Curse of Knowledge

Examples

Support forum: “How do I install this?” Maintainer: “Just clone the repo and build from source.” User: “…what’s a repo?”

The maintainer isn’t being smug. From inside fifteen years of experience, “clone and build” genuinely feels like the simple version.

A famous demonstration: tap a well-known song on a table and have someone guess it. Tappers, who hear the melody in their heads, expect listeners to get it about half the time. Listeners — who receive only knocking — get it a few percent of the time. The tune you can’t stop hearing is the knowledge you can’t subtract.

It’s also why experts can be the worst teachers of beginners, and why your “clearly worded” message reads as riddles to the person who lacks the context you forgot you had.

Why it happens

Knowledge doesn’t sit in a drawer you can close for the demonstration; it’s baked into how things look to you. When you judge what someone else understands, you simulate their mind with yours — and yours has the answer pre-installed. Adjusting away your own knowledge is effortful and reliably incomplete, and the effect persists in experiments even when people are paid to get it right. It’s the communication-flavored sibling of hindsight bias: known answers feel obvious, in others’ minds as in your own past.

The discussion cost is real: “I already explained this” and “you’re being deliberately dense” often mean “my explanation lived on context you don’t have”.

How to counter it

• Test on a real beginner — documentation, tutorials, and announcements should meet one genuinely fresh reader before shipping.
• Define terms on first use, even ones that feel beneath mention. Especially those.
• Replace “obviously” with the missing steps. If it were obvious, the sentence wouldn’t be needed.
• When misunderstood, assume missing context before missing intelligence — it’s the more common cause, and the more fixable one.