This very short essay is excellent: What you can’t imagine, you can’t see. It’s from that Tips for the Reasonable Mystic thing. Let me pop in some quotes from it, although I sincerely recommend reading the whole thing:

They’ve done experiments where people are shown out-of-focus images. As the images are slowly brought into focus, the subjects are asked to guess what the image is as soon as they can. People who make wrong guesses early have a very hard time correcting them–the image must be in almost perfect focus before they manage to see what it really is. A slightly fuzzy image that you ordinarily would easily recognize as a train may look like a shark to you if you guessed it to be a shark when it was just a blob of color.

… The same thing happens at more conceptual levels. Can you imagine an honest lawyer? If not, I guarantee you will never meet one. Can you imagine that someone could love you just the way you are? If you can’t, you will be unable to notice when someone does.

… When trying to convince other people, it always helps to know whether they can imagine what you’re trying to tell them. If they can, then you only have to show them evidence. If they can’t, evidence is useless–they won’t see it as evidence of anything. Those arguments that go in circles forever are of the second type: Neither party can imagine the world that the other plainly sees. Consequently, everything the other party says is irrelevant. It is just noise, supporting no point of view at all.

If I had a nickel for all the times that last paragraph had happened to me, I would have so many nickels… I would be the king of nickels.

Also, if you like this, the essay about mysticism as being a low bandwidth communication channel is absolutely fantastic!