Curse of Knowledge

This page is anchored by a Kyle note in How To Read a Book. Adler and Van Doren warn the reader to ask “if there is a special language that the author uses,” because “certain words provoke special responses from us, responses that they might not provoke from other readers a century hence.” Against that passage Kyle writes: “Connect to Conor’s curse of knowledge.” The framing here is temporal and contextual — the author’s special vocabulary is invisible to him but loaded for a reader of a different era — which Kyle reads as a variant of the curse of knowledge: the difficulty of recovering the assumptions baked into one’s own language. The book reinforces this with its observation (via Basil Willey) that “it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one’s own habitual assumptions; ‘doctrines felt as facts’ can only be seen to be doctrines… after great efforts of thought.” Kyle’s annotation explicitly distinguishes this from the existing Curse of Expertise page.

Context: The “curse of knowledge” is a cognitive bias whereby people who know something find it hard to imagine not knowing it — making experts systematically bad at communicating with, or modeling the mind of, the less-informed. The term was coined by economist Robin Hogarth.

Chris Anderson makes it central to TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking: speakers “fall in love with their ideas and find it hard to imagine what is complicated about them” to the uninitiated. His illustration — a physicist assuming everyone knows what a charm quark is, a novelist asking what “natural selection” means — sits alongside the TED guideline (after Einstein): “Make everything as simple as it can be. But no simpler.”

Where this appears

• How To Read a Book — Kyle’s note “Connect to Conor’s curse of knowledge” on the author’s “special language” that won’t provoke the same response in readers a century hence.
• TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking — Chris Anderson (via Robin Hogarth) makes it the core obstacle a speaker must overcome; the “but no simpler” Einstein corrective.