I recently learned about a concept called the curse of knowledge. Wiki defines it as "a cognitive bias
that leads better-informed parties to find it extremely difficult to
think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties."
This is a problem I keep running into when dealing with the condo situation: experienced homeowners and other real estate people can't even begin to fathom how utterly ignorant I am.
I recently blogged that builders should provide manuals for new homes, clearly describing all the maintenance for which new homeowners will be responsible. In multiple separate conversations, I've mentioned that I want this because I don't want to have something go disastrously wrong because I didn't do some kind of preventive maintenance that I was completely unaware of.
And every single homeowner I've mentioned this to has the same response: "Like what?"
That's the problem exactly. I don't know like what. I have no idea what kinds of things I'm completely unaware of. Sometimes I respond to this with the example of filters that need changing that I gave in that blog post, and people invariably respond by listing all the filters that need to be changed. (Some of which I didn't know, thereby proving the need for this information, but there's no way that the maintenance for which I'm responsible can possibly be limited exclusively to replacing filters!)
The same thing happened when I expressed surprise and dismay that my developer didn't provide a list ahead of time of what kinds of finishes you have to choose between, so I could research them and actually know what I want. They seemed shocked that I would have to research such simple decisions ahead of time. They eventually did provide to a list of impenetrable finish names that I'd never heard of before. I passed it on to my mother who said "Don't worry, I know all of these, you don't need to research anything." But it turned out there were other decisions I had to make, which they hadn't thought noteworthy enough for a first-time buyer to need to research.
The same thing happens when I mention that I intend to hire and inspector to do my inspections because I haven't the first clue what you might be looking for in an inspection. ("Why waste your money hiring an inspector? All you have to do is look around and see if anything is wrong!") The same thing happens when I mention that around the time of my move and finalization of my purchase I'm scaling back my schedule, taking some time off work, and not taking on any new commitments so I can give my full and immediate attention to anything unexpected that comes up ("What could there possibly be that's unexpected? And if there is something, just handle it!")
What's extra weird about this is experienced homeowners and real estate people kept "warning" me about things that already knew about (e.g. occupancy fees, maintenance fees) or don't care about (e.g. occupancy will most likely be delayed). But no one seems to be able to give me the information I actually want, because they can't conceptualize not having it.
3 comments:
I'm having trouble with the Curse of Knowledge concept as being distinct from any other situation where members of the dominant culture assume their point of view is universal.
The Curse of Knowledge encompasses, but is not limited to, members of the dominant culture assuming their point of view is universal. For example, I once blogged about how I can't remember why I used to think I would be translating from English to French.
The translation community is not the dominant culture. I know full well that thinking people should translate into their mother tongue isn't universal, because I used to think differently myself. But I've been so immersed in the translation profession for so long that I can't remember why my teenage self used to think that, or put myself in my own former self's shoes to figure out how I got there.
Ahh. Got it. So this is very common, then.
I'll have to read more about this. It's kind of the converse (or just opposite?) of people who know virtually nothing about a field believing they know a great deal about it, and judging other people's performance in that field.
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