Ah… I love this thread full of people smugly congratulating themselves for not being the sort of people who would smugly congratulate themselves for being intelligent.

To the question:

The three broad alternatives available to me are to present a simplified version of a thought, which will potentially fail to do it justice and will likely fail to really communicate it anyway, since understanding it will require background knowledge the listener likely doesn’t possess, to present a full explanation of the thought, which will be long and ultimately dull, or to keep my mouth shut.

I used to do a fair amount of the second, with predictable results - either listeners grew quickly bored, or they were genuinely interested, which would encourage me to continue until they grew bored.

Now I mostly do the third, and would that I had started sooner. It’s far and away the better way to live. As a general rule, people just don’t want to know about, for instance, my proposed method for reconciling the need for some measure of absolutism in moral judgments with the reality that moral judgments are necessarily highly subjective and situational or my assertion that institutionalized, hierarchical authority is fundamentally illegitimate since there is no nominal justification for it that isn’t arbitrary, self-contradictory or self-defeating.

When I want to communicate those sorts of ideas, I write them out in long posts that are likely not read. Day to day, I just smile and exchange pleasantries and otherwise keep to myself.