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Curse of knowledge 0:53
A 53-second explainer of Curse of knowledge, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Curse of knowledge demo
What this video covers
The curse of knowledge is the difficulty experts have imagining what it's like not to know what they know. Once something is obvious to you, you can't easily un-see it, so you overestimate how clear your explanations are and skip the very steps and terms a beginner needs - because to you they go without saying.
The expert version felt perfectly clear - to you, because you already know the words. Drop into a beginner's shoes and it falls apart: undefined jargon, skipped steps, assumed context. That's the curse of knowledge. You can't reliably feel a newcomer's confusion from the inside, which is exactly why the only real fix is to watch actual newcomers try, and write for them.
