You don't expect a person on the other side of a restaurant's hall to hear clearly what you're whispering at your table, and you're not amazed by how tiny she looks, because your intuition tells you that this is how distance works. Yet, when we talk—in a more abstract way—about contexts and circumstances different from our own, we expect them to make sense to us here and now, no matter how "far away" they are in terms of their structure, behavior and histories. I wonder if we're in the process of evolving an intuitive sense of systemic perspective.