Curse Of Knowledge And Need To Keep Learning

Sholom Sandalow discusses an interesting article about curse of knowledge affecting creative thinking. I have experienced how the it affects our communication. But it can be considered quite severe if it even curbs our ability to think out of the box and take innovative approaches.

I cannot verify the claim or the theory and research behind this, but it does seem close to what some of my experience. As you gain expertise in a field, you kind of develop your own pool of solutions, and then it becomes difficult to think outside it. It takes a lot of effort to not consider what you have and take a fresh and different approach towards a problem. Theoretically this should not be a problem, but the dynamic nature of our world keeps changing the problems we face, and we have to keep taking a fresh look at them.

This is also a strong reason why one should keep learning in software engineering. Whether it is programming languages, CMSs, tools, frameworks, processes or even documentation techniques. Learning something new is the first step towards acknowledging that you need to know more than what you know. But in the long term it helps you build better solutions. Steve Yegge puts the point across much better:

You have to cross-train to be a decent athlete these days. Programmers need to be fluent in multiple languages with fundamentally different “character” before they can make truly informed design decisions.

Another thing that I try to follow is to never build expertise in just the tool. Try to understand the underlying concept and then it becomes easier to learn other tools based in that domain.

But one thing that we should be really aware of is that problems are always a step ahead of us. We can hardly master them, the best we can do is keep learning the new possibilities and new ways of approaching them. That will help us avoid the curse.