Why Smart People Are Terrible Communicators

I um, I want to start today’s deep dive with a scenario that I think is, well, it’s probably going to painfully resonate with you. Oh, I can already tell this is going to be one of those uncomfortable truths. Right. So you’re sitting in a meeting or maybe you’re at dinner party and you are explaining an idea. Okay. Setting the scene. And it’s an idea that you know inside and out. Like to you, it is just as clear as day. Sky’s blue, water’s wet, kind of obvious. You’ve lived with this idea. Exactly. So you look at the person across from you, expecting that, you know, that spark of recognition and you just get nothing. Just the blank stare. The glazed over. Gently blank stare. And in that moment, what is your immediate reflex? Because I have to admit, mine is usually pretty uncharitable. I mean, it’s human nature. You start thinking, are they just not listening? Yes. Or are they, um, are they a little slow? You feel this frustration bubbling up because the concept is right there in your head perfectly formed. I think why can’t they see it? It’s a totally universal frustration. But what’s fascinating is that our brain’s default reaction, you know, blaming the listener, is almost always wrong. Which is a tough pill to swallow. It really is. That frustration isn’t a sign of their lack of intelligence. It’s actually a symptom of a specific psychological wiring in your own brain. And that is exactly what we’re exploring today. Welcome to the deep dive. I’m your host. And I’m your resident expert. Today we are unpacking what is known as the curse of knowledge. But we aren’t just going to define it and move on. No, we have a much more interesting mission for this one. We’re going to look at it through a really unexpected lens. We have this ancient Chinese idiom that perfectly explains why your emails get ignored and why smart people are well, often terrible communicators. It’s such a great source. We’re looking at a concept from the songs of Chu. And the specific idiom is, uh, Kwa Ga, he grew up. Do they get that right? You did. Kwa Ga, the literal translation is high songs have few singers. High songs have few singers. Or sometimes you’ll hear it translated as the higher the melody, the fewer it can harmonize. It sounds incredibly elegant. But um, given the topic of our deep dive, I have a feeling this isn’t exactly a compliment. You’d be right. It’s actually used as a defense mechanism in the original story. So let’s hit the scene. This comes from the Warring States period involving a figure named Song Yu. Okay. Song Yu. He was a court poet in the state of Chu, a brilliant intellectual, highly educated, but he wasn’t exactly Mr. Popularity. I can picture the type. Right. So one day a guest at the court actually confronts him, basically calls him out right in front of the king. Oh, wow. What’s the accusation? The guest asks him, Song Yu. You are a man of great talent. But if you’re so great, why don’t the common people of Chu praise you? Why are you so isolated? Man, that is a direct hit. That’s the ancient equivalent of saying, if you’re so smart, why do you have zero followers? Exactly. It completely challenges his social standing. Now at this point, Song Yu could have reflected on his communication style, right? He could have said, maybe I’m not connecting with my audience. He could have. But instead, he doubles down. He tells a story about a singer in the city capital to prove that his isolation is actually proof of his genius. All right. Let’s hear this defense. I want to see if I buy it. So Song Yu describes this singer performing in the city square. He says, when the singer started with popular folk tunes, these were songs called She Lee and Bar In. The response was massive. She Lee and Bar In. What kind of vibe are we talking about here? Think of these as the absolute mass market hits. She Lee translates to something like the rustic neighborhood. Okay. So, rowdy, simple, catchy tunes. Exactly. Everyone knows the chorus. It’s the sweet Caroline of Ancient Chu. So thousands of people are joining in. The engagement is super high. The energy is off the charts. But then the singer shifts gears. He starts playing songs called Yang, A, and She, Liu. And these are different. Yeah. These are a bit more complex, maybe a specific regional style, slightly harder to follow. And immediately, Song Yu says, the crowd thins out. Only a few hundred could harmonize. Okay. So we’ve gone from thousands to hundreds. The funnel is starting to narrow. Right. Then the singer moves to Yang Chen and Baixiu. Which translates to Spring Snow, right? Spring Snow, yes. These are the higher pieces, complex scales, difficult intervals. And now only a few dozen people are left singing. So the room is basically clearing out. The easy fun vibes are gone. Completely gone. And finally, and this is Song Yu’s big climax, the singer hits the absolute highest notes. The peak of the performance. The most refined, difficult tones possible. Intricate harmonies that require perfect pitch. And at that point, Song Yu says, only a handful of people in the entire state could harmonize with him. So Song Yu finishes this story, looks right at the critic, and basically says, what, see? I’m just too advanced for all of you. Precisely. He uses this entire metaphor to justify himself. He says, the reason I am unpopular isn’t because I’m bad at what I do. It’s because I am a phoenix soaring where common birds cannot go. A phoenix, wow. He even says, I am a great fish leaping in the deep ocean where the menos can’t swim. Umble guy. Very. He ends with this line. And in a superior person, their thoughts and actions are beyond the common understanding. You know, playing devil’s advocate here for a second, part of me actually respects that a little bit. