This is a special post for quick takes by Eric Neyman. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I frequently find myself in the following situation:
Friend: I'm confused about X Me: Well, I'm not confused about X, but I bet it's because you have more information than me, and if I knew what you knew then I would be confused.
(E.g. my friend who know more chemistry than me might say "I'm confused about how soap works", and while I have an explanation for why soap works, their confusion is at a deeper level, where if I gave them my explanation of how soap works, it wouldn't actually clarify their confusion.)
This is different from the "usual" state of affairs, where you're not confused but you know more than the other person.
I would love to have a succinct word or phrase for this kind of being not-confused!
To me it feels like I have no specific confusion, only general confusions, parts of my map that are blank (instead of parts that seem contradictory or impossible/really implausible). Perhaps this is just me having getting an intuitive sense of how much I should expect to be out there beyond what I know.
3Eric Neyman
Often (but not always) I can distill my confusion down to two things that I believe to be true that seem to be in contradiction (or in tension).
Huh, by the time I can do that, I usually have more domain knowledge than I thought we were imagining here. When I have little I just have questions like "I have no clue about the details of X"