own? No way.

The Paradox of Brilliance

It seems that the amount of intelligence needed to understand an idea is inversely proportional to its brilliance. My first conjecture: great ideas are grokkable, marginal ideas are not.

Let’s take an example. For millennia, bankers and merchants and mathematicians tried to solve simple equations without the number zero (think roman numerals). Progress in math was stymied, and commerce and finance were a tad more difficult than they needed to be. This condition continued for centuries. People simply could not conceive of counting nothing.

Eventually, some bright minds in India popularized the idea of zero and the diminutive digit made its way through the Middle East and finally the rest of the world.

We now teach the concept to three-year-olds. And they’re unimpressed.

We take great ideas for granted because they seem so obvious. The opposite is also true. The more half-baked the idea, the more likely we are to think that it’s us who are stupid - especially when it’s outside of our domain of expertise.

This has huge implications for data visualization. A clear visual is often maddeningly hard to create. Consider the two images below, each based on the same dataset.