Why "Above People's Heads" Is a Communication Problem, Not an Intelligence Problem

“This is going to be above people’s heads.”

If you’ve ever been the one saying hard things about systems, you’ve heard that sentence.
Sometimes it’s said kindly. Sometimes it’s a warning. Sometimes it’s an excuse.

What it really means most of the time is:

“We don’t want to do the hard work of translating this truth into a form the system can absorb.”

I had to learn that the hard way — in enterprise GTM rooms, in architecture reviews, explaining RFS or MAIA or AIDF to people who didn’t care about fields or sequent calculus, and at home with two teenagers who don’t give a damn about any of those acronyms.

“Above people’s heads” is almost never an intelligence problem.
It’s a communication problem — and often a courage problem.

The Meeting Where “Too Smart” Was Code for “Too Honest”

One of the first times this really clicked for me was in a strategy session with leadership.

Big account.
Big target.
Slide deck full of “AI transformation.”

Someone asked me to walk through the structural risks:

data sources we didn’t control,
incentives misaligned with the desired behavior,
architectural debt we were implicitly betting against,
the gap between what the system could prove and what the slide was promising.

I laid it out — plainly, not academically:

“If we ship this version, here’s where it will break under load.”
“If we don’t fix this integration, support is going to live in incident hell.”
“If we promise this outcome, we’re effectively lying unless we change X and Y.”

Silence.

Then someone said it:

“This is all true, but it’s going to be above people’s heads. We should simplify.”

What they meant wasn’t:

“Our team is not smart enough to grasp this.”

What they meant was:

“If we say this out loud in the wider room, it will force decisions we don’t want to make yet.”

That was the first time I translated “above their heads” to its real meaning in my notes:

“We’re more afraid of the consequences of clarity than of confusion.”

Once you see that, you don’t unsee it.

Intelligence Isn’t the Bottleneck. Bandwidth, Incentives, and Ego Are.

Most people I’ve worked with are not too dumb to understand systems.
They’re too overloaded, misincentivized, or defended to want to.

When someone says:

“This is too complex,”

what’s often true underneath is:

they’re already at cognitive capacity,
the system punishes them for surfacing inconvenient truths,
the explanation is optimized for the speaker’s ego, not the listener’s constraints.

I’ve been guilty of that last one.

Early in my AI architecture work, I’d:

lead with field metaphors before anyone cared why vector DBs were lying,
talk about MAIA’s RL and quantum‑inspired math before anchoring in “what is this thing actually trying to do?”,
explain AIDF’s sequent calculus before showing how “we’ll fix it later” keeps burning teams.

When people glazed over, I’d feel the temptation to think:

“They just don’t get it.”

The more honest assessment was:

“I didn’t do the work to connect my clarity to their world.”

Once I swallowed that, the question shifted from:

“Why can’t they understand this?”

to:

“What’s the minimal structure I need to preserve, and what can I simplify without lying?”

That’s a communication problem.
It’s solvable.

How This Shows Up in Systems Work (RFS, MAIA, AIDF, etc.)

When I talk about:

RFS as field‑based memory,
NME as structured traits,
MAIA as intent spine,
AIDF as math‑backed governance,
LQL/LEF/CAIO as chemistry/physics/orchestration,

I’m not trying to impress anyone.
I’m trying to name the things I actually see.

“Above people’s heads” shows up in this space as:

“Let’s just call it ‘smart storage’ instead of explaining field semantics.”
“Let’s say we have ‘governance’ and not get into proofs and invariants.”
“Let’s sell ‘AI memory’ and not talk about the difference between retrieval and identity.”

That kind of simplification feels harmless in the moment.
It’s not.

It:

miseducates customers,
locks engineering into architectures that can’t do what was promised,
creates internal cynicism because everyone close to the work knows the slide is a lie.

