Simple and easy are different.

An Enlightening Oxymoron
from out of an unsuspected dimension
.

SIMPLE

EASY

TRIVIAL	SUBTLE	FORGET IT!
Learning your name	Learning science concepts	Seeing six-factor color information
Learning your first language	Learning a new language as an adult	Writing computer applications in machine language without a compiler

DIFFICULT

COMPLEX

This is the core observation that supports a concept which we believe goes largely:

Obvious, yet unobserved

"Simple" can mean "easy." This is a tacit belief, a presumed "truth" felt so strongly that "simple but difficult" is an oxymoron dissonant enough that it simply gets ignored when it appears.

Don't let this enlightenment get away so easily! Take a closer look:

Simple and easy is what we expect.
When the learned material is simple, the learning is easy.

Complex and difficult is what we expect.
When the learned material is complex, the learning is difficult.

However,

Simple but difficult does appear...often.

Most elementary science concepts are simple but difficult.
Human rights, civil rights, fairness, and "All men are created equal," are simple but difficult concepts.
Negation of negation is a simple but difficult concept..."I could care less!"

Complex but easy appears, too.

An infant easily learns the complexities and subtleties of the adult language that surrounds him.
The analysis of electromagnetic waves that enter our eyes and give us vision is incredibly complex, but what we see is "obvious."
The analysis of sound waves that enter our ears is just as complex, yet we can detect the most subtle of nuances of the speech we hear.

This implies that "simple but difficult" and "complex but easy" are not from the world of learning. Something else has entered this game. Another dimension is necessary to plot our observations. That something else more resembles the information processing chips or the applications software you install into your computer than it resembles the data you enter into the applications. This is development, not learning. Developments process information; learning acquires information.

New languages we learn as adults are learned in a way that is totally unlike the acquisition of a first language by an infant. Learning a new language is made extremely difficult by its massive volume of learning.

COMPLEX BUT EASY:

The infant, in acquiring language, acquires a complex skill which has been programmed through his DNA.

A student trying to learn elementary physics often looks at the simple concepts but sees only the complex of applications of the concepts to specific situations. He memorizes the complexity; he misses the simplicity.

SIMPLE BUT DIFFICULT:

That student is not "seeing" with a potential "perception," developable through appropriate interplay of environment and genetics.

Furthermore, that new dimension, simple-complex, is actually many new dimensions projected onto one. (And the meticulous will note that while here it's shown at right angles to the other dimension–easy-hard–it should be at an a somewhat smaller angle because there is some correlation between the two dimensions.) The new dimensions include the developments of those human information processing skills we lump into "intelligence." That new, "second" dimension contains shadows of the many dimensions of human intelligence (Use "BACK" to return).

Failing to see important additional factors (things that add dimensions to our view) is pretty much what we mean by "oversimplification." Oversimplifications–of many hues and flavors–are the most common of human errors and the roots of very many human mistakes. Look around you with multiple dimensionality in mind and you will see many such oversimplifications, "obvious" under the perception of dimensionality, yet unobserved when that perception is turned off.

You need to look in new directions, directions that are orthogonal to all the directions you've been searching in.
That is, your solutions, if you find them, will turn out to be in unsuspected dimensions.

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