Reflecting about Obvious Stuff

We are all a bunch of monkeys. We are not buddhist monks, we have not solved science, we still fight wars and make each other miserable.

Given this, we ought to expect that we are missing a lot of obvious stuff.

One of my favourite bits of such obvious stuff is the importance of Taking Notes. Most people do not do it nearly enough, and are directly more stupid as a result.

There's more, and you can find it in the Basics section of The Outline.

Beyond important things like Taking Notes, Physicalism (missing) or Formalism (missing), I am also saddened by people not being able to reflect about obvious stuff.

I would love to have a community of people reflecting about what Humour is intrinsically. What makes jokes funny? Is it possible to program a generator of jokes? Can we program a generator of puns, and predict a-priori which puns are funny?

Similarly with music. Like, how can random sounds trigger emotions? Is it purely associative? Can we design new sounds that no one heard and predict what emotions they will trigger? Can we find musical atoms (musical elements that can't be broken down any further) for each emotion?

It's just a way of thinking that I enjoy, and that I find missing in the world.

People avoid reflecting about obvious stuff for a variety of reasons.

It is boring. Overcoming this type of boredom is a skill in itself, that I call "Staring at the Wall".

It is humbling. Realising how stupid we are about things we took for granted feels bad. It means we were not that smart or in control after all.

It is socially punished. People who question the obvious are often seen as stupid. From the outside, it is hard to distinguish someone who does not get common sense from someone who is trying to question and deepen their understanding of it.

It is insidiously hard. When something is obvious, it is all too easy to dismiss it as trivial and think that we got all of it.
So many times have I seen someone nod at Taking Notes being crucial to thinking, and then proceed to not do it. Conversely, I have also seen people being like "Well, so far, I have made it work without taking notes, so why should I start now?" and then commit mistakes that would have been trivially avoided with notes.

It is just plain hard. Reflecting about obvious stuff is a specific type of reflection. Reflection is a specific type of reasoning. And reasoning is hard in general.
By default, our thoughts go nowhere and do not compound. That's just how our brains work. We have discovered some methods of reasoning, but we are far from a thorough understanding of what it means to reason. Reasoning itself is still an art, not a science.

This bullet point is the ultimate quine and mise-en-abyme: "reasoning is hard" is itself obvious, and I am asking you as a reader to reflect about it.