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, in a world where everyone is just chasing likes and producing this lowest common denominator content. Isn’t there something noble about refusing to dumb things down? I see where you’re going. Like maybe we need high songs. I certainly don’t want my brain surgeon operating based on a catchy, simple folk tune, you know, it’s a very seductive argument, the whole lonely genius trope. And you’re right, there is a place for high level discourse between experts. Right. Two neurosurgeons are talking to each other. They should be singing Springs. No. Absolutely. But our sources for this deep dive point out a fatal flaw in song use logic when you apply it to general leadership or everyday communication, which is what? What’s the flaw? It’s all about effectiveness. Song you genuinely things. He’s an eagle soaring above the sparrows. But psychologically speaking, he’s really just a radio broadcasting on a frequency nobody is tuned into. If a tree falls in the forest kind of thing, if no one tunes in, are you actually communicating or you’re just making noise? Exactly. And this is where we have to reframe the story. Song you thought this tale proved his genius, but through the lens of the curse of knowledge, it actually just proves he was a terrible communicator. Okay. So let’s formally define this curse of knowledge based on the source material. How does it actually work? Well, the fundamental issue is that expertise naturally creates isolation. The higher your level of knowledge, the fewer people share it with you. Which makes sense. That’s the narrowing funnel from the story. Right. But the curse part happens because the singer or the expert assumes the audience already knows the baseline melody. They assume a shared context that simply doesn’t exist. Because they’ve forgotten what it’s like to not know it. Precisely. And knowledge gaps are completely invisible to the expert. When you do something every day, your expertise becomes automatic. You don’t even have to think about the basic steps anymore. You don’t. You forget the struggle of learning it in the first place. So the singer feels misunderstood and underappreciated while the audience just feels confused and alienated. It’s like a cognitive blind spot. We’re walking around thinking we’re broadcasting in 4K resolution, but everyone else is just receiving static. And there’s also an emotional component to this mechanism. The sources talk about this fear experts have that if they stop and explain the basics, it will feel like an insult to the listener. I do that. I’ll say things like, as you obviously know, just so I don’t sound condescending. We all do it. We overestimate what the other person knows to be polite, but it actually just leaves them totally lost. So you have this situation where inside the bubble of expertise, the high song feels great. It signals belonging. Yes. Because we are the elite. But to everyone else, it’s a giant wall. Song you wasn’t just failing to communicate. He was actively using that complexity as a moat to keep the commoners out. That distinction you just made complexity as a moat is really crucial because historical evidence shows us that this wasn’t just a metaphor for sensitive poets. No, it had real world consequences. Massive consequences. The high song mentality actually shaped the way China was governed for centuries. If you look at the imperial examinations, right, these were the civil service exams you had to pass to become a government official. Exactly. They ran for over a thousand years and they became the ultimate high song. By the time you get to the Ming and King dynasties, they had developed something called the Eight Legged Essay. Eight Legged Essay, that sounds intense. It was incredibly rigid. It was a formalized way of writing where you had to perfectly match tones, structure arguments in a very specific parallel format and reference obscure commentaries on the Confucian classics. They weren’t testing practical skills. They weren’t asking, hey, how would you solve a famine or how do we fix the irrigation system in this province? Not at all. It was purely a test of shared cultural context. It was testing whether you had spent 20 years of your life memorizing the specific complex melody of the elite