Neurotypicals seem to suffer from the curse of knowledge far more than others. The worst part is, they're neither aware of it, nor do they want to be aware of it.

They don't realize how many assumptions they're making about what you know, and that the information they're assuming you have is the same information that they are working from.

For the uninitiated, the curse of knowledge is a concept where, by knowing the context of a thing, you understand it, but others do not because they don't have the context of that thing. It's a curse because the speaker with the curse of knowledge assumes that others have that context, often unaware that context needs to be provided for that thing to be understood.

The easiest demonstration of this I've seen is, try having someone guess a song by tapping it out on a table or something. More than 90% of the time they will not be able to guess what song you're portraying because they lack the context. As soon as you mention the song, assuming the listener has heard the song before, they will be able to hear the association between your taps and the song, but not before being told.

This phenomenon happens a lot, and it's the worst on government anything because often you are not provided any reference to look up what is intended for the question, form, information or whatever that you're being asked to provide, you just need to provide it, but you lack the context to know what they even mean.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I refer to this as the corrollary to "you don't know what you don't know", which is, "you don't know what you know".

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

That's apt. I like it.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I would suggest that NT’s suffer from the curse of assumption and they’re unaware of it. It they read a question like we’re discussing they assume only one aspect of it. Whereas a non-NT like adhd would see multiple angles and answers to the question all at once and suffer the frustration of having to decipher what the asker really means - hence the au/adhd person’s need to over-explain an answer to be sure to corral the information specifically to the question they think is being asked.

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Assumptions are the corner stone of the curse of knowledge.

NTs make a lot of assumptions about the listener and how they will understand something, because they always operate within a contextual box. They either don't care, or don't want to examine their statements from outside perspectives because their perspective is the only one that matters to them. That makes it sound worse than it is, but it's accurate.

Neurodivergents generally spend a nontrivial amount of time trying to "fit in" with the NTs, often at the cost of their own mental well-being, but I digress. The majority of divergents have the skillset of understanding someone else's point of view, since it's a critical tool when building up a persona, aka masking.

I don't care what anyone says, that's a skillset, and it can be extremely useful. It's often not used in a good, or productive way (looping back to the argument of masking being mentally burdensome here). As a tool, out can be used to great benefit, or great detriment, depending on how it's used.