The Curse of Knowledge Meets The Valley of Death
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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. 1854. A gently sloping valley near the village of Balaclava in Crimea. On one side of the valley, Russian troops with cannons. On the other side of the valley, Russian troops with cannons. At the far end of the valley, yes, you've guessed it, Russian troops with cannons.

This is the Crimean War, the same grim conflict we heard about earlier this season when Florence Nightingale treated sick British soldiers. The war was the global standoff of its day. The British, French and Turks were all worried about Russia's growing influence. Balaclava is just outside Sevastopol, a strategic port on the Black Sea, and the situation is delicately poised.

With all their cannons, the Russians are firmly in control of the valley. They've just captured a bit more land and a few British cannons. But now the commander of the British forces, General Raglan, has ordered his cavalry to take those cannons back. General Raglan watches through a telescope from his viewpoint on a distant hilltop as his men on horseback ride towards the valley. So far so good.

Now they should turn and climb the slope to surprise the small band of Russians who are hauling off the heavy British guns. But they don't. They keep on going, further and further down the valley, between the Russians on both sides, towards the Russians at the end. What on earth are they thinking? Cannon to the right of them. Cannon to the left of them.

That's how the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson famously described the charge of the Light Brigade. Generations of British schoolchildren learned from his poem about the 600 horsemen and their suicidal charge into a valley full of guns. Into the valley of death rode the 600. Tennyson based his poem on a breathless first-hand account in the times.

The Times' war correspondent was watching from the hilltop alongside the horrified General Raglan. As it turned out, in his rush to file the story, he had miscounted. There were nearer 700 men in the light brigade. Tennyson was annoyed when he got this fact check. 700 would ruin the meter of his poem. He decided to leave it as it was.

Boldly they rode, and well, into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell rode the six hundred. But why were six or seven hundred of Britain's finest cavalrymen charging suicidally straight at Russian cannons? Tennyson got this bit right. The soldier knew someone had blundered. Indeed, someone had blundered. But who and why?

I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. The infamous Crimean blunder involved three men. An impatient young captain, a frustrated bullying lord and an amiable old general. That's General Raglan. Let's take a moment to get to know the general first.

The Times' War Correspondent describes Raglan's personal charm, sweet smile, kindly glance, courteous, gracious, gentle manner, and how about a character reference from Florence Nightingale? It was impossible not to love him. He was not a very great general, but he was a very good man. Not a very great general.

Raglan had spent most of his long career as a number two. Well into his sixties now, he was still new to the top job. He might have been a very great administrator in peacetime, but it was 40 years since he'd been on a battlefield, let alone commanded any troops. Now General Raglan is hundreds of feet up on top of a hill, the Sapoon Heights.

He lifts his telescope to his eye. He's got a commanding view of the British soldiers down below. It's like watching from a box in a theatre. In the distance, he can see the valley the Russian troops are defending, with cannons on the slopes on both sides and at the end. It's eight o'clock in the morning. General Raglan will send four fateful orders to the cavalry over the course of that morning. He clears his throat and dictates the first.

Cavalry to take ground to the left of the second line of readouts occupied by Turks. To get the order to the cavalry, Raglan has to send a messenger to ride the steep and winding path down the Sapoon Heights, then gallop across the plain. It takes 20 minutes. The recipient of the message is a man named Lord Lucan. He's in charge of the cavalry, which includes the light brigade. He reads the message. Cavalry to take...

Wait, this makes no sense. Why are communications sometimes hard to understand? The psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker reckons the single biggest reason is the curse of knowledge. That's a curious cousin of the Dunning-Kruger effect. With Dunning-Kruger, we don't know what we don't know. With the curse of knowledge, we don't notice when we know something others don't.

The curse of knowledge was ingeniously demonstrated in an experiment by a Stanford University psychology student called Elizabeth Newton. She put volunteers into pairs and gave one of each pair a list of well-known songs. Choose a song, she said, and tap it out with your finger on the desk. Like this. The job of the second volunteer was simple. Listen to the taps and then guess the tune. Did you get that one? No? Try another.

If you don't recognise the tunes, don't feel bad. Very few of the listeners among Elizabeth Newton's experimental subjects managed to. They guessed correctly just 2.5% of the time. But here's the part that demonstrates the curse of knowledge. She asked the people who'd done the tapping, if we played your tapping to lots of listeners, how many would correctly guess the tune?

