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The Curse of Knowledge

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sense_of_style_book_cover[Originally published in my 100Stickmen Tech musings notebook. Before it was 100Stickmen Tech.]

The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know what you know. – Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style

From The Sense of Style:

The Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.

The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows—that they haven’t mastered the argot of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

Pinker’s Advice for writers and speakers on lifting the curse:

The key is to assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are, but that they happen not to know something you know.

Pinker’s Advice for readers and listeners on falling under the curse:

Richard Feynman once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t.”

Lifting — or even denting — this curse on technology and technologist knowledge is crucial to extending everyone’s digital era acumen, understanding one another, and doing better work.

To borrow from Ladislav Sutnar: the 100 Stickmen [Tech] project aims always to intensify comprehension.

better problems and technology knowledge transfer

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Often, the work of problem-solving spurs the creation, or escalation of other problems. Most are implications of solution execution; expected or not.

Sometimes though, the new problem is a result of poking and prodding the original problem, long before solution work. While considering your problem, you unearth a better problem.

Not better as in more interesting to solve, but better as in more approachable. This is a technique I used recently to describe my own work.

What work? Making technology knowledge and participation more accessible — Because technology is everywhere, but technology knowledge isn’t.

The illustrations:

techknowledgeproblem-1

techknowledgeproblem-2

In the first illustration, the original problem, the difficulty onus is on the technology knowledge receiver. To achieve topical depth, the knowledge seeker has to conquer increasingly difficult material, most likely written by an expert technologist for industry peers.

In the second illustration, a better problem, the difficulty onus is flipped to the technology knowledge teller. By pushing ourselves to adopt, and in some cases master, new explaining techniques and forms, technology knowledge seekers can go further with consistent effort.

Now, one-to-one, the degree of difficulty is still unbalanced. But, the multiplying (one-to-many) impact of any single teller/telling serving numerous receivers makes shifting the burden a better problem.

Not simple by any means, but better.

Drawing (even poorly) to See via The Book of Life

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I recently unearthed my (real world) drawing pencils and purchased a pixel point stylus to add more illustration to my public works.

If you’ve worked with me, you know that drawing — on a whiteboard, legal pad, printer paper, using Visio, wherever — is a huge part of my process. Drawing helps me understand new ideas, think through problems, invite collaboration and communicate.

And while I’ve drawn some lovely Visio diagrams, my pencil-based drawing skills sit squarely in the fair range. A very long time ago, they were better. Because I worked at it, daily.

Now, I can either quietly, privately rebuild those skills, or throw caution and doodles (as it were) to the winds. I’m leaning towards the latter, because it’s not about artistry, but thinking and communication.

On this talent-is-overrated line, John Rushkin‘s thoughts on the importance of drawing, as described in The Book of Life:

Before the invention of photography, people used to draw far more than they do today. It was an active necessity. But in the mid-19th century, photography killed drawing. It became something only ‘artists’ would ever do, so Ruskin – passionate promoter of drawing and enemy of the camera – spent four years on a campaign to get people sketching again. He wrote books, gave speeches and funded art schools, but he saw no paradox in stressing that his campaign had nothing to do with getting people to draw well: ‘A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.’

So if drawing had value even when it was practised by people with no talent, it was for Ruskin because drawing can teach us to see: to notice properly rather than gaze absentmindedly. In the process of recreating with our own hand what lies before our eyes, we naturally move from a position of observing beauty in a loose way to one where we acquire a deep understanding of its parts.

via On the Importance of Drawing | The Book of Life.

[Bold is mine.]

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

(BIO)

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