class. And the physical experience of taking this test was pretty brutal, wasn’t it? Oh, it was grueling. Candidates were locked in these tiny individual cells for days at a time, just them, their brush, and the high song. Talk about isolation. It’s like the literal embodiment of song use philosophy. It was a system explicitly designed to filter for people who thought exactly like song you. And the result of that filter was a bureaucracy that developed a highly specialized vocabulary. Meaning they spoke a language the average person couldn’t understand. They literally they spoke Mandarin or Guanua, the language of the officials, which was completely unintelligible to the common peasant. So you have a government singing spring snow and the peasant is out there starving because they can’t even understand the tax code. Exactly. The bureaucracy became a closed loop. They were writing commentaries on commentaries of the Confucian classics. It’s the circular nature of the curse of knowledge in action. Yes. I’m trying to explain a complex idea by referencing another complex idea, assuming the reader already knows both of them. It reminds me of trying to read an academic paper today. Have you ever tried to read one outside your field? Oh, it’s impossible. You read the abstract and it’s just this dense buzzword salad. You feel like you need a PhD just to understand the introduction to the study. That is the modern equivalent of the eight-legged essay right there. It’s signaling to the reader, I belong to the tribe. But it completely sacrifices impact and clarity for status. Okay. So Song You represents this deeply elitist view. Basically, if you don’t get it, that’s your problem. But the sources don’t just leave it there, do they? Is there a counter-argument to this mindset? Yes. There is a beautiful philosophical rebuttal that comes from the Taoist tradition. I love when Taoism enters the chat. Right. The Taoists, particularly Lausie, looked at all this performative complexity, all this gatekeeping and just fundamentally rejected it. What was their take? Well, there’s a famous quote from Lausie. Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know. Wow. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of Song You standing in the court bragging about his rare impossible melodies. It really is. But the deeper critique here is about the actual duty of a wise person. The source contrasts Song You’s attitude with the Taoist concept of the Sage. How does the Sage operate? Song You prides himself on being totally unreachable. But the Taoist Sage’s ultimate goal is to skillfully save people so none are abandoned. So none are abandoned? That is a massive paradigm shift. It completely changes where the responsibility lies. It puts the burden of communication squarely on the nowhere, not the listener. If the Sage sees that people are confused or falling behind, the Sage doesn’t say, well, my thoughts are just too deep for you. Right. They don’t blame the menos. The Sage changes the method. They lower the key until the audience can sing along. It’s a form of compassion, really, like a cognitive compassion. Yes, or what psychologists today call theory of mind. That’s the ability to understand that other people have beliefs, desires, and knowledge states that are entirely different from your own. And Song You clearly lacked theory of mind. Completely. He projected his own vast knowledge onto the crowd and then judged them for not matching it. I want to bring this into the present day for a minute. Because obviously we don’t have imperial exams anymore. Thankfully. But we definitely still have the curse of knowledge. Where do we see this high song hurting us right now in the modern workplace? It’s everywhere, honestly. You see it constantly in teaching. Oh, for sure. Teachers who have been teaching a subject for 20 years, forgetting what a beginner actually doesn’t know. Right. They skip steps. You also see it heavily in tech writing. Have you ever tried to put together furniture or set up a router? And the manual is just filled with jargon that assumes you’re an engineer. Yes. It excludes non-specialists entirely. But I think the most painful example of this might be in product design in UX, user experience. Oh, without a doubt. The classic user error phenomenon. Think about the last time you got a really cryptic error message on a piece of software. Something like error 404 or what was the one from that movie office space? PC load letter. Yes. PC load letter is the perfect example. What does that even mean? Right. You’re just staring at the printer wanting to smash it. But here’s the thing. To the engineer who wrote that code, it makes perfect logical sense. PC means paper cassette. Load letter means load the standard letter size paper into it. It’s a highly precise instruction. But to the end user, it’s literal gibberish. Because the engineer is singing the high song of printer architecture, they assume the user shares their intricate mental model of how the machines internals work. And they completely