The alternative isn’t to drown people in math.
It’s to:

pick the right layer of explanation for the room,
keep the structural truth intact,
refuse to use “they won’t get it” as a shield for our own laziness or fear.

If a room can’t handle “vector search is not memory,” that’s not a problem with their intelligence.
It’s a problem with how we’ve normalized bad metaphors.

The Personal Version: “Above Their Heads” at Home

This dynamic isn’t limited to work.

With my kids, I’ve caught myself thinking:

“They’re not ready for this level of detail,”
“This is too much for them right now,”
“I should just keep it simple.”

Sometimes that’s true.
You don’t drop every adult burden on your kids in the name of “honesty.”

But there have been moments where “above their heads” was covering for something else:

my own discomfort with admitting I was overloaded,
my fear of saying “I don’t know how this will play out yet,”
my instinct to protect them from complexity instead of equipping them to navigate it.

The better version of that looks like:

telling them the truth at their level,
naming constraints (“I can’t do X and Y at the same time”),
explaining tradeoffs without dumping the entire emotional stack.

When I do that well, they don’t look confused.
They look more grounded.

Kids are proof that “above people’s heads” is often just lack of effort in translation.
They can handle more than we think — as long as we don’t outsource all the work of making it coherent to them.

What I Do Differently Now

These days, when someone says:

“This is going to be above people’s heads,”

I pause and ask:

“Which people?”
“What decision are we afraid this clarity would force?”
“What part of this is actually too complex, and what part is just badly explained?”
“What’s the simplest version that’s still structurally true?”

In practice, that means:

I don’t strip out the distinction between retrieval and memory just because it’s subtle.
I don’t call an orchestrator “governed” if AIDF and CAIO haven’t touched it yet.
I don’t sell TAI as “just an assistant” when the point is a life‑integrated system that actually remembers and behaves.

It also means:

I own my role in miscommunication instead of writing people off,
I accept that some rooms genuinely don’t want clarity — and adjust my involvement accordingly,
I try to make my writing and explanations carry the weight so the listener doesn’t have to guess what I really mean.

If, after all of that, something is still “above someone’s head,” I can live with that.
But at least then it’s an honest limitation, not a convenient story.

Where This Leaves Us

“Above people’s heads” is a phrase I take seriously now — not as a judgment of intelligence, but as a diagnostic:

Are we hiding behind complexity to avoid telling the truth?
Are we underestimating people because it’s easier than doing the work to explain?
Are we willing to keep the structural truth intact, even if we simplify the surface?

In a world where:

AI marketing is full of over‑claims,
architectures are often vibe‑coded,
governance is too often theater,

we can’t afford to keep using “they won’t get it” as cover.

If what you’re building actually matters — systems, companies, families — then it’s on you to:

see clearly,
speak precisely at the right level,
and refuse to accept “above their heads” as an excuse for your own imprecision.

That’s the standard I try to hold myself to now.
I don’t always hit it.
But I’m done pretending the gap is someone else’s problem.

Key Takeaways

“Above people’s heads” usually signals a communication or incentive problem, not a lack of intelligence.
In enterprise and AI contexts, it often means “we’re afraid of the decisions this clarity would force.”
The stack I’m building (RFS, NME, MAIA, AIDF, LQL, LEF, CAIO, TAI, AIOS, AIVA) demands precise explanations so we don’t sell capabilities the architecture can’t support.
At home, “they won’t get it” can be a way of avoiding honest, age‑appropriate explanations that kids are more than capable of handling.
The real work is finding the simplest explanation that preserves the structural truth, not watering down the truth until it’s meaningless.
If you care about systems that don’t break people, you can’t offload the cost of clarity onto everyone else with “they just don’t get it.”

Why I Prefer Accuracy Over Agreement
Why I Reject Groupthink — and Why It’s a Superpower
The Real Reason I Refuse to Build Fragile Systems
Systems Thinking as a Survival Mechanism
What Engineering Looks Like When You Refuse to Vibe-Code