The Expertise-Information Gap

There’s an asymmetry at the heart of AI interactions: the system has extensive knowledge capabilities, but users lack the domain frameworks to formulate comprehensive queries.

Users can’t anticipate what information experts would consider essential. They don’t know what they don’t know. Critical contextual details go unspecified because users don’t realize they matter.

This isn’t a user failure, it’s a design problem. The gap exists because we expect non-experts to perform expert-level problem formulation.

Related: 01-atom—information-scaffolding, 05-molecule—fata-framework, 05-atom—proactive-vs-reactive-clarification