The Heat Pump He Explained Past Her, Never Knowing

A homeowner in Crescent stopped me in the middle of an explanation last spring and asked me, very politely, what a coil was. I had been talking for about three minutes about superheat. I had used the words coil, refrigerant, latent capacity, and metering device, and I had assumed, the way I always quietly assume, that the words were doing what I needed them to do. Her question stopped me. I sat down on her porch step and started over. I want to talk about that today. About the cost of forgetting that you ever did not know something. There is a name for it. Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein and Martin Weber called it the curse of knowledge in a 1989 paper in the Journal of Political Economy. They were studying how well-informed economic agents predict the behavior of less-informed agents, and they found, robustly, that the well-informed agents could not undo their own knowledge well enough to model what the less-informed agent would do. Once you know a thing, the thing is loud in your mind, and you cannot quiet it back down to silence to imagine someone who has never heard it. Elizabeth Newton ran a famous experiment on this at Stanford in 1990 for her doctoral work. She had subjects tap out the rhythm of a familiar song on a table and ask a listener to guess the song. The tappers, hearing the melody in their own heads as they tapped, predicted that listeners would guess the song about half the time. Listeners actually guessed it about two and a half percent of the time. The tappers could not unhear what they were hearing internally, so they could not estimate what the listener was getting from the bare taps. That is the curse of knowledge. You have the melody. The other person has the taps. You cannot fully imagine the silence between the taps because your head is full of the song. Core line: "If they do not ask, the gap stays open and the apprentice goes out to work on a coil they think they understand and they make a mistake that the explanation should have prevented." Give Us A Shout Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell's Heat & Air, HVAC in Kingfisher and central Oklahoma. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort. We're family-run and powered by 47 years of experience. Whether it's AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up. 🛠️ Book Online: https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true 🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com 📞 (405) 375-4822 🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite 🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties 📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs: YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003 X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.