“The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult or us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”
Imagine that the tapper is familiar with a song and expects the listener to be familiar with it, but he doesn’t know the song’s title, or any word that he would expect the listener to recognise as a name for it. If he taps out a rhythm from the song, he will have the song ‘playing’ in his head as he does so. This might lead him to overestimate how accurate the rhythm is, or how easy the song is to distinguish from that rhythm alone. When he hears the rhythm that he is tapping out, internally he also hears the song, making it very difficult to judge what it would be like for someone just to hear the rhythm.
Although it would be difficult to create an experiment in which knowledge of a popular song’s title and “musical knowledge” of the song are rigorously separated, we see that the tappers have two kinds of knowledge that the listener lacks: the song title, and musical knowledge of the song – i.e. the ability to replay the song with decent fidelity in one’s mind.
Chip and Dan Heath suggest that knowledge of the song’s title is the critical knowledge that causes the tappers to be overconfident about how likely the listeners are to recognise the song. This is a complex statement about the way in which the human brain works, but we don’t yet understand the brain in great detail; as far as I am aware there is no particular neuroscientific evidence that should cause us to believe that knowledge of the song title, rather than musical knowledge of the song, is the crux of the problem. Therefore I am not inclined to view their explanation as authoritative, and (assuming that there isn’t just some problem with the experiment) on the strength of introspection I lean towards the idea that musical knowledge has the greater effect in causing this overconfidence.
The failure to try to correct for this bias could be regarded as an example of irrationally expecting short inferential distances, but I view that as being more related to the understanding of words and concepts—complex areas of the map, that are charted on one person’s map in a particular way but not on another’s. I think a better fit would be the mind projection fallacy: the error of projecting the properties of one’s own mind into the external world. In this case the property being projected is the person’s internal soundtrack accompanying the rhythm that he is physically tapping.
Actually, expecting short inferential differences is a special case of the mind projection fallacy – the property being projected is the detailed structure of words and reductions in someone’s map of the territory; the person in question fails to realise that the reductions, the causal relationships and the subtle definitional changes that accompany words in his mental model do not accompany those words when they are processed by the brains of other people.
So, “the curse of knowledge” is essentially the problem of the mind projection fallacy as it applies to a given person’s level of knowledge (of various kinds) with respect to the knowledge possessed by others, and this knowledge need not be encoded verbally.
Imagine that the tapper is familiar with a song and expects the listener to be familiar with it, but he doesn’t know the song’s title, or any word that he would expect the listener to recognise as a name for it. If he taps out a rhythm from the song, he will have the song ‘playing’ in his head as he does so. This might lead him to overestimate how accurate the rhythm is, or how easy the song is to distinguish from that rhythm alone. When he hears the rhythm that he is tapping out, internally he also hears the song, making it very difficult to judge what it would be like for someone just to hear the rhythm.
Although it would be difficult to create an experiment in which knowledge of a popular song’s title and “musical knowledge” of the song are rigorously separated, we see that the tappers have two kinds of knowledge that the listener lacks: the song title, and musical knowledge of the song – i.e. the ability to replay the song with decent fidelity in one’s mind.
Chip and Dan Heath suggest that knowledge of the song’s title is the critical knowledge that causes the tappers to be overconfident about how likely the listeners are to recognise the song. This is a complex statement about the way in which the human brain works, but we don’t yet understand the brain in great detail; as far as I am aware there is no particular neuroscientific evidence that should cause us to believe that knowledge of the song title, rather than musical knowledge of the song, is the crux of the problem. Therefore I am not inclined to view their explanation as authoritative, and (assuming that there isn’t just some problem with the experiment) on the strength of introspection I lean towards the idea that musical knowledge has the greater effect in causing this overconfidence.
The failure to try to correct for this bias could be regarded as an example of irrationally expecting short inferential distances, but I view that as being more related to the understanding of words and concepts—complex areas of the map, that are charted on one person’s map in a particular way but not on another’s. I think a better fit would be the mind projection fallacy: the error of projecting the properties of one’s own mind into the external world. In this case the property being projected is the person’s internal soundtrack accompanying the rhythm that he is physically tapping.
Actually, expecting short inferential differences is a special case of the mind projection fallacy – the property being projected is the detailed structure of words and reductions in someone’s map of the territory; the person in question fails to realise that the reductions, the causal relationships and the subtle definitional changes that accompany words in his mental model do not accompany those words when they are processed by the brains of other people.
So, “the curse of knowledge” is essentially the problem of the mind projection fallacy as it applies to a given person’s level of knowledge (of various kinds) with respect to the knowledge possessed by others, and this knowledge need not be encoded verbally.