Resource Recognition

The curse of knowledge

Your expertise feels ordinary to you for a documented reason. It is a well studied effect, more specific than modesty or impostor syndrome, and once you know its name you can work around it.

The study

In 1990 Elizabeth Newton ran an experiment at Stanford. One group tapped out well known songs on a table. Before the listeners guessed, the tappers predicted how many would be recognised. They expected about half.

Out of 120 songs, listeners named three.

Why the tappers were so wrong

The tappers could hear the song. The whole song, in full, with the melody and the words, while the listener heard only tapping. The silence the listener was sitting in was invisible to them, because for them the song filled it.

Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge. Once you know a thing, what it was like before you knew it is almost impossible to reconstruct.

What that does to your own expertise

The process you built. The question you answer every week without thinking about it. The order you do things in, which lives only in your head because it is obvious.

All of it reads as ordinary from the inside. From the outside it reads as expertise, because the person outside is sitting in the silence.

The practical move

Stop trying to assess your own knowledge by how impressive it feels to you, because that reading is broken in a known direction. Use an external signal instead. What do people keep asking you to explain? What do you get interrupted for?

That question works because it only asks you to notice.

Source: Newton, Stanford, 1990.