Three vices may be observed concerning difficult things:  Making them too easy, making them unnecessarily obscure -- and making them both at once.

Things that really are easy should be easily presented.  However, those who are in a hurry, or who do not want to think much, want everything to be easy, and so they turn to oversimplifications.  In the appendix to his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, E.D. Hirsch listed 5,000 things which he said educated people ought to be able to should be converse about.  I don’t think it was the poor man’s intention – he criticized rote learning -- but the book inspired a movement to cram the 5,000 names and ideas down the throats of schoolchildren as though they would then be well-educated.

Things that really are obscure should be presented in a way which acknowledges their difficulty.  However, those who are proud of their knowledge and accomplishments puff themselves up by making the arcana of their disciplines seem more difficult than they have to be.  Often they use deliberately obscure language either to disguise what they mean, or to make it seem as though they are saying something when they are saying nothing.  They are simultaneously contemptuous and envious of those who do write clearly.

You would think these two vices would be mutually exclusive, but a peculiarity of our own intellectual culture is the development of ways to obfuscate and to oversimplify all at the same time.  A prime example is the application of quantitative techniques such as cost-benefit analysis to matters to which they are not applicable.  Methods like this baffle and impress the uninitiated because they take a long time to learn.  However, they enable the adepts to reach spurious conclusions about all sorts of things without having to do any real thinking.