Simple seeming things are difficult

Everything looks easy and is easy to judge from far away. When people see someone else doing something, especially someone considered a professional, they assume the job is easier than it is, especially if they’ve dabbled in it a bit and are familiar enough to understand a few things, but not familiar enough to understand the emergent difficulty that arises when you scale that activity up to a business. Something might appear straightforward and obvious based on your initial observation, but there is actually A LOT going on behind the scenes to make that simple thing happen, like watching a skater do a kickflip and land it. Looks seamless, and the steps required to do it seem obvious. Just move your feet like this and you’re good. Then when you get on the skateboard and try to do it, it’s far more difficult, and you get injured. The second example I go into is generating electricity. This seems easy. You just have to turn a turbine. Why can’t we turn more turbines and get the whole world on electric power overnight? But it’s not JUST turning the turbines. Where are you going to turn them? In the air? In the sea? They might kill wildlife. How big will they be? How much do they cost to make? What is their lifetime and how much energy can you get out of them in that time? Are they worth that cost? Now what about storage? It’s impossible to generate energy at exactly the same rate as it is used, so you need storage. Now what about transmission? How are you going to get that energy to the people that need it? It all gets exponentially more complicated when you factor in the human component. Who is going to be opposing you actively? Who is your competition? Who is paying politicians to pass legislation to ensure that you fail? Consider that the majority of the questions I’ve just asked are science questions, each with their own lines of research going on to make turning turbines for people more economically viable. Photovoltaics are even more complicated because you’re not just turning turbines. That is the essence of why simple seeming things are difficult. You think that you just want to do one thing, but then you realize that to do that you need to address another thing, but to address that new thing you have to address a few other things, and it can explode exponentially into a tree-like structure. Eventually you get to a place where your solution is “good enough” and economically viable, and you release it, but nothing is ever perfect. And then when you do release it, people are going to be criticizing it harshly because it has flaw X or problem Y, and they’ll ask “why don’t they just fix that problem? It’s just one thing. Just make it better. These guys are idiots. Hundreds of scientists and engineers developing this and they couldn’t even prevent problem X? I could make a better project in my garage.” And these little seemingly simple problems that are actually very difficult to solve appearing before the public is what creates people who don’t trust experts. INTPs are really good at seeing all of this technical nuance, and addressing it carefully, so they often find themselves at the receiving end of this type of harsh criticism. It’s exacerbated by the fact that we like to burrow into our problems without communicating with people, so they think we’re just screwing around, wasting their time, and not actually solving anything. This criticism can actually scare away INTPs from impactful careers in STEM. They might just say “screw that” and spend the rest of their days living in a small apartment, working at a grocery store, and developing their own personal projects at home alone on their computers, never showing the greatness of their work to the world. This is a bit of a loss for the world at large, and can be avoided if people make more of an effort to reach across the isle and understand these technical problems a little bit more, and be less quick to judge a person who is working on it.