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Tetronian comments on Overcoming the Curse of Knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (54)
1) I suppose this is to be expected given priming, anchoring, and self-anchoring, but it's a worrying bias nonetheless. It certainly does help explain why inferential distances feel so hard to bridge.
2) I like the picture--it's a good visual metaphor for the point you're making.
3) I don't think the table of scientific words is good example--it's not that common people don't know anything about these words, they're simply used to using them in a nontechnical context whereas the scientists are used to using them in a technical context. The scientists' uses of the words are not more valid or more informed than the laymans', they're just contextually different. Many of the examples in the table (especially "values," "bias," and "error") aren't the result of a knowledge gap, but of a simple definitional dispute.
It's not clear to me which is the case, actually. It would be difficult to dispute the assertion that the average layman is almost always primed to read "positive" as "good" rather than "present" or "upward," but that doesn't indicate whether or not he's actually aware of those alternate uses. Maybe he's never been exposed to scientific literature - that wouldn't exactly be shocking.
I wish I could access the original paper the table was published in. Alas!