Many concepts can be explained concisely, in simple language, and we should all strive for clarity. But the aphorism [“If you can't explain it to a 6-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.”] is a mistake, for a number of thoughts approximate the carpenter’s craft, and to meaningfully reveal them requires time and attention. Sometimes these cannot simply be told to another at all, they must be grown. For a topical example, we know that maturity itself cannot be imparted to a six year old, no matter how good a summary we might give. Despite our understanding, we know it is something that can only come to each of us in time. This pattern is more common than we think. True things are disclosed slowly.
Articulating ideas as simply as possible is attractive, not least because getting people to agree with us is attractive. But we have a tendency to overrate ideas that can be shared easily, with the most apparent advantages. By constant simplifying, we may be lulled into abridging our own ideas a little too much, and sooner or later our audience—or ourselves—might come to expect only these truncated thoughts. What is easy to explain is not necessarily what is best. What is easy to understand is not necessarily what is true.
—Quote from Long Distance Thinking by Simon Sarris
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. There's a growing tendency to treat simplicity as a proxy for correctness (the thesis of Sarris's post above), and I think that's being entrenched through people's presence in spaces like Twitter.
Twitter encourages an abbreviated style -- both as an obvious artefact of form, and because of the culture of Twitter. There's a wildly disproportionate expectation of perfect purity and precision in a space that is by design pretty hostile to that. So on the one hand some people present things as categorical and simple (when they generally aren't) and on the other, people who try for nuance are attacked for not framing things perfectly and fully capturing all the subtleties.
Which is not to say Twitter has no value -- I just see it more and more as a means to learn about a thing in broad terms and then go away and seek to understand that thing elsewhere. The problem I've found (in myself) is when Twitter starts to infiltrate my way of thinking.
(I am, myself, simplifying here by using Twitter as a proxy for this way of thinking, but I think it's a pretty solid example of it.)
What it boils down to for me is that: many things are complicated. Not so much so that we can choose intellectual nihilism and abandon any sense of good, bad, right, and wrong. But Twitter rewards -- explicitly and implicitly -- oversimplifications that can't tolerate a thing being good and bad at the same time. To have it be a key lens on the world habituates one away from thinking in terms of complexity. And if we let that mindset overly influence our view on the world...
Well, we'd probably be about where we are.