Something related to the world at large is that humans are so varied that we usually create unintentional blindspots. Someone being expert on a field completely unrelated to yours might not know what you do for a living. I’ll use for example, my family, without giving away any super notable key details.
My mom and my aunt are elementary school teachers. My dad worked on multiple companies, mostly related to technological stuff, like arcade machines, and nowadays he’s a driver for the company he works for. My grandpa from my mom’s side worked on construction (the lower end of the scale) and my grandma sold cosmetics, door to door. My grandpa from my dad’s side had a restaurant and was an expert cook. The least we say about my other grandma the better.
None of those are in the same field as I am, maybe my dad is the closest one, but if I ask him about how to host a website, he’ll be confused and ask me what I meant.
These unintentional blindspots are regular things in life, experts in one field are not experts in other fields and no matter how many times others insist, they’ll never get there as quickly as people demand them to be. This causes a masterclass of misunderstanding, and I want to talk about it.
Types of Misunderstanding (IMO)
These are all made up names I made to explain the types. I looked up Wikipedia and there, it only says something like ‘the act of not understanding’. Very helpful.
Overreach
One of the classic types of a ‘Masterclass of Misunderstanding’ is the Overreach. You think you can do it, and because you are successful from multiple attempts before on what you already know what (and how) to do, you try to do something new and fresh without doing any research if you can actually do it. A runner will never be as good as a BMX athlete unless they train. It might look easy enough to try it but the training regime is different, there’s a lot of consider and if you think you ‘got it on the bag’ because you already train for something, you’ll never be able to do it. In short, overconfidence often leads to Overreach.
Plain Ignorance
‘Ignorance is bliss’, as the saying goes, right? Well, being willfully ignorant is not ‘bliss’ and will cause you to misunderstand things that essentially super basic. A book talking about metaphors needs to have its metaphors to be understood and if you ignore them, it’s not you thinking that the author is too pretentious or something, it’s you being plainly ignorant. Just because you don’t know some things doesn’t mean you can’t learn and just because you know multiple things, it doesn’t mean that you already know everything.
Face Value Non-Analysis
Another common thing that causes misunderstanding is taking things as they are presented like you were a child, and then discarding any possible critical thought that would certainly come up from it. Just because it’s presented as such doesn’t mean it’s exactly that way, nuance is real and needs to be extracted from it to be understood. Failing to do that leads into the misunderstanding scenario.
Other types
I’d say that usually these are the three common types, and others can be a combination of two or all three.
Practical Examples
Annihilation is a 2018 movie directed by Alex Garland, loosely based on the 2014 novel of same name. Quick summary of the plot: The story follows a group of scientists who enter the ‘Shimmer’, a mysterious quarantined zone of mutating plants and animals caused by an alien presence. It’s a pretty good movie! You should watch it. But when the movie comes up with lines like…
“The person that started this journey won’t be the one that ends it.”
… it’s hard to not just see the movie from what it is. It wears its BLUNT themes on its sleeves, and isn’t afraid of showing it. The characters tell you as much, both to the other characters and the camera. The performance of all the involved characters are evocative of what they want from this ‘alien’ force, when it was essentially just a proxy that essentially screams about “WE’RE A METAPHOR FOR EXISTENTIALISM” and make you think. This is quite explicit because despite showing the themes to you, it also wants you to use your brain and come to your own conclusion, and you are the one that should find the closure.
But at the time, all you could on get on Youtube was ‘The Movie Ending: Explained’ and then go ‘the alien was able to spread its influence and the survivors are gonna have kids that will be more alien like than ever!!!’ which is not only is the Plain Ignorance type of misunderstanding but also the Face Value Non-Analysis… It pains me that this is what happens when people aren’t being spoon-fed the answer, and remember, this is from 2018, almost a decade ago, before Tiktok exploded around the world.
Dan Olson of Folding Ideas has a great videowhere he describes the movie better than any poser could because he understood the movie and its themes, and has plenty of pretty good quotes.
Jarhead is a 2005 movie based on the 2003 novel of same name. Summary: Anthony Swofford (author of the book) chronicles his military service in the United States Marine Corps during the Persian Gulf War. Just like the book, Swofford saw very little actual combat. The book and the movie’s narrative focuses on the physical, mental, and emotional struggles of the young Marines.
And it’s also pretty good, because it deals with really heavy themes about military and stuff happens during wars, or rather then they don’t. Naturally it made its money back and also a pretty good film.
3 direct to video sequels exist, because movies about anti-war are still movies about war. None of them are related to Jarhead other than the name. I could say that the machine made to make franchises needed something to attach itself to. Jarhead has ‘war’ on it, let’s make more war about it. But it also paints a really lack of understanding, or rather a Masterclass of Misunderstanding about that Jarhead was about. You start with an actually deep and impactful movie regarding how war can drive people crazy if they don’t get to do anything and somehow that gets turned into a bad Call of Duty campaign but shot in film.
Dan Olson of Folding Ideas also has a great video about this one too, and it goes in more depth than I am, since that’s not the focus for my post, but you can clearly see that someone didn’t see Jarhead was about.
Anthem was a 2019 video game created by Bioware (of Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Baldur’s Gate 1 fame). Anthem is a third person shooter that is essentially Destiny (which was aligned with Activision at the time) but made by EA. It was clear that someone in the team wanted to make a ‘Destiny but changed the homework to look different‘, and a higher-up agreed with the decision.
The entire development process was turbulent because no one had any idea of what Anthem was supposed to be like. They knew some things that they wanted and not much more. The game’s name was called ‘Beyond’ for over 5 years, before the reveal. This is a classic case of Overreach. Bioware was fairly successful in making RPGs in a certain way, and they were gonna make a completely different one, that wasn’t their strong suit. Nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn’t hardpivot until I had some other things done in, or even, define the core of what the game was supposed to be.
In January 12th, 2026, its servers were shutdown, rendering the game unplayable.
Closing Words
There were so many other examples I can give out and I could go on for days, weeks. But I need to stop or you’ll never get a chance to read it.
So you want a proposed solution to misunderstanding? Just understand it, duh. I kid, but thinking critically, analyzing things in a non-superficial way, get information, data you can trust and never try to overstep your skills. If you think you know and it’ll be easy to deal with just because, then that’s when you should take a step back and rethink things over. Don’t be afraid to be humble, it won’t make you less of a person. Besides, it’s better to not have any issues than to have them if you can avoid it, because they can be often lethal to the thing you’re making or even to yourself.