Someone Told Me About The Cognitive Bias Form Called Curse Of Knowledge The Other Day And Im Obsessed

Someone told me about the cognitive bias form called “curse of knowledge” the other day and I’m obsessed w/ thinking about it.

The basic premise is that it is “when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.” Or in other words, once you learn something, you can’t at all remember what it was like to not have that knowledge or context anymore. It creates gulfs between people who have different knowledge bases who are communicating.

This has come up for me in life SO MUCH around topics of abuse, boundaries, consent, and relationship dynamics. (All types of relationships, not just romantic.) I’ve read about and studied and dissected these things to death so it’s second nature for me to talk about it. Then, I will think that a friend and I have the same values of what’s abusive or acceptable.......but then later I learn that what they meant is totallyyyyy different than me.

Or when I bump into people who truly think that thin = healthy or who don’t understand what being trans is at even the most basic level. I’m like “Jesus this asshole is hopeless” and I no longer remember what it was like back when I very FIRST learned these concepts.

It’s one thing if someone is willfully ignorant or a proud bigot. But if someone is TRULY learning something new, they need the super super basics patiently available to them so they can get the knowledge you have...and then THAT could become a bridge between you.

This “curse” feels important for me to just bear in mind before I write people off. And to just not assume that someone else and I are talking about the same thing. Maybe it’s a case where they have knowledge I don’t.

is this true? who knows! is it sweet! damn right it is!

why do something fun if i can panic over nothing instead!

“On Friday evening, people in southeast Berlin felt the ground below them move. The 1.4 magnitude tremor was felt at precisely 8:58 pm in the evening, at the same time as Florence And The Machine were on stage at the Tempelhof Sounds festival in Berlin’s now-shuttered Tempelhof Airport, prompting people to wonder whether the outdoor event with 60,000 attendees was truly an earth-shattering show.

Florence And The Machine’s set-time was at 8:30 pm, and looking at the setlist, about a half-hour into the show, it’s a good bet that the band was playing either the classic, “Dog Days Are Over” or the emphatic “Free” off of the new album, Dance Fever. German outlet rbb|24 reports that someone at the show indicated, “…There was a moment around 9 pm when quite a few jumped at the same time. You could also feel the vibrations on site.” Could this really have caused such an impact? Data scientist Jens Skapski seems to think so.

“The signals probably go back to a concert. We don’t usually have earthquakes in Berlin, that’s why I wanted to know more about it,” Skapski told rbb|24. According to the rbb|24 report, “Three private seismological stations in the immediate vicinity of Tempelhofer Feld registered an above-average deflection, 1.4 on the local magnitude scale.” It lasted close to a minute, which makes it more of a tremor and not necessarily an earthquake. Skapski adds that “It’s equivalent to a small earthquake,” but that, “A natural earthquake would be shorter and with a higher frequency.”

So while we already knew that Dance Fever was a banger of an album from Florence Welch and company, this takes it to a whole new level.”

Byline | Adrian Spinelli, Uproxx, June 13, 2022. 

https://uproxx.it/dp7a2pt 

actually YOU are dust and to dust you shall return. not me though im different

Florence + the Machine, “The Bomb,” from Dance Fever (2022).

now you come back every summer

like a carnivorous flower