this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Once I had to fill some forms for the gouvernement and I just went to their office and found a wonderfully helpful lady who helped me to do it and reassured me when I would freak out because their questions were not logical or not as closed as they thought. It was an eye opener and I've used the technique ever since.
Neurotypicals seem to suffer from the curse of knowledge far more than others. The worst part is, they're neither aware of it, nor do they want to be aware of it.
They don't realize how many assumptions they're making about what you know, and that the information they're assuming you have is the same information that they are working from.
For the uninitiated, the curse of knowledge is a concept where, by knowing the context of a thing, you understand it, but others do not because they don't have the context of that thing. It's a curse because the speaker with the curse of knowledge assumes that others have that context, often unaware that context needs to be provided for that thing to be understood.
The easiest demonstration of this I've seen is, try having someone guess a song by tapping it out on a table or something. More than 90% of the time they will not be able to guess what song you're portraying because they lack the context. As soon as you mention the song, assuming the listener has heard the song before, they will be able to hear the association between your taps and the song, but not before being told.
This phenomenon happens a lot, and it's the worst on government anything because often you are not provided any reference to look up what is intended for the question, form, information or whatever that you're being asked to provide, you just need to provide it, but you lack the context to know what they even mean.
I refer to this as the corrollary to "you don't know what you don't know", which is, "you don't know what you know".
That's apt. I like it.