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The more explicitly you articulate an idea, the more likely someone is to claim it was already obvious and self-evident.
Even if they had never thought of it before: good articulation makes the conclusion feel inevitable in retrospect. There is no sense of acquisition. It is experienced not as “I learned something,” but as “I know, lol.”
Sometimes the idea becomes so obvious in retrospect that failing to have thought of it seems like stupidity. And people say “we knew” to avoid feeling stupid. In environments where intelligence is treated as the primary virtue (yes, here), this effect intensifies. For many, admitting they hadn’t noticed something before still reads as a reputational loss.
I spent years thinking about how to make a computer game that would teach some math and would be fun to play. Then I saw Sumaze and I feel like a complete idiot -- it is so simple that it should have been obvious. I was already kinda exploring not too far in the idea space, but I couldn't connect the dots.
I already made some maze exploration games. Separately from that, I was considering a mathematical version of something like Sokoban, where you would push stones containing numbers and symbols, until you create a valid equation (e.g. you push "2", "+", "2", "=", and "4" together in a straight line), but the prototype wasn't fun at all; too much pushing, and it seems like an artificial needlessly complicated addition to the equation solving.
Now in hindsight, if I just put these two ideas together (instead of Sokoban with numbers and operators, make a maze exploration game with numbers and operations) and aimed for small instead of large levels, I would be almost there. But it didn't occur to me for years. And now that I see the solution, it seems completely obvious.
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Another idea that seems obvious in hindsight: When you write textbooks, too bad that they are not interactive. When you write interactive educational applications, too bad you sometimes need to add a screen of text to explain some concept. Another problem, with interactive educational apps you could accidentally lose your data; or if you want to use it both at school and at home, you need to create accounts to transfer the data, and that comes with additional complications (privacy concerns, password recovery). The obvious solution to this dilemma -- of course only obvious after someone else did it first -- is:
Make a product that consist of both a textbook and an application. The textbook explains things, and gives you a few trivial problems to solve on paper. Then you solve more complicated ones in the application, and afterwards write down some of the solutions on paper. That way, you have a paper text to read, and a paper trail of your work, and the interactive application can focus on its main task, and doesn't have to include a user manual.
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Sometimes the idea becomes so obvious in retrospect that failing to have thought of it seems like stupidity. And people say “we knew” to avoid feeling stupid.
In these cases, I have obvious evidence that I didn't think of these ideas, so I just... feel stupid.
Yeah, probably when you have clear evidence that you didn’t know any better, the effect weakens or breaks
You just gave me an idea to put a quick intuition-check before my explanations, so people see their own prior state. Thank you, this is actually very useful!