The tappers reckoned around half of the listeners would get it right. But remember, hardly any of the listeners actually did. The tappers were wildly overconfident in their ability to convey music using only taps. Why? Because, in their heads, they weren't just hearing the taps. They were hearing this. Or this.

The people doing the tapping simply couldn't imagine what it would be like to hear only the taps, without the knowledge of which tune the taps were intended to convey. Much the same thing happens when an expert gives a talk full of confusing jargon. They don't realise it's jargon. To them it's a bunch of very familiar words with perfectly clear meanings. They can't conceive of what it's like to be someone who doesn't understand.

"The curse of knowledge is a devilish curse," says Steven Pinker. "We do not notice the curse because the curse prevents us from noticing it." "We sometimes forget that the person we're talking to might not have the context to make sense of what we're saying." "We mean one thing. They hear something else entirely." Down at the mouth of the valley, Lord Lucan reads General Raglan's message again.

Cavalry to take ground to the left of the second line of redoubts occupied by Turks. It still makes no sense. Redoubts occupied by Turks? There aren't any. Redoubts are temporary fortifications. That's where the British cannons had been, guarded by their allies, the Turkish army. The Russians had captured them already that morning, so the Turks weren't occupying the redoubts anymore.

Still, that must be what Raglan meant. Second line of redoubts? Isn't there only one line? Yes, can't help you there. Take ground to the left. Whose left? The left of what? My left? Raglan's left? Where's he looking from, anyway? There's the curse of knowledge. Raglan had a perfect view from high on a hilltop. He knew exactly what he meant by to the left. He forgot that Lucan, down below, had a different point of view.

A more experienced commander might have made sure to write something his troops couldn't possibly misinterpret. East or West, not right or left. As you might have guessed, the puzzled Lord Lucan is the second of our three main characters. He's the frustrated, bullying Lord. Unlike the amiable old General, Lord Lucan is not a popular man.

Lord Lucan had risen quickly through the ranks of the British Army. A Lieutenant Colonel in his 20s. Was this because of his military genius? No. If you were good at your job, you might hope to get promoted. But the only sure way to the top was money. The British military sold off its top ranks to the highest bidders. Lucan was a Lieutenant Colonel because he'd paid to be one. Millions of dollars in today's money.

Lord Lucan soon got a reputation as a harsh, vindictive leader. It had soldiers flogged for trivial misdemeanours. But then Lucan stepped back from the army. It spent most of the last two decades running his family estate in Ireland's County Mayo,

The smallholders who farmed his vast tracts of land were struggling to pay their rent, and Lucan decided to modernise. He had merged their small plots of land into bigger farms that would be more productive. But to do that, he first had to force out his existing tenants. Lucan was pitiless. He hired crowbar brigades of 50 men to demolish his tenants' houses. When the potato famine hit, he kept going.

Here's one survivor's account of the winter of 1846 in County Mayo. "Sick and aged. Little children and women with child were alike thrust forth into the cold snows of winter. And to prevent their return their cabins were levelled to the ground. The majority rendered penniless by the years of famine wandered aimlessly about the roads and bogs till they found refuge in the workhouse or the grave."

Lord Lucan, as I said, was not a popular man. Now he was back in the army. He'd swapped the crowbar brigades for the cavalry, and he was struggling to work out exactly where General Raglan wanted him to position his troops. He asked Raglan's messenger to stay with him while he finished the manoeuvre, just to make sure he'd understood what the general had in mind. And this time, he had. But there were three more messages to come.

Cautionary Tales will return in a moment.

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Why would the British Army sell ranks to the highest bidder? It seems to make no sense. Wouldn't you want your army to be run by the people who were best at running an army? But the purchase system did have some logic behind it, at least if you were a part of Britain's ruling class. This was a time of revolutions in Europe. If your army was run by capable soldiers from the middle or lower classes, well, that was risky.

The army might side with the people against the elite by selling off ranks to the highest bidders. You made sure that could never happen because only the landed gentry could afford to be in charge.

There was, of course, a downside to this arrangement. Capable soldiers had to take orders from incompetent aristocrats, like the amiable old General Raglan or the frustrated, bullying Lord Lucan. Not surprisingly, the capable soldiers sometimes resented this. It's time to meet the third and final man who'll play a pivotal role in the blunder, the impatient young captain.

