[elteto]

Exactly, we humans try to learn new things by relating to what we already know. This leads to trouble when we encounter new subjects that have no connection to previous experiences, because we have a hard time relating to it. However, the problem with people finding QM esoteric and weird is a bit more nuanced than that.

In most of the other areas of knowledge we can make progress because they do resemble reality in ways that we are familiar with. For example rotation in classical mechanics or special relativity can be somewhat confusing to a beginner, but if we think a little bit deeper than what we are used to then we can see that the results make sense and match what we experience. And also this experience is consistent at different scales. Now you move to QM and the first thing that hits you is that reality "breaks" after some point in the size scale, beyond that everything is different, with uncertainties, probabilities and a bunch of other odd properties. Learning QM is an exercise in mind-stretching, even for the most capable of us. For me the problem is not that it is different, but why is different. Why do we have such a gap between the large scale and the small scale? That is what baffles me.