Essay · ~10 min read

The Curse of Knowledge

Chip Heath and Dan Heath · Harvard Business Review Freemium Beginner

This short piece names the exact bias that trips up experts: once you know something deeply, you literally cannot imagine not knowing it, so you assume your idea is as obvious to everyone else as it is to you. That is the mechanism behind insider bias, and seeing it named makes it easier to catch in yourself. It is a starting point for why 'this is obviously needed' from an expert is a claim to test, not a fact.

• Deep expertise makes you a worse judge of what outsiders see, because you unconsciously fill in context they do not have.
• The famous tapper and listener experiment shows how badly experts overestimate how clear their own signal is to everyone else.
• The fix is concrete language and real stories over abstract certainty, which is also how you check whether your idea lands with people who do not already share your knowledge.