The curse of knowledge

The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when someone who knows a lot about a topic has trouble imagining what it’s like not to know that thing.

Once you understand something well, it becomes incredibly difficult to remember what it was like before you understood it — the confusion, the terminology, the steps you didn’t know were even steps.

This means that experts often overestimate how clearly they’re communicating. They skip over context. They use jargon. They assume too much. And the people they’re trying to help — students, teammates, customers — are left feeling overwhelmed, confused, or even unintelligent.