Do you have the “curse of knowledge”? If you’re reading the Last Word on Nothing—meaning, if you’re a curious, highly literate, super smart person (also beautiful)—you probably do. The curse of knowledge refers to this phenomenon: Once you know something, it’s easy to forget that you used to not know it, and that a lot of other people still don’t. The curse of knowledge (at least how I hear it in my own head) is an ironic term. Imagine someone with their arm over their forehead, looking up in distress: “Woe is me! I am cursed with the burden of knowledge!”
The curse of knowledge is sort of the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the finding that many people who know little about a subject will confidently overestimate how much they know. In the curse of knowledge, you overestimate how much other people know.
Recognizing the curse of knowledge is important, especially for writers, editors, social media posters, scholars, researchers, chit-chatters, cartoonists, or communicators of any kind.
I’ve edited for a lot of publications, and one of my favorite roles as an editor is to listen to a writer, who hopefully knows more about their subject area than I do, talk through a bunch of possible story ideas. I don’t know if you know this about science writers, but they know so much! It’s hard for them to find something they think is truly new, because not much is truly new to them. So they’ll often dismiss each story idea as they go, maybe because we covered a similar subject in 2023, or there was a story in a competing publication that’s aimed at experts, and anyway, everybody knows. The editor’s job to stop them when they hear the beginnings of a good story and say, “that’s interesting!” That’s interesting, and a lot of people in your audience doesn’t know this thing yet, and they will enjoy knowing it, so tell them.
Speaking in jargon is a type of curse of knowledge. It’s hard to notice jargon when you’re fluent in it, so communicators have to be scrupulous about explaining terms, especially ones that mean one thing in common language and a different thing among specialists. “Positive feedback” is a great example that climate communicator Susan Joy Hassol uses. Who doesn’t want positive feedback? Climate scientists, who use the term to refer to self-reinforcing cycles, like how when ice melts you get less reflection of sunlight, causing more ice to melt, causing less reflection. Same with experts who are “famous.” If you’re writing about them, go ahead and use both their names and include a reminder of who the heck they are.
The curse of knowledge is one reason I love “today I learned” as a hashtag and an approach to communication, a way to be humble and excited and generous with new knowledge all at the same time. At a meta-level, by highlighting something we just learned, we tell people who already knew that thing (because everybody knows) that not everybody knows it. A today-I-learned item is a new delight for some, and a reminder of the curse of knowledge for others.
The curse of knowledge is sort of a theory of mind problem, the problem of imagining what other people perceive and know and remember and care about. It’s much simpler to assume their mind is stuffed with the same stuff that’s in our mind. It’s a hard problem! How should we know what other people know? It takes a lot of reflection to figure out how to tell a story that is comprehensible to people who don’t know much about a subject and enjoyable and fresh for people who do.
I’ve been thinking a lot about stories that fade from popular attention because a problem was solved; something was bad and then it was made better. Some people know that we fixed acid rain, saved the whales, created vaccines against cancer, and made apples taste better. But others don’t know, or have forgotten, or don’t know how good things happen, in part because mass media (for reasons) focuses on problems that haven’t been solved. And mass media has a huge curse of knowledge problem.
There’s no easy way out of the curse of knowledge, especially for writers (which includes anybody who writes anything). But it helps to talk to other people (editors, colleagues, friend-friends, or pocket friends you are connected with on social media) and ask questions. Does everybody know this already? This is kind of weird, right? Or is it boring? Or obvious? Is this helpful? Is this interesting? I’m telling you, it is.
