It seems that with more abstraction, more people throw up their hands and say "I'll never understand it", "The designers of this system did things in the stupidest way possible", "It's magic" or (in the case of the financial system) "It's a rigged game" "You're working for the man"

What all of these points of view have in common is that the people who hold them have given up trying to understand the world around them. Instead they take the intellectually lazy way out and compose their own pet theories of why things are the way they are, this is where tinfoil hat stuff comes from. This is dangerous, and is sort of the point of the original article.

I keep telling people that "the world is still knowable, still understandable". You have to put in the time and learn about it. It's easy to do, you just have to do it. There are plenty of "average" people playing in these "difficult" to understand fields.

What we desperately need to cultivate is a culture that encourages and rewards curiosity. When people are curious, they take the time to learn about the world around them, and why things are what they are.

If you don't master the world around you, it masters you.