Thus Steven Pinker for The Wall Street Journal today. “The ‘curse of knowledge’ leads writers to assume their readers know everything they know,” he explains in the byline. The article comes together with a picture of Pinker’s face, which attracted me to it in the first place. He starts by invoking something he calls Hanlon’s Razor, which says that one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But he adds that stupidity he has in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low intelligence quotients; rather, the brightest and the best informed are those who suffer from it most often. Whence the curse of knowledge as the best explanation for poor prose written by good people. And what is Pinker’s advice on how best to lift the curse? The traditional advice, which is to always remember the reader over one’s shoulder, is not as effective as one may think, for no-one has the power to read other people’s thoughts. It is better to actually put whatever one has written away for a while before reading it again and giving it its final shape. Even better, one can actually show it to someone else and ask for comment. In general, one should get out of one’s own mindset and find out how other people think and feel. Having come to the end of Pinker’s article, though, I felt a little disappointed. For crying out loud, I am writing for myself! My main problem is that I am changing over time. In fact, I started writing nearly forty years ago. And the famous professor of psychology from Harvard University has not a word for the likes of me.