Lewis Nolan is up on the Sapoon Heights with General Raglan, waiting for his chance to shine. He wasn't the son of a lord. His father was a soldier and diplomat. The sons of lords went to expensive private schools and studied ancient Greek. Nolan's school taught him more practical subjects. Engineering, military history, fencing, horsemanship.

He quickly gained a reputation as the army's most brilliant horseman. And he quickly developed strong opinions on everything the army was doing wrong.

Still just in his early 30s, he wrote a book, Cavalry, Its History and Tactics, and he couldn't resist the odd swipe at the posh buffoons in charge. Write up in golden letters, in every riding school and in every stable, horses are taught not by harshness but by gentleness. Where the offices are classical, the golden rule may be given in Greek as well as in English.

This kind of snide remark didn't endear him to the higher ranks. Yes, they saw Captain Nolan's skills, but they also thought he was far too young to be publishing his opinions. A great man, said one, in his own estimation.

In the weeks before the battle at Balaclava, the British army made its way through Crimea, and the higher-ups made decision after decision that had infuriated Captain Nolan. Twice the cavalry came across an unexpected chance to attack Russian troops, and twice Lord Lucan held them back. There were 1,000 British cavalry looking on at a beaten army retreating within a ten-minute gallop of them, enough to drive one mad.

The decision to be cautious wasn't Lord Lucan's fault. The orders came from General Raglan. Lucan was frustrated too. Nonetheless, he got the blame. He also got a nickname. Not so much Lord Lucan as Lord Look-On. Am I right? It wasn't fair, but it stuck. And it stung. Lucan didn't want to be known as a dithering bystander.

And that's another reason he was irked when he read General Raglan's First Order of the Day. It wasn't just that the meaning of the words was hard to parse. Once he'd understood them, Lucan realised this was yet another humiliating retreat. He had deliberately positioned his forces close to where the Russians would have to pass if they were to attack. Raglan was telling him to be cautious again, to move the cavalry further back.

Back up on his vantage point, meanwhile, the old general changed his mind. Perhaps Lord Lucan had got the positioning right in the first place. Half an hour after sending his first order, General Raglan sent his second. That meant half of Lucan's cavalry, the heavy brigade, as opposed to the light,

Another messenger on horseback gingerly picked his way down the side of the Sapoon Heights and galloped to Lord Lucan to hand him the slip of paper. Lucan read it and rolled his eyes. Great, now he had to move back to where he'd been, but with only half his troops. That wouldn't help if they ran into any Russians, and they did. But luckily the Russians weren't expecting it. The two forces skirmished briefly and the Russians retreated.

Up on his hilltop, General Raglan spied an opportunity. With that Russian retreat, perhaps he could recapture those British cannons the Russians had taken earlier, the ones nearby on the Causeway Heights, the slope to one side of the valley. Raglan, being a cautious man, didn't want to send the cavalry on their own. He'd rather wait for the infantry, the foot soldiers, to back them up.

But where were the infantry? He'd sent a message to their camp telling them to come right away. As it happened, the urgency of Raglan's message had been lost on the infantry leader.

He'd decided he could finish his breakfast before setting off. But Raglan didn't know that. He expected the infantry to come into view at any moment. And anyway, there weren't that many Russians near those guns on the causeway heights. The cavalry could take them on their own if needed. Raglan dictated his third order of the morning. Cavalry to advance and take advantage of any opportunity to recover the heights. They will be supported by infantry...

which have been ordered. Another messenger, riding cautiously down the steep slope. Another slip of paper, handed to Lord Lucan. Another exasperated sigh. It will be supported by infantry. What does that mean? Does he want us to advance now and hope the infantry will arrive later? Or are we supposed to wait for the infantry to arrive and then advance? General Raglan had meant advance straight away. Lord Lucan decided he should wait for the infantry.

There was still no sign of them, so the cavalrymen decided they might as well relax for a while. They got off their horses, lit their pipes, unscrewed the caps on their flasks of rum. Some had brought hard-boiled eggs from breakfast. Up on the hillside, General Raglan watched through his telescope in mounting fury. Why were the cavalry smoking and drinking? He'd told them to advance. He turned his telescope towards those captured British cannons on the heights.

Could he see Russian soldiers starting to drag away those cannons? That's what it looked like. There was no time to lose. Raglan dictated his fourth and fatal order. Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Raglan wanted the message to get to Lord Lucan as quickly as possible, so he looked around at the horsemen he had with him on the hilltop. Who among them would be the swiftest rider?

