2 docs tagged with "expertise"

The Curse of Knowledge is a cognitive bias in which people with expertise find it difficult to imagine what it is like to lack that expertise. Once you know something, it's very hard to remember what it was like not to know it. This creates systematic failures in communication: experts design products, write documentation, and give presentations that are incomprehensible to novices because they cannot accurately model the novice's perspective.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited knowledge or skill in a domain overestimate their competence, while experts tend to underestimate theirs. Documented by David Dunning and Justin Kruger (Cornell, 1999), it explains why novices are often more confident than intermediate learners, why self-assessment is unreliable, and why the most dangerous decisions are sometimes made by people with just enough knowledge to feel confident.