I think Claude is making it way too easy to feel like you know what you’re talking about

I use Claude all the time for things I know very little about. And it’s kind of ridiculous how quickly I can go from knowing basically nothing to feeling like I’ve got a pretty good handle on something.

Half an hour, a few follow-up questions, maybe some sources, and suddenly I feel pretty confident talking about a subject I knew fuck all about before.

Which is great. It’s one of the reasons I use Claude so much. But how do I know I actually understand it? I know what Claude told me. That’s not quite the same thing.

It reminded me of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You’ve probably seen some version of this graph: you learn a little, your confidence shoots up, then you learn more and realise just how much you don’t know.

What I find interesting is how fast Claude can get you up that first hill.

I’ve had conversations where the first answer seemed completely solid. Then I questioned one detail and got an important caveat. Questioned that, got another. Checked another model or went through the sources and found something pretty fundamental that hadn’t come up at all. And I’ve caught myself thinking: shit, if I hadn’t asked that second question, I would’ve just gone with the first answer.

If I know a subject well, I know when to push back. If I don’t, Claude can give me a very convincing answer and I might have no idea what’s missing.

Lately, when something actually matters, I’ve started asking things like: what am I missing here? What would an expert challenge? What assumptions are we making?