Is it obvious, or can't you explain it?

One of my pet peeves is people responding something along the lines of "yeah, it's obvious" in a dismissive way to some statement I made. I would guess that, let's say, 80% of those responses are people that actually can't explain that thing, 15% are because the statement is pretty logical but they hadn't thought of it yet and 5% are assholes which genuinely found it obvious.

The thing is that a lot of simple things are tough to explain. 1 + 1 being 2 is a thing you basically know since you're born, and yet providing a solid explanation of why exactly it's reasonable to do that is kind of hard. You have to understand that, fundamentally, it's just axioms and definitions and inference rules (which also boil down to definitions or axioms). And, in fact, I was going to say that you know that 1 + 1 is 2 since you know what numbers are, but a good definition of what a number is is also kind of hard!

Really, "number" is a word and is used as such. This means that it can mean different things under different circurmstances. In general, it's basically impossible to make a foolproof way to agree on the definition of anything, since to define something you need previous definitions, so it's a miracle that humans can communicate and understand each other.

So, if you're about to say "it's obvious" in a dismissive way, maybe don't 😇. You could instead "I agree"! Way less confrontational, more true in the 80% of cases where the thing isn't obvious in the first place, and just all around nicer. You could even say "you're right", but that can be either too much to ask or actually even patronising. Point stands: please don't say it's obvious in a dismissive way, the world is better without it ^^