Pages 57-67. What does Pinkner mean by "the curse of knowledge?" What is one reason that very intelligent people have trouble communicating what they mean to others? What is one solution that Pinkner states or implies as being a solution to the "curse of knowledge?"

8 THE SENSE OF STYLE THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE 59 60 THE SENSE OF STYLE THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE 61 According to this theory, opaque prose is a deliberate choice Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately from another person's vantage point." There's hindsight bias, the ten- Chapter 3 Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand explained by stupidity."The kind of stupidity I have in mind has noth- fact, it took thirty-two.12 Users with less expertise were more ency of people to think that an outcome they happen to know, such as in predicting the learning curves, though their guess, to in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo- best informed who suffer the most from it I once attended a lecture on have been obvious to someone who had to make a prediction about they predicted twenty minutes. The better you know something , the THE CURSE OF intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have biology addressed to a large general audience at a conference on tech . nology , entertainment, and design. The lecture was also being film before therach decision makersgreen, former People who make a the course of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why KNOWLEDGE obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bam- wearing a sandwich board around campus with the word REPENT her readers don't know what she knows -that they haven't mastered boozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook . Here is Calvin for distribution over the Internet to millions of other laypeople. explaining the principle to Hobbes: cent breakthrough in the structure of DNA He LZ assume that everyone else would make the same decision " There's the patois of her guild, can't divine the missing steps that seem too THE MAIN CAUSE OF INCOMPREHENSIBLE gon-packed technical presentation that was geared to his sory transparency, in which observers who privately kno obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as PROSE IS THE DIFFICULTY OF IMAGINING WHAT sarcastic assume that the speaker's naive listeners can somehow d off the look or omg the port bother to explain the jargon, or spell IT'S LIKE FOR SOMEONE ELSE NOT TO KNOW SIGNERINGS INBUT NOW PURPOSE OF WRITING IS WRITING CAN BE AN AND MONOLOGICAL IMPERATIVES e room that none of them understood a word , Apparent to SOMETHING THAT YOU KNOW the sarcasm, too. And there's ming lingness, a failure to ment shown in this New Yorker cartoon is a familiar example : asked him to explain the work more clearly. he seemed rised and not a little annoyed. This is the kind of stupidity I am talking hidden while a second child is out of the room assumes th typical reader struggle to follow an academic article, the "it In a related demonstration, a child comes into the fine print on a tax return, or the instructions for setting up Call it the Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it 19. Uclick. All rights rese was invented by economists to help explain why people me most popular explanation I hear is the one captured in this hcils, but the child will say that he himself knew it experience gashreplicas of the bamboozlement theory, because it information that their opposite number does not's A mood g !) Children mostly outgrow the inability othing to hide and no need to impress . They do groundbreaking work imber does not. A used-car dealer for example , should price a lemon at the same value as a creampuff of where a person will lo on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest , down to-earth people, the kind you'd enjoy having a beer with. Still, the same make and model, because customers have no way to tell the nce. On this kind of analysis, economists imagine that every ly accursed wh their writing stinks. hey try to estimate Offer ty's sake.) But at least in experimental markets, sellers don't take full ledge and skills. If a student happens to k People often tell me that academics have no choice but to write advantage of their private knowledge . They price their as ing of an uncommon word like apogee or eluci on pongcause the gatekeepers of journals and university presses insist" rice their assets as if their customers knew as much about their quality as they do. is, she assumes that other students know it. too 10 When my experience, and it turns out to be a myth. In Stylish Academic Writ- the curse of knowledge is far more than a curiosity in ceonions tal volunteers are given a list of anagrams to unscramble , masochistically analyzed the literary style in a sample of five hundred someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human some of which are ca Anyone who wants to lift the curse of knowledge must first appre- every field were written and found that a healthy minority in vering related versions of it and giv- to them beforehand, they rate the ones that are easier ing it new names . There is egocentrism , the inability of children to ] they'd see when experienced cell phone users were ask realize that he is too impaired to drive , we do not notice the curse Good start . Needs more gibberish . In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is imagine a simple scene, such as three toy mountains on a tabletop, novices to learn to use the phone, they guessed thirteen minutes; in * In this chapter, it's the female gender's turn to be the generic writer. 62 THE SENSE OF STYLE THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE 63 64 THE SENSE OF STYLE THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE 65 66 THE SENSE OF STYLE because the curse prevents us from noticing it. This blindness impairs Tenerife Airport radioed he was at takeoff, by which he meant "taking "out their homers under the name of the mmegarment course that our readers may not be members of the clubhouse in which we force their particip paired associate learning, in which Psychologists mystifying technical terms: themes t tion" and failed to stop him before he plowed his plane into another 747 Obviously writer different things ; stage-level and individual-level predicates , which are t a dozen email attachments named "pinker.doc." The professors on the runway." "The visually confusing "butterfly ballot" given to Palm avoid abbreviations and technical term QOV. Even moderately common abbreviations should be spelled out mith.doc," I go to a Web site for a trusted-traveler program and Principles A, B, and C, which could just as easily have beemen , and porters of Al Gore to vote for the presidential election led many sup- SALT means Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and even if everyo to decide whether to click on GOES , Nexus , GlobalEntry , Sentri , Flu swung the election to George W. Bush, changing the course of history. for . Biologists needn't define transcription factor or spell out did, there are babies being born mer, minute who will somed Reflexive Principle , the Pronoun Principle , and the Noun Principle . For or FAST-bureaucratic terms that mean nothing to me. A trail map every time they refer to those things, and many technical te not simply the initials "20 The hazard