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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the programmers I think are "on the spectrum" seem to have a real blind spot for the possibility that other people lack the knowledge they have.

If they know something, they just assume I do too.

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I'm not sure that this is exclusive to those on the spectrum. It is common enough to have a name; The curse of knowledge [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Well this explains why 70million voted for the other guy!

I mean sure there's that, and then there's colleagues you have to ask for context every single time. A previous coworker I had would frequently start talking to you about some bug he's trying to fix without first telling what bug he's even on about.

I feel like the curse of knowledge mostly applies when experts talk to non-experts. Not including trivially required context when talking to co-experts seems like something else to me.

I know when I started out what I struggled with and how difficult it was to learn things. But after having learned them, I have a lot of trouble explaining how I got there. I can't remember why it was hard anymore, as it just seems easy to me now. This is a large part of why I don't enjoy writing documentation or teaching others. Point being, I know about this problem in me, it's not a blind spot, there's just not a lot I can do about it.

Exactly, most things are easy when you understand them, so even if it took a long time to "get" them, once you do, you tend to forget with time, how difficult it is.

I really struggle with this.

I think it feeds strongly into imposter syndrome too. It's easy to devalue your own contributions when you suspect anyone else could make them.

In my experience, non-programmers struggle with this just as much. The main difference is that as a specialized discipline, it is more likely a lot of their knowledge is not shared with other people.

The curse of knowledge (or expertise) is interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Edit: Sorry for the dupe. Vizzier posted this a minute or three before I did.

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