https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
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I think I've been in that meeting
Painful.
I'm about to go into one of these kinds of meetings.... sigh...
-tg
The problem the expert had was not understanding his role. Speaking plainly would do him no good. What he needed to do was snow the audience under with jargon. Technically, 7 mutually perpendicular lines can be drawn, they just can't be drawn on a two dimensional sheet of paper. He could have added considerable obfuscation by discussing the dimensionality of the problem. Also, the color red is really just a wavelength of reflected light (in the case of an ink drawing), so he would have just needed to talk about various nanometer spectra and convinced them that they were seeing red lines in the blue color, but their lack of expertise kept them from realizing the true nature of the lines.
Of course, in that case, the purpose of the expert would have been to either steer them into getting what was attainable and convincing them that it was what they asked for, or, failing that, to keep the discussion going until the project died of old age.
I'm glad I saw this; I now realize things could be worse. Oh. Wait. I didn't think it could get any worse...