Flippant Remarks about “The Curse of Knowledge”

Business Pundit in 2007 published “The Curse of Knowledge—Why Communication at Work Is Sometimes Difficult.” It starts out with a bang of explicit clarity:

Once you know something, it’s difficult to imagine what it is like to not know it. It’s called the “curse of knowledge,” and it is the root of many different workplace problems. It affects communication between employees and with customers, and it can cause all your good intentioned new products to fail. It’s why designing for someone who isn’t like you can be so difficult.

What’s in bold above is my emphasis on the difficulties of imagination. When most properly assimilated people try to imagine the purpose of imagination they often resort to the skills required by cartoonists, animators and other non-essential entertainment work. The Business Pundit reminds us that we need imagination to see just how many ways imagination is needed.

The opinion here is that “the curse of knowledge” is a distraction away from the main problem: egocentrism limits the imagination. From this core, I can flippantly list a few corollaries:

Not only is the knowledgeable and egocentric person “unable” to understand how another person functions without their knowledge, the knowledgeable and egocentric person is also deeply unconcerned about the unknowledgeable.
The knowledgeable and egocentric person can inadvertently stagnate or reduce the scope of their power by being deeply unconcerned about the unknowledgeable.
Teaching often helps the teacher more than the students and students can approach the same old problem from a new direction—and this natural diversity strengthens the gene pool of the living knowledge. Often by accident or by deliberate, fascist sadism, the knowledgeable and egocentric person can abuse the unknowledgeable. This abuse often turns the unknowledgeable into fools—because fools despise instruction—and this aversion comes from the fear of more abuse.

Yes, I have a very healthy idea of what I do not know. But I have been tempted to volunteer too much information to other people (for the fun of it). My playful sense of how knowledge is acquired is not the experience of too many poor people (regardless of “material wealth”). Most people fear being abused by Mr. Smarty Pants and will defend themselves from any instructional overtures. It took me a long time to understand that when a properly assimilated citizen is “threatened” with submitting to my instruction, they too often assume that my ego sees them submitting to me.

What is totally horrible is when a person who has knowledge that I desperately need is withholding that knowledge from me because they are afraid of being accused of being an abuser. These are their other offensive concerns:

Because they are female and I am male they assume I am unable to withstand the “humiliation” of being taught something by a woman. I literally hate this concern.
They are concerned about me forming a time-consuming, resource-hogging dependency on them. This is offensive because the person assumes that I am lazy and not interested in being self-sufficient. This becomes very offensive in the context of racism—especially black-on-Black racism.
They are concerned about me “teasing” them for being some kind of “egghead”—this is a kind of preemptive abuse that the people who are afraid of abuse for “submitting” to instruction dish out. It’s getting complicated ain’t it?What is missing in all of this instruction (and non-instruction) is the poetic vision of knowledge. Knowledge is like water. Only a fool dares to claim that they own water—and there are huge corporations in existence right now who claim to own water by the way. Only a fool refuses to collect the water being poured by me because they think it is “my” water instead of just seeing the water. I can name a handful of my so-called friends—most of them are artists—who habitually do not listen to me because of these ‘complications.’