> For instance, there is a domain of cognitive science
called “expert-novice studies.” Two of its leading figures
are Herbert A. Simon, the Nobel Prize winner, and Jill
Larkin, who has co-authored articles on this subject with
Simon. Their studies provide an insight into the paradox
that you can successfully look something up only if you already know quite a lot about the subject. In these studies, an expert is characteristically a specialist who knows a lot about a field—say a chess master or a physicist, whereas a novice knows very little. Because the expert already knows a great deal, you might suppose that she would
learn very little when she looked something up. By contrast,
you might think that the novice, who has so much to
learn, ought to gain a still greater quantity of new information from consulting a dictionary or encyclopedia or the Internet. But, on the contrary, it’s the expert who learns more that is new, and learns it much faster than the
novice. It’s extremely hard for a novice to learn very much
in a reasonable time by looking things up.
The linked paper is interesting and elaborates this phenomenon a lot more than the one quote.