Curse of Knowledge

TL;DR

The curse of knowledge happens far more than we realize. Effective communication is not just about conveying information but also about ensuring that your message is well-received and understood. By working to establish a shared understanding, a common context, and a consistent frame of reference, we can avoid confusion and foster a deeper connection with our audience. Let's strive to communicate effectively and make a positive impact in our interactions with others.

Background

I recently spoke with someone who expressed a desire to learn programming. I'm always excited to hear when someone is motivated to learn and grow professionally – that mindset leads to success! By expanding their skills and knowledge, they set themselves up for success in their current role and open new career opportunities.

For background, this individual has never worked professionally in an Information Technology (IT) role and has relatively little traditional IT experience. As such, they currently lack the fundamental knowledge that IT professionals often take for granted.

Naturally, as a Python enthusiast, I recommended they start learning Python and provided them with a few suggested resources. While going through the tutorials, they struggled to get particular code snippets to work. To be clear, this individual is wicked smart; they just lack experience.

Examples

Take, for example, the following example snippet found in a tutorial:

$ sudo apt install python3-pip

Their first thought was to copy the snippet and run it at the command line. In fact, I'm sure many non-experienced IT people would do the same thing:

What happened here? They copied the entire highlighted snippet, which included $. For those of us familiar with a Unix, Linux, or Mac OS prompt, we understand the $ presents the command prompt and provides helpful information like whether you are a regular user or a root user, which would traditionally be #.

They've copied what was highlighted in the guide and received the message bash: $: command not found. Experienced *nix people understand that bashtells us the shell environment we are running in and is saying that $ is a command that could not be found. I'm sure many people would say, "Well, that's common sense!" Or "That's obvious! You don't include $ when you copy the snippet." This individual's first question was, "What is bash?" Then they asked, "Do I need to install Bash?"

I've seen numerous guides that use the shell prompt $ in their highlighted snippets. I've also seen guides that bounce between snippets that include the shell prompt and exclude the shell prompt from one line to the next in the same guide. As you can imagine, this likely confuses many people who lack command line or terminal experience.

If you step back and give it some thought, I am confident you could think of a half-dozen examples where the curse of knowledge around any topic resulted in confusion — either for you or someone you were communicating with.

Take away

We all experience the curse of knowledge – assuming our audience shares a background and understanding with us. I want to clarify my intention is not to criticize the guidewriters in the provided examples. And I understand my example may be on the extreme side of things – learning Python but not understanding how the *nix shell works. My point is that I want to draw attention to the confusion that can arise when we assume our audience has the same knowledge and understanding as ourselves. This is a common problem in the tech industry, especially in software.

Communication is typically defined as a message sent from a sender to a receiver. However, I believe that real communication requires a shared understanding between both parties. Without this common understanding, communication is incomplete. To achieve this, context plays a crucial role and can be a powerful tool. When speaking or writing, I would encourage you to consider your assumptions about your audience. We can communicate more effectively when we question our assumptions and ensure our audience has the appropriate context and a shared understanding.

Can you think of examples where you experienced the curse of knowledge? What did you learn from the experience?