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I recall hearing "it's not obvious that X" a lot in the rationality community, particularly in Robin Hanson's writing.
Sometimes people make a claim without really explaining it. Actually, this happens a lot of times. Often times the claim is made implicitly. This is fine if that claim is obvious.
But if the claim isn't obvious, then that link in the chain is broken and the whole argument falls apart. Not that it's been proven wrong or anything, just that it needs work. You need to spend the time establishing that claim. That link in the chain. So then, it is useful in these situations to point out when a link in the chain isn't obvious when it was being presumed obvious. I am a fan of "it's not obvious that X".
Agreed, but in many contexts, one should strive to be clear to what extent "it's not obvious that X" implies "I don't think X is true in the relevant context or margin". Many arguments that involve this are about universality or distant extension of something that IS obvious in more normal circumstances.
Robin Hanson generally does specify that he's saying X isn't obvious (and is quite likely false) in some extreme circumstances, and his commenters are ... not obviously understanding that.
Gotcha. I appreciate you pointing it out. I'm glad to get the feedback that it initially wasn't clear, both for self-improvement purposes and for the more immediate purpose of improving the title.
(It's got me thinking about variable names in programming. There's something more elegant about being concise, but then again, humans are biased towards expecting short inferential distances, so I probably should err on the side of longer more descriptive variable names. And post title!)