The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts are Bad Teachers

In Make It Stick, a book about the science of learning, there’s a chapter dedicated to the illusions of knowledge. One idea in that chapter that grabbed my attention was the notion of the curse of knowledge. The idea is that “the better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it.” The more expertise you reach in a field, the harder it is to teach what you know to someone else.

The curse of knowledge is part of the loss of beginners mind. Once you reach mastery in a domain, you will forget what it was like to be a beginner. Things that seem easy for an expert to understand are probably not so easy to understand for someone starting to learn.

With the exception of trained educators, experts usually don’t have the empathy and patience to teach someone starting at level zero. They have developed a ton of mental models and use jargon to quickly explain concepts. They simply don’t know how to unpack what they know.

Software Developers that teach online target beginners because there are more of them. But most people making Udemy courses and YouTube tutorials are probably not S Tier Engineers.

The S Tier Engineers are too busy building things, contributing to open source, writing libraries and frameworks, and writing new programming languages. It’s not like they are totally incapable of teaching a beginner, but their “students” are the ones who have to be patient instead of the other way around.

Students also need to have a thick skin because experts usually have big egos. There’s a reason why Linus Torvalds didn’t become a teacher.

This brings up the issue of those that can’t do, teach. In the context of what I discussed so far, there’s an element of truth behind that insult. There are people who are experts that are actively doing the thing that they teach, but I’d say that they are few and far between.