The Curse of Knowledge strikes again

JDN 2456268 EDT 14:56.

 

A review of Five Golden Rules by John Casti.

 

It's a problem that plagues many nonfiction writers. Steven Pinker called it the Curse of Knowledge; Less Wrong refers to it as Inferential Distance. The problem is this: You know what you know, but you don't know what other people don't know. So it's hard to explain things without going over people's heads or seeming condescending.

Five Golden Rules is supposed to be a book about cutting-edge mathematics for pe...