Proposed Term
Curse of Knowledge
Context
A cognitive bias: once you know something, you can no longer easily imagine not knowing it, so experts unconsciously assume background the audience lacks — and communicate over their heads. Coined by Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein & Martin Weber (1989, Journal of Political Economy); popularised by Chip & Dan Heath (Made to Stick, 2007) as the central villain of communication, and by Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style, 2014) as the chief cause of bad technical/academic writing. (Cf. Elizabeth Newton's 1990 "tappers and listeners" experiment.)
Captures the communication limit Jens framed as "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you" — the receiver does the understanding; the sender can only calibrate. As an LLM anchor it is especially useful for documentation aimed at an uncertain audience: instructing a model to "avoid the curse of knowledge" makes it surface assumed knowledge, define jargon, and pitch to the reader's level.
Fits communication-presentation; relatives in the catalog: feynman-technique, plain-english-strunk-white, bluf, inverted-pyramid-style, blooms-taxonomy.
Sources: Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber (1989) · Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick (2007) · Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (2014).
LLM Activation Test Result
Model: Claude (Opus 4.8)
Prompt: "What concepts do you associate with the 'Curse of Knowledge'?"
Response: A cognitive bias where experts can't un-know what they know and so overestimate shared background, producing jargon-heavy, over-assuming explanations; coined by Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber (1989); popularised by the Heath brothers (Made to Stick) and Pinker (The Sense of Style); illustrated by Newton's tappers-and-listeners study; remedies include audience empathy, concreteness, defining terms, and feedback. Rich, consistent, strongly attributable activation.
Pre-submission Checklist
Proposed Term
Curse of Knowledge
Context
A cognitive bias: once you know something, you can no longer easily imagine not knowing it, so experts unconsciously assume background the audience lacks — and communicate over their heads. Coined by Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein & Martin Weber (1989, Journal of Political Economy); popularised by Chip & Dan Heath (Made to Stick, 2007) as the central villain of communication, and by Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style, 2014) as the chief cause of bad technical/academic writing. (Cf. Elizabeth Newton's 1990 "tappers and listeners" experiment.)
Captures the communication limit Jens framed as "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you" — the receiver does the understanding; the sender can only calibrate. As an LLM anchor it is especially useful for documentation aimed at an uncertain audience: instructing a model to "avoid the curse of knowledge" makes it surface assumed knowledge, define jargon, and pitch to the reader's level.
Fits communication-presentation; relatives in the catalog:
feynman-technique,plain-english-strunk-white,bluf,inverted-pyramid-style,blooms-taxonomy.Sources: Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber (1989) · Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick (2007) · Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (2014).
LLM Activation Test Result
Model: Claude (Opus 4.8)
Prompt: "What concepts do you associate with the 'Curse of Knowledge'?"
Response: A cognitive bias where experts can't un-know what they know and so overestimate shared background, producing jargon-heavy, over-assuming explanations; coined by Camerer, Loewenstein & Weber (1989); popularised by the Heath brothers (Made to Stick) and Pinker (The Sense of Style); illustrated by Newton's tappers-and-listeners study; remedies include audience empathy, concreteness, defining terms, and feedback. Rich, consistent, strongly attributable activation.
Pre-submission Checklist