Explanation fails when the listener needs several inferential steps the speaker has forgotten taking, and the speaker reads the failure as stupidity.
Yudkowsky's point is that in ancestral conditions almost everybody shared almost all background, so a single step was normally enough and the intuition that explanation should be quick is calibrated for a world that no longer exists. In a specialised society the gap is routinely several steps, and the speaker's frustration is evidence about the speaker's model rather than the audience.
In practice
- An expert who has explained the same thing four times without success is not facing four unintelligent audiences.
- A briefing that starts three steps in loses the room in the first minute and the speaker notices at the twentieth.
- Standing
- Closely related to the curse of knowledge and the illusion of transparency, both of which are researched; this names the specific failure of assuming a short gap.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Theories of what stands between an event and its audience