Two out of a hundred and fifty guessed right

Here’s one of the nicest things I know, and you can try it at your kitchen table tonight. Elizabeth Newton, a PhD student at Stanford, turned it into an experiment.

Two people. One taps out a well-known tune on the tabletop, "Happy Birthday," for example. The other has to guess the song.

Before they start, the tapper predicts how many people will get it right. Most say about half. That doesn’t sound unreasonable. The song is so obvious, after all.

A hundred and fifty songs were tapped. Two were guessed correctly.

Two. Out of a hundred and fifty. The people who predicted half were off by about forty times, and they didn’t even notice while they were tapping away.

Where the gap lies

It’s inside the head of the person tapping. When she taps her finger on the table, she hears the whole song, the melody, the lyrics, the chorus, maybe even her grandmother’s voice singing it. Of course it’s obvious what the song is.

The other person is sitting across the table, hearing someone drumming their fingers.

This is called the curse of knowledge, and it’s nobody’s fault. Once you know something, you can’t unpack it again and remember what it was like not to know. You simply don’t hear your own tapping as tapping.

Why this is about AI at work

At almost every workplace I visit, there are two or three people already using AI every day. They paste in a draft to tidy it up. They ask for a summary of that report nobody had time to read. They let AI take the first swing at that tricky email.

They hear the whole song.

The boss is sitting across the table, hearing tapping.

And here’s the painful part: the person using AI thinks they’re explaining things perfectly. Just like the tappers who predicted half. When they say "it saves so much time," they hear their own thirty little moments from that week. The boss hears an opinion without substance, like when someone says a movie was good.

That’s why these conversations stall. Not because anyone’s against it, not because anyone’s slow. It’s because one person who hears a melody is trying to convince another person who hears tapping, and both are completely sure they’re talking about the same thing. It’s almost touching, if it weren’t so costly.

It applies to us too

Then I read our own homepage with this in mind, and it wasn’t a cheerful read.

"Every question is answered by the cheapest AI model that can handle the task."

We hear the whole song there. We hear the router, the quality thresholds, the cost log, and the monthly cap, and we’re pretty proud of all of it. But a customer hears tapping. And honestly, the sentence is about our engine, not about the customer’s Tuesday.

So we rewrote it. Instead of explaining what the service is, we explain what someone actually did:

Attach two versions of a contract and ask what’s different. We tried this with two drafts of a purchase agreement where a clause about staff responsibility was removed and the warranty period was shortened from twenty-four months to twelve. Both changes came back, along with what they mean in practice for the buyer.

Exactly the same service. The difference is that the second version can be retold in the break room to someone who’s never heard of us.

A test you can use tomorrow

Take any sentence from your own product description, service description, or quote. Ask it one question:

Can someone who doesn’t know us retell what happens, without using a single one of our words?

If it can’t, it’s tapping. It feels crystal clear to you because you hear the song. There’s no shame in that, everyone does it. But it needs rewriting.

Here are a few pairs, all from real texts:

• "A modular platform with high configurability." vs. "You decide which parts are on, and you can change it without calling us."
• "AI-driven streamlining of administrative processes." vs. "The meeting is recorded and you get the minutes with decisions and responsible person, ready to share."
• "Ensures regulatory compliance." vs. "Before anything is sent out, it’s reviewed, and if it contains personal data, the protection is automatically increased. You’ll see why."

Notice that the second version isn’t simpler. It’s more specific. That’s the whole trick. We often think we need to simplify, but that just makes it fuzzier. What helps is being concrete.

What this means if you’re considering AI

If you hear the song: stop arguing. Instead, show one single thing that happened yesterday, with the document’s name and what came back. One small, concrete event beats ten adjectives, every time.

If you hear tapping: you’re not slow, you’re just missing the song. Ask for it. Don’t ask "what can AI do for us." Ask "what did you do last Tuesday that you wouldn’t have done otherwise." That answer is usually a lot more fun than any presentation.

And if you’re describing something you’ve built yourself, for someone who’s going to pay for it: don’t tap. Play the song. Preferably with your grandmother’s voice in it.