Curse of Knowledge Detector

When to Use

You have a draft (a pitch, announcement, explainer, slide, landing page, memo, or product write-up) authored by someone who knows the subject deeply, and you need to find the specific places where that expertise has corrupted clarity for a non-expert audience. Use this skill when the goal is diagnosis, not rewriting — you want a ranked list of Curse-of-Knowledge violations the user can act on (or hand to a rewriting skill).

Preconditions to verify before starting:

• The draft exists as text the agent can read (paste, markdown file, or document).
• The audience is named and at least roughly profiled — without a target audience, "too expert" is undefined.
• The user wants a critique, not a full rewrite. If they want a rewrite, hand off to message-clinic-runner after producing the report.

The Curse of Knowledge, restated for the agent: Once someone knows something, they cannot imagine not knowing it. Experts "tap" a tune they can hear in their own head (Elizabeth Newton's 1990 Stanford study: tappers predicted listeners would guess 50% of tunes; listeners got 2.5% — a 20x gap). The same expertise that produced the Answer backfires during the Telling Others stage. This skill catches the tapping.

Context & Input Gathering

Required Context (must have — ask if missing)