forget that the user just wants to print a single document and go to lunch. That gap between the experts’ mental model and the user’s mental model is where all bad UX and user frustration lives. And we see this disconnect at the leadership level, too, don’t we? It’s not just tech. Hugely. Think about corporate strategy. Executives do this all the time. How so? Well, the CEO and the executive team have spent, say, six months locked in board meetings. They are looking at spreadsheets, debating OKRs, analyzing market trends. They have lived and breathed this new company strategy. They know the melody by heart at this point. Right. They’ve internalized it. Then they send out one single email to the entire company, saying something like, we are pivoting to a synergy-focused cross-functional paradigm to maximize leverage. And they expect everyone to read that and just start cheering at their desk. Exactly. Instead, the employees are sitting there terrified. They hear the word synergy and they immediately think, are there going to be layoffs? Because they haven’t heard the background music. They weren’t in the room for those six months of context building. The leader is singing spring snow and the employees are just hearing frightening noise. The expert has completely failed to bridge the context gap. They haven’t explained the why from the ground up. OK. So we’ve diagnosed the problem. And I think we all know we were guilty of being song you sometimes. I definitely know I am. We all are. It’s a hard-wired bias. So how do we fix it? Based on our sources, how do we actively lower the key? The solution requires very deliberate effort. It’s not something that happens naturally because as we said, your brain desperately wants to stay in the comfortable state of knowing. Right. So the first practical step is to actively remember what it was like not to know. Which sounds easy, but it’s actually really difficult. You have to sort of time travel back in your own head. You do. You have to ask yourself, what were the confusing parts from you when I first learned this? What specific words didn’t make sense before I learned the jargon? You have to explain from the listener’s starting point not your own current vantage point. It’s like trying to unsee a magic trick once you know how the illusion works. That’s a great way to put it. And because it’s so hard to unsee the trick, the second piece of advice is critical. You have to value accessibility over sophistication. Meaning you have to stop trying to sound smart. Yes. And we resist this. We worry that if we simplify things, we’ll look amateurish. We think, if I use basic words, my peers won’t respect my expertise. And we’re terrified of not looking like that soaring phoenix. But the reality is the exact opposite. True mastery isn’t about making things complex. Anyone with a thosaurus can make a simple idea sound complicated. Oh, I’ve worked with a few of those people. But we all, the ultimate skill, the highest level of expertise is taking something deeply complex and making it genuinely simple for someone else to understand. That makes total sense because complexity is so often just a mask for a lack of true understanding or at least a lack of empathy for the listener. It’s a lack of connection and communication at its very core is about connection. If you are singing the most beautiful song in the world to an empty room, you aren’t really communicating. You’re just alone. So we’ve gone from the courts of ancient Choo and the poetry of Song Yu all the way to the frustrations of modern IT manuals and corporate emails. It’s a journey. It really is. We’ve seen how the high song can be a massive trap away to stroke our own egos while completely alienating our audience. And we’ve learned from the daoist that the burden of translation is always on the singer. It is the expert’s job to find the key that the audience can actually sing in. So what does this mean for you, the listener, tomorrow morning? And you’re drafting that email or you’re pitching that new idea and you feel that temptation to use the big buzzwords to skip the backstory to assume they already know the melody. Just stop. Catch yourself in the moment. Ask yourself. Am I being Song Yu right now? Exactly. Don’t blame the audience for the blank stare. It’s a humbling lesson, but an incredibly useful one. High songs have few singers. They really do. And I want to leave you with a final provocative thought today. Trying to really mull over based on the ancient text we explored. Let’s hear it. If you ever find yourself standing alone on the mountain, singing a song that no one around you understands, you have a choice. You can keep singing to the wind and call yourself a misunderstood genius. Or you can do the hard humble work of walking back down the mountain to teach them the melody first. The question is, do you want to be admired from afar or do you actually want to be understood? That is the perfect question to end on. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. We’ll see you next time.