We often feel frustrated when we understand something perfectly in our heads but cannot explain it simply to someone else. This happens because of the curse of knowledge, which makes experts forget a beginner's point of view, and because the mind turns information into patterns it processes automatically. Deliberately using difficult, complicated vocabulary to sound knowledgeable can also make a person appear less intelligent. The important work is to communicate deep ideas in simple, clear language.

1. Plausible Nonsense and the Sokal Hoax

In 1996, New York University physicist Alan Sokal conducted an outrageous experiment on the journal Social Text. He submitted a bogus paper packed with false claims, logical leaps, and completely meaningless sentences. It carried the grand and forbidding title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."

Sokal wanted to find out whether total nonsense could be published if it looked plausible on the surface and told the journal's editors what they wanted to hear. The paper was indeed published without meaningful verification. On the day it appeared, Sokal revealed that it had been an intentional hoax, triggering an enormous controversy in academia.

The episode starkly demonstrated that meaningless nonsense can readily be dressed up to look intellectual. But it also raises an interesting question:

"How often does someone have a genuinely intelligent idea, yet explain it so badly that it sounds like nonsense?"

2. The Curse of Knowledge and the Tapper-Listener Study

When reading a classic such as John Rawls's masterpiece A Theory of Justice, we sometimes find that an author of exceptional intelligence has written in a way that takes several readings to understand. Readers usually blame their own lack of comprehension, but the author may simply have failed to communicate the idea clearly. Knowing a field extremely well does not mean you can explain it well to others.

In The Sense of Style, linguist Steven Pinker calls this the curse of knowledge. It is the psychological inability of someone who already knows something to imagine the perspective of a person who knows nothing about it. Experts consequently overestimate a beginner's understanding and unconsciously skip essential foundational steps.

A famous psychology experiment illustrates the problem: Stanford University researcher Elizabeth Newton's tapper-listener study. 🎵

1. One person, the tapper, thinks of a familiar and easy song such as "Happy Birthday."
2. The tapper performs only its rhythm by tapping a finger on a table.
3. The other person, the listener, must identify the song from those taps alone.

Before the experiment, the tappers predicted that listeners would identify the songs about 50% of the time. The actual result was striking: listeners correctly guessed only 3 out of 120 songs, or about 2.5%.

The melody was playing vividly inside each tapper's mind, so the answer felt obvious and clear. To the listener, however, the performance was merely a series of meaningless, disconnected taps. Unable to put themselves in the state of not knowing the song, the tappers did not realize how little information they were conveying.

3. The Blind Spots of Expertise in Chess and Reading

Here, a "smart person" does not simply mean someone with a high IQ. It means an expert who has accumulated substantial knowledge and experience in a particular field. As knowledge and skill grow, the brain begins to process information not as separate pieces but as a single, holistic pattern.

• A beginner chess player considers the position and individual possible moves of each piece.
• An experienced chess player sees the arrangement of several pieces and a sequence of moves at a glance as one familiar, complete pattern.

Reading and writing work the same way. With repeated training, basic steps such as analyzing morphemes, grammar, syntax, and punctuation become fully automatic. Yet once these foundational steps become automatic, they fall outside conscious thought and become the hardest parts to explain to someone else—even though beginners need those basics most.

4. Do Difficult Words Make You Look Smart?

Some experts unconsciously leave parts of an explanation out. Others deliberately use difficult language to make their ideas seem more impressive. People often assume that their writing will be taken seriously only if it contains big words and dense technical jargon. Sokal's hoax exploited exactly this tendency.

Research by psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer shows that the strategy has precisely the opposite effect. His research team prepared two versions of writing that expressed essentially the same ideas and asked readers to evaluate them.

• Version A used unnecessarily long, complicated, and pretentious vocabulary.
• Version B expressed the ideas clearly using simple, everyday words.

Even when the underlying idea was equally strong, readers rated the author who used unnecessarily complex language as less intellectually capable. Tangling an idea in complexity because you cannot express it simply is not evidence of genuine intelligence.

5. The Pitcher, the Catcher, and Hemingway's Retort

Of course, not every complicated concept can be reduced to a few sentences. Academic and technical fields require specialized terminology, and readers also have a responsibility to make a serious effort. In How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren compare the relationship between author and reader to a baseball pitcher and catcher. ⚾

• The pitcher, or author, must throw the ball—the message—with accurate control.
• The catcher, or reader, must actively concentrate and try to catch it.

No matter how hard the catcher tries, a ball thrown wildly ten feet above the catcher's head cannot be caught. Writers have a clear responsibility to deliver the ball within a range their readers can reach.

A famous exchange between American literary giants William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway speaks to this point. Faulkner criticized Hemingway's simple style, saying that he had "never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Hemingway responded brilliantly:

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

As Hemingway suggested, profound and meaningful thought does not require obscure, complicated language.

Conclusion

There is nothing shameful about struggling to explain what you know. It is a cognitive trap that becomes increasingly likely as knowledge deepens: the curse of knowledge.

A truly intelligent person does not parade difficult words to display knowledge. They can unpack a vast and complex idea in the simplest, clearest language and place the ball squarely in the reader's glove. The deeper the thought, the more effort we should make to communicate it in accessible and precise language.