If we want to be especially nerdy and Marxist, this I think is best explained by Dialectical Materialism and how it relates to knowledge itself. At a certain quantitative buildup of understanding of a concept, through stimuli such as reading theory or seeing it in the real world, there is a jump from simple knowledge of a subject to a comprehensive understanding, ie a shift from the quantitative to the qualitative.
Essentially, reading more, experiencing a concept first hand, and testing it in the real world is what turns simple knowledge into true understanding, and it is the latter that allows for concepts to be correctly simplified instead of incorrectly. Kinda like downscaling an image, if your first image is blurry it will look worse than if your first image is focused, even if you downscale to the same resolution.