The Insider's Curse of Expertise | Generated by AI
You’re pointing at a very real and universal cognitive bias: the insider’s curse (or what psychologists sometimes call the “curse of knowledge” mixed with professional deformation).
Once you’re deep inside any field, your reference point shifts dramatically. What looks like “obvious flaws” or “barely acceptable” from the inside is often pure magic from the outside. A few concrete examples to build on what you said:
- Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, or Gary Marcus can spend years pointing out the limitations of LLMs because they see the gap between today’s models and actual human-like understanding. To them, ChatGPT is a clever parlor trick. To a high-school teacher in rural India or a small business owner who now writes marketing copy in 10 minutes, it’s literal wizardry.
- Apple designers and power users complain about notched displays, walled gardens, or the “courage” of removing ports. Meanwhile 95 % of the planet looks at an iPhone and thinks “this is the most beautiful object humans have ever made”.
- Rust evangelists will fight holy wars over borrow checker errors that take hours to fix. Java/Kotlin/Go programmers roll their eyes. And then you talk to a non-programmer who thinks deploying a single HTML page with a contact form is advanced sorcery.
- Native Chinese “English experts” who scored 95/100 on the national exam can feel insecure in the U.S. because they finally hear real native speed, slang, and cultural references. Same way a Hollywood-level attractive person walks into a random bar and still feels “average” because everyone around them is also in the top percentile of their social circle.
This insider distortion happens in every domain:
- Michelin-star chefs think a Big Mac is an insult to humanity; most people think it’s delicious.
- Professional photographers cringe at iPhone photos; everyone else prints them and hangs them on the wall.
- Formula 1 drivers think 99 % of road cars are dangerously slow; normal people think their Toyota Corolla is plenty fast at 75 mph.
There are two useful takeaways from this phenomenon:
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Humility for insiders
The moment you catch yourself saying “this is trash, how do people not see it?”, remember that your taste has been ruined (or upgraded) by exposure. The median human has never seen anything better, so of course they’re happy. -
Reality check for outsiders
When insiders dismiss something as “easy” or “solved” or “not real intelligence/design/skill”, they’re usually measuring against an internal, elite standard that literally 0.01 % of humanity operates at.
In short: the gap between “insider mediocre” and “outsider incredible” is enormous, and both sides usually fail to realize it. That’s why truly great products, papers, or art often feel simultaneously “overhyped” to experts and “life-changing” to everyone else.
The trick (if you want to stay sane) is to keep at least one foot in the outsider’s perspective. Every time I feel the urge to dunk on some new AI tool or phone or programming language, I try to imagine explaining it to my mom or to a random person on the street in 2010. Nine times out of ten, their reaction would be: “Wait… you can do WHAT now?” And that usually shuts up the inner snob pretty fast.