Curse of Knowledge
The curse of knowledge is when a communicator assumes their audience has the background knowledge needed to understand them.
Why can't experts explain well?
Once we know something, we can no longer simulate not-knowing it, so we systematically underestimate what needs to be explained.
- Also called the curse of expertise
- Flip side: what’s obvious to us can be amazing to others; once known, things stop feeling interesting
- Classic case: a professor forgets the difficulties a beginner faces, so course design optimized for faculty intuition fails students