The Invisible Wall Between Minds (Introduction)
Imagine trying to explain how to ride a bicycle to someone who's never touched one. You might say: "Just balance and pedal!", forgetting that balance is something your body learned through dozens of falls.
That's the Curse of Knowledge: once you know something, it becomes incredibly hard to imagine not knowing it.
In psychology, this cognitive bias describes the difficulty experts have in communicating with novices because they can't easily recall what it was like to be a beginner. Knowledge reshapes perception, rewriting our internal model of the world. What once was complex now feels obvious, and we unconsciously assume it's obvious to everyone else, too.
This bias doesn't require arrogance; it simply exploits how our brain compresses experience. Once we've mastered a concept, we stop noticing the steps we took to get there.
When Seniority Becomes a Blindfold (The problem)
In software development, the Curse of Knowledge shows up everywhere.
- A senior developer writes a "simple" regex that nobody else understands.
- A tech lead drafts documentation that skips crucial setup steps.
- A mentor reviews a junior's code and asks, "Why didn't you just use dependency injection?" assuming that the junior knows what is being talked about.
The bias warps our empathy. We assume that everyone around us shares our mental models, our vocabulary, and our intuition about architecture.
But knowledge is not contagious by proximity: it must be transferred, not assumed.
When this happens:
- Onboarding slows down.
- Documentation becomes cryptic.
- Communication turns from collaborative to hierarchical.
- Juniors feel inadequate, seniors feel misunderstood.
Ironically, the more we know, the worse we can become at teaching or explaining it.
Remembering the Path You've Forgotten (Mitigation)
Escaping the curse begins with awareness. You can't "un-know" something, but you can simulate ignorance, reconstruct what it felt like not to know.
Some practical ways:
- Explain as if to your past self. When teaching or documenting, imagine you're talking to you from two years ago.
- Focus on clarity, not just correctness. Ask others, "Was this clear?" instead of "Is this right?"
- Encourage reverse mentorship. Juniors can point out where explanations fail; treat those as signals, not annoyances. Also, ask them to repeat what they had understood.
- Replace jargon with analogies. The human mind learns through stories more than syntax.
- Write as a teacher, not just a technician. Every pull request, comment, and commit message can be an act of mentorship.
The goal is not to simplify the world, it's to make it navigable for others. Knowledge should be a bridge, not a barrier.
Debugging the human mind, one bias at a time.
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