I largely agree with your assessment that "the popularity of these formats suggests that there’s a large audience of people with appetite for education, looking for new and more sophisticated ways to explain the world around them." But I very much disagree that these audiences are looking for more *sophisticated* ways of explaining the world. Certainly newness, or maybe surpprising or counterintuitive, is a big part of what they are looking for. But where you see a desire for sophistication, I see a desire for straightforward, universal and totalizing answers and explanations.

I wrote a long comment about this in your links round up (but gave up on it after having trouble logging in). Essentially, my argument there and here is that the way most people are educated and their engagement with the internet and social media rewards and feeds into humans' innate need for clear cut answers that can be given quickly, concisely and confidently. Therefore, instead of a whole media ecosystem of true debate and personal edification we have a marketplace full of people selling "the reason why"s, life hacks and "one weird trick"s.

In other words, all these curious people go to these sources looking for a way to understand the world, but instead of digging further and further into the nuances of the answers, they end up with a series of short, concise and, often, unexpected "facts" that try to explain everything easily, straightforwardly and completely.

Furthermore, when trying to learn, they want to go directly to an answer that sounds and feels like a concrete fact.. Saying things like "it's not that simple" or "it can be that way, but not always" or "it's not entirely known" leads to impatience and discomfort. I'm talking from personal experience talking to a colleague who is very intellectually curious and often asks in total good faith about new concepts and ideas (many that could be considered "woke") hoping to understand them. But she constantly gives up on in-depth explanations when she can't get straightforward and universal explanations that fit into the paradigms that she's already familiar with. This then means that it's easier and more comfortable for her to get information and (self)education from podcast intellectuals through social media.

When the curious reject nuanced considerations, the curiosity remains and they will invariably find an answer that better meets their needs. And once they understand the world through the prism of these explanations, any other reason or factor will be considered suspect or downright untrue, especially if it's given with caveats and qualifications. Eventually you get a guy who frames all the problems a man may have on the fact that he doesn't own any crypto, eats raw meat or suntans his scrotum (this is a real post I saw and I think I'm forgetting some of the other weird crap I'm supposed to be doing to be a "real man.")

I think it's probably still important to engage with these people's curiosity. It's likely useful to still try to give true and reasonable explanations to people who are struggling to understand them. But I would argue that it's important to go into these conversations understanding that most people inherently like easy answers they can act on. And that there are only a few of us for whom complicating and questioning everything is enjoyable. Even seeming autodidacts might just want to know things about the world rather than wrestle with their understanding and conceptions of it.

It would also be useful, during these conversations, to keep stressing that though there are rarely easy answers, thinking through those more tenuous and nuanced concepts has value since it helps us to begin to grasp reality and often leads to new and interesting questions.