is not limited to pro long time I got a headache reading papers in semantics that analyzed ng whether that means each way or for a round trip, and it fa How can we lift the curse of knowledge? The traditional advice- so common and are so useful that they eventually cross over into everyday parlance, 1 he, and DNA. But the curse of know hold spokesperson cheerily writes , " Irwin and I had aman "some, but not all": when I say Some men are chauvinists, it's natural t w several unmarked forks along the trail. My apartment is cl You might think is TheHat you might think.' The problem is that just trying harder to put your- edge ensures that most writers will overestimate how standard a ter interpret me as implying that others are not. But in a strict, logica self in someone else's shoes doesn't make you a whole lot more accurate become and how wide the community to mercerstreet. work on our Ecpsats the children to the UNER, and we all continue e buttons which may have to be held down for one, two in figuring out what that person knows." When you've learned so A surprising amount of jargon can simply be banished and no one contradiction in saying Some men are chauvinists; indeed, all of them will be the worse for it. A scientist who replaces murine model with rats considerate writer will also cultivate the habit of adding Society , a lew are. Many insists afree to the two meanings as the upper-bounded thing so well that you forget that other people may not know it, yo will use up no more space on the page and be no less scientific. s borrowed from mathematics, and Philosophers are every bit as rigorous when they put away I ating mumm flowering mustard plant," rather than the bare "Arabidansis" (which m lucky enough to find the manual, it enlightens me with us when they put away Latin expres- I could never keep them straight. ATlast ] came across a limpid seman- ons like "In the state of falarm and chime setting. Press the [SET that people are not easily disabused of their curse of knowledge, even when they are the things bet feminist the mind, to remember what it a writer who explains technical terms can multiply her . do from everyday English , and I've followed the literature ever cina falarm 'hour setting)-> alarm minute setting; -> (time 'hour setting! >(time 'minute' setting) >( year' setting)+('month' settin like to learn something, or to ignore what they know." itself . And though nonlawyers might assume that the language of co This vignette shows that even belonging to the same professional v' setting) will be completed in turn And peace the MODEL ining the reader over your shoulder is a start Or people do learn to discount their knowledge when they are shown how tracts, such as the party of the first part, must serve some legal p the set items." I'm sure it was perfectly clear to the engineers ost of it is superfluous. As Adam Freedman points out in mis book on also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field , my sub their judgments, and if you've read to this point, perhaps you ishes legal boilerplate is i chair terminology and frenzied verbosity, as prolanation at all. For example: Here's an explanation of the , ultiply these daily frustrations by a few billion, and you begin to Wilkins To you . Your readers know a lot lessabout why he ; This by two eminent cognitive neuroscientists , w ge is a pervasive drag on the strivings of nanity, on a par with corruption disease and antrome called they do , and unless you keep track of what you know that they term syllepsis : " the use of a word that relates to , qualifies , or gover that publishes brief review articles for a wide readership : Abbreviations are tempting to thoughtless writers because they can wo or more other words but has a different meaning in relation don't , you are guaranteed to confuse them . .. such as when Benja- save a few keystrokes every time they have to use the term. the winters zach for that fromerssay *continue win .. . such as when professionals lawyers accountants, computer gurus, A better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to be aware of least vaguely aware of the use of jargon. abbreviations of many minutes stolen from the lives of their readers . I stare at a table hang separately." Clearer, no? No? Sometimes two examples are and its variants , where the way in which a stimulus is ultimately fy poorly drafted text. There's an old saying that for the wan of numbers whose columns are labeled DA DN SA SN , and have to flip of the example is relevant to the definition. What if add " orwhen Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War is only the m vocabulary. Every human pastime music, cooking, sports, art, theo- hundreds of milliseconds after the original stimulus sing several to say or type a long winded description every time they refer to a legative, Similar Affirmative, Similar Negative. Each abbreviation is you cho mark said, you can leave in a taxi, and if you can't get a taxi, famous example of a mustard posted its long bybeen attributed to surrounded by many inches of white space. What possible reason could After I macheted my way through the overgrowth of passives, zombies, oor wording (operators misinterpreted the label on a warning light), n each other's company. The problem is that as we become proficient at our job or hobby we come to use these catchwords there have been for the author not to spell them out? Abbreviations that And when technical terms are unavoidable, why not choose ones and redundancies, determined that the content of the sentenceresided as has the deadliest plane crash in history, in which the pilot of a 747 at so often that they flow out of our fingers automatically , and we forget der from having to en field of linguistics is among the worst offenders , with dozens of demonstrate " the integrative nature of conscious perception ." The THE CURSE OF K jurors write as if everyone knows what the "rabbit illusion" is, but I've Nor does their explanation enlighten How are we ever heard off . ize " a stimulus ," " poststimulus events ," and " the way in which a stim - ulus is ultimately perceived"? And what does any of this have to do th rabbits: Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself been written for the likes of me, the best I could say after SoI did a bit of digging and uncovered Cutaneous wabbit T munich " you close your eyes and someone taps you a few times off string of taps running up the length of your arm, like a hopping rabbit. taps fell depends on the location of the later fans But why did authors just say that , which would have taken no more words that The curse of knowledge is insidious, because it conceals not only the contents of our thoughts from us but their very form. When we know something well , we don't realize how abstractly we think about it . And we forget that other people, who have lived their own lives, have not gone through our idiosyncratic histories of abstractification. the land of the concrete. One is called chunking. Human working think that its capacity was around seven items (plus or minus two), but hree or four. Fortunately, the rest of the brain is equipped with a work- theneck. It can package ideas into bigger and bigger was one of the greatest stylists in the history of the behavioral sciences and it's no coincidence that he co-opted this homey term rather than inventing some technical jargon.)" Each chunk, no matter how much