The curse is real

The curse of knowledge is one of the cognitive biases. It was first named and described in 1989 in the Journal of Political Economy by Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber. Fairly recently, huh? Especially that it's something affecting everybody. So what is it about exactly?

Disclaimer: This is not a scientific article about the subject. I'll present my point of view along with my opinions.

In layman's terms, the knowledge you acquire curses you in a way that after learning something you cannot "unlearn" it. This doesn't seem to be very problematic because why would you like to lose valuable knowledge?. Unless you need to teach somebody something. Then it's hard to take their perspective (state of knowledge) to explain something using context (knowledge) they already have.

Why the best scientists might not be the best teachers?

The fact you know a lot about A doesn't necessarily put you in a position of being the best person to teach A. Arguably, chances are that the bigger the difference between what you know about A and what a person you want to teach about A knows, the harder it might be to teach them. Maybe, just maybe, this is a reason why a friend might have an easier time explaining something complex than a professor.

An example of the curse

One specific instance of the curse of knowledge is "Lady Monadgreen’s curse". As Gilad Bracha said, "Once you understand monads, you immediately become incapable of explaining them to anyone else". Some of you might be familiar with a feeling that something snaps in your brain and - out of a sudden - you have a feeling you've just understood something. It can happen even (or maybe especially?) if you're not actively learning something but possibly doing completely unrelated stuff. Now you know this is exactly how the curse feels.

Knowledge curse in software engineering

Software engineering, especially when compared with other fields of engineering, is still relatively new. It also still develops rapidly so a lot of new people are joining every year. And it's not only a stream of people graduating software engineering at unis but also people from other backgrounds, including non-technical ones. Every year, they need to learn what people with 1-year experience learned 12 months ago and so on...

Because of it, the awareness of the curse of knowledge might be particularly important in IT. And now you're at least aware!

What to do about it?

Cognitive biases are hard to overcome. Even the awareness of their existence doesn't mean you're not susceptible - that's bad. Still, even if you can't build a solid immunity or resistance, you can make it less bad by actively working towards diminishing the effects.

How? One of the ways might be to describe your learning experience as you learn. Every time you feel you progressed (or stalled, we all know it happens), share it with others. Give your context, describe your experience.

Not only it might help others to be inspired to learn something new and to follow your path but also help you. You will structure your knowledge as you speak or write it. Somebody might hint you how you can shift your thinking or take another perspective to progress. The only problem with this approach is that you also need to overcome your ego and admit you don't know something or that you're struggling to understand something. But please try to do it. For yourself and for others.