What do I mean by “generally correct but overly simple”? Imagine a physicist who says, if he drops a sheet of paper and a bag of bricks from the top of a high tower, they’ll both hit the ground at the same time. When the local villagers tell him he must be mad, he scoffs, and declares they must not understand gravity, for which (as Galileo proved) the rate of an object’s downward acceleration is independent of its mass. When the villagers continue to doubt him, he writes angry pamphlets expressing his disappointment that everyone is too foolish to accept perfectly simple principles of physics.
However, in this case the physicist is wrong and the populace is correct. Sheets of paper really do fall more slowly than bags of brick, and an experiment would have confirmed that fact. Although the physicist was correct in saying that Galileo proved gravity operated independent of mass, he didn’t realize that this general principle wasn’t enough to determine at what times the paper and bricks would hit the ground. The villagers, who knew less about gravity but were willing to trust their experience, ended up doing better, even though they might not have been able to explain the principles at work. If the physicist had understood air resistance as well as gravity, he would have been able to match the villagers’ success and even exceed them, but until he admitted that the problem wasn’t as simple as taking his favorite physics equation and applying it to the exclusion of all else, he would never have an incentive to study it.
-- Yvain, “Why I Hate Your Freedom”