Why Deep Learning Works Even Though It Shouldn't

This is a big question, and I'm not a particularly big person. As such, these are all likely to be obvious observations to someone deep in the literature and theory. What I find however is that there are a base of unspoken intuitions that underlie expert understanding of a field, that are never directly stated in the literature, because they can't be easily proved with the rigor that the literature demands. And as a result, the insights exist only in conversation and subtext, which make them inaccessible to the casual reader. Because I have no need of rigor to post on the internet, (or even a need to be correct) I'm going to post some of those intuitions here as I understand them.