Experts struggle to imagine not knowing what they know, making communication difficult.
Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber named the economic effect in 1989. Elizabeth Newton's 1990 Stanford dissertation supplied the memorable demonstration: tappers of a familiar tune predicted roughly 50% recognition, and listeners identified about 2.5%. It is the standing reason expert documentation is unusable.
In practice
- A senior engineer writes a runbook that assumes the reader knows which cluster is production.
- A teacher explains long division in the language of someone who has never not known it, and cannot see which step is the cliff.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind