From a personal perspective, the author reflects upon the notion that many research findings appear falsely to possess the quality of being "obvious". Specific attention is given to the topic of teacher effectiveness. The feeling that findings are obvious can be related to the following: the false consensus effect, selfserving cognition, hindsight bias, baserate neglect, illusory correlations, and the fundamental computational bias. The author suggests ways in which teacher effectiveness findings can be used, and notes how one "obvious" notion, that discovery learning produces more meaningful learning than direct instruction, is a fundamental misconception.