Tech Leader Pro podcast 2023 week 39, the curse of knowledge

30/09/2023 10 min

Listen "Tech Leader Pro podcast 2023 week 39, the curse of knowledge"

Episode Synopsis


This week my web search engine greppr came under a bot attack, in this episode I will discuss what happened and how I fixed it.

Notes:


Leaders, all of your problems are people problems. Mostly due to their poor communication skills.
This week a senior colleague got annoyed with me for not turning up to a meeting:


With a person I never heard of.
At a place and time I never received an invite for.

People regularly assume others have knowledge of something just because they do: then neglect to transfer that knowledge.
Somehow, we believe our mental model has magically impacted upon others, without ever actually communicating it to them. It's bizarre!
I discovered this phenomenon has a name: the curse of knowledge. Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
Wikipedia: "The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with others, fails to disregard information that is only available to themselves, assuming they all share a background and understanding."
I found a better definition on the website TheDecisionLab.com: "When we know something, it can be hard to imagine what it would be like not knowing that piece of information. In turn, this makes it difficult to share our knowledge, because we struggle to understand the other party’s state of mind." Ref: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/management/curse-of-knowledge
Leaders need to be master communicators, and cannot become that if they are not aware of their own cognitive bias.
What I am working on this week:

Apache Nutch is unstable, and eats up a lost of disc space.

Media I am enjoying this week:

Diaspora by Greg Egan.



Notes and subscription links are here: https://techleader.pro/a/616-Tech-Leader-Pro-podcast-2023-week-39,-the-curse-of-knowledge