Explaining the process of how a situation came to be this way to someone is a really important part of effective teaching. For example, that's what the whole idea of a proof is in mathematics. You show process. Suppose for someone trying to explain the physics of movement, you certainly wouldn't start with the theory of relativity; you would start with simple Newtonian physics. The reason being relativity makes no sense if not given any reason to believe it. For an average person, it just seems like a needlessly complicated solution to classical observations. Galilean translation just makes a lot more sense, at least at first.

Of course, when actually arriving to the theory of relativity, Einstein didn't jump there needlessly. In fact the situation was that we did try Galilean translation as the theory. And it worked for a long time until the madness about the speed of light came about. Then we iterated the existing theory to account for new data.

And truth be told, we're actually quite good at this; this meaning iteration on ideas.

People improve solutions iteratively

What we're not so good at is reasoning about concepts and ideas that don't make "sense" yet (a concrete definition of sense needed). It's hard for us to understand something when it's overcomplicated because it's not how we would try it ourselves first.

This actually has very broad reaches. For example, UI/UX :

Explaining the process in UI/UX

September 22, 2020

This is why it was so hard for me to understand Prosemirror: My difficulty with Prosemirror.