Recognize, in real time, when you are speaking or writing as an expert who has forgotten what it was like not to know — and install the external scaffolding (tests, readers, rituals, deletion rules) that catches the failure your own inner ear cannot.
The curse of knowledge is the variable-shadowing bug of communication. The expert-you and the beginner-reader are using the same symbol — Hash, service, connection, state — but it resolves to different objects in each scope. Your job as a writer is to be the linter that catches the shadowing before the reader gets the runtime error of confusion. And note the deeper point about why the bug is invisible: the code compiles fine in your environment. Your head has all the dependencies installed. The reader's doesn't — which is why the only reliable test is running the artifact on a clean machine: the cold reader.
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If you read only one chapter from this entire curriculum, read Pinker's Chapter 3. If you have read it once, read it again. If you have read it twice, hand it to a colleague.
The single most consequential failure mode in technical communication is the curse of knowledge. Pinker called it "the chief contributor to opaque writing." It is also the chief c…
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
1. Sense of Style Ch 3 — read twice, with notes. 2. Run the cold-reader test (above) on your most-recently-written README or doc. Log every face-change site. Compare against the s…
5 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.