[jfarmer]

This is something only someone who was already on their way to being an expert would say. :)

A beginner with a broken, incomplete, or confused model of the world won't be able to accurately assess whether a new piece of information is consistent with that model. The information could directly address their issue and they won't even realize it. The expert, standing over their should, is dumbfounded: "Your answer is right there! You scrolled past it five times!"

This isn't something unique to programming. It's true of all human understanding. How long were humans relatively comfortable with magnetism and electricity before we understood the relationship between them?

The effects of electricity are all around us. It's why we can't put our hand through the table. But you have to have a deep understanding of electromagnetism to see how that "obvious" fact is related to the this magical voodoo thing we call electromagnetism.