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The Monday Morning Memo

“The Curse of Knowledge” is a phrase used in a 1989 paper in
The Journal of Political Economy. It means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you know.
 

Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to name the songs.
 

Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.
 

The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?

Janet Rae-Dupree
The New York Times
December 30, 2007

 

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Random Quote:

“Here and there exclamation marks stuck out of the ground, sharp needles piercing the scenery. Whenever my gaze caught on them, my eyelids began to quiver; the eye cut itself on those wooden structures erected in the fields, on their boundaries, or at the edge of the forest. In total there were eight of them in the Plateau, I knew the exact figure, because I’d had dealings with them in the past, like Don Quixote with the windmills. They were knocked together out of wooden beams, set crosswise; they consisted entirely of crosses. These grotesque figures had four legs and a cabin with embrasures on top. Pulpits, for hunting. This name has always amazed and angered me. For what on earth was taught from that sort of pulpit? What sort of Gospel was preached? Isn’t it the height of arrogance, isn’t it a diabolical idea to call a place from which one kills a pulpit?”

- Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, p. 54, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

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