"'Send Nolan!' The impatient young captain eagerly took the message and gied up his horse. Raglan called after him. "'Tell Lord Lucan the cavalry is to attack! Immediately!' At last, Nolan rode off, exultant. After weeks of frustration, finally the cavalry had something to do, and he, Nolan, would get to deliver the order to that dithering fool Lord Lucan.'

Captain Nolan urged his horse on as it slithered and stumbled down the steep side of the Sapoon Heights. He galloped the last mile towards Lord Lucan and thrust the message into his hand. Advance rapidly to the front. Which front? Prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Which guns? Nolan watched Lucan trying to figure it out. His patience snapped.

General Raglan's orders are that the cavalry should attack immediately. Attack, sir? Attack what? What guns, sir? Where and what to do? There, my lord. There is your enemy. There are your guns. Nolan swept out a hand in the general direction of, um, well, of what exactly? It looked to Lucan like Captain Nolan was pointing right down the valley, towards the many Russian cannons arrayed at the far end. There is your enemy.

"There are your guns." Lucan gulped. Up on the hilltop, General Raglan was oblivious. It simply hadn't occurred to him that there could be any ambiguity about what he wanted. Obviously this fourth order was a follow up to the third. You know, the one that said "Recover the heights". So when he said "Advance to the front" he meant the heights. Obviously.

And when he said the guns, he meant the British cannons that had been captured on the heights. That was obvious, wasn't it? Not to Lord Lucan. All he heard was, the curse of knowledge was about to destroy the Light Brigade. Cautionary Tales will return shortly.

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In the 1960s and 1970s, the computing titan, IBM, employed a Dutch psychologist called Geert Hofstede to fly around the world asking questions of their employees in different countries. Questions like this: How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?

IBM wanted to understand how workplace culture differed from country to country. Were people collectivist or individualist? Sticklers for rules or happy to improvise? And what was their attitude to authority? Hofstede came up with an idea he called power distance. In a culture with low power distance, an employee who gets an apparently stupid instruction feels free to say, you sure boss?

Where the power distance is high, the employee silently gulps and carries out the stupid instruction. Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, describes how countries with a high power distance used to have more fatal plane crashes. Captains and first officers spend about the same amount of time at the controls, but crashes would happen more often when the captain was flying. If the first officer was flying badly, the captain would tell them.

If the captain was flying badly, the first officer might not.

Power distance is high in Korean culture. In 1997, Korean Air Flight 801 was descending into Guam. The captain was tired. He wasn't thinking straight. He was peering out of the cockpit window to try to spot the runway. It seems he hadn't realised that there were dark clouds ahead. The runway wouldn't be visible. He should be relying on the instruments instead.

The first officer knew what was happening, but he didn't want to challenge the captain directly. Instead, he pointed at the weather radar and dropped a hint. "Don't you think it rains more in this area here?" The captain was too distracted to understand. He kept on looking outside. "Where was that runway?" The flight engineer knew what was happening too. He tried an even weaker hint. "Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot."

Neither said what they must have been thinking: "Captain, you can't land the plane by looking outside! The weather's too bad!" And neither said another word as the captain flew the plane through a dark cloud and into a hillside. Airlines now train their pilots on how to speak up if they think the captain is making a mistake. But on the battlefield in Balaclava in 1854 there had been no such training.

The curse of knowledge had set the blunder in motion, and power distance was about to seal the deal. It seemed to Lord Lucan that General Raglan wanted the cavalry to embark on a suicidal charge down the valley. Well then, that's what they'd have to do. Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem sums up the lot of the soldier. Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.

Actually, Lord Lucan would have had some scope to make reply and reason why. The power distance here was complicated. Lucan outranked Captain Nolan, but Nolan was speaking on behalf of General Raglan. Lucan couldn't refuse Raglan's order, but he could have pressed Nolan to explain it, to make sure he understood. That's exactly what he had done with the messenger who delivered the first ambiguous order, to move his troops to the left.

But this time, he didn't. Perhaps he was angry about the insolence with which young Nolan was treating him. Perhaps he was worried about how it would appear. Lord Look-On wriggling out of action once again. At any rate, he simply glared at Nolan, then rode off to talk to the Light Brigade. They were closest to the valley. They'd have to lead the charge. The leader of the Light Brigade was Lord Cardigan, another wealthy aristocrat who'd bought his position.

Lord Cardigan.

Cardigan readied his troops.

Every last one of them could see how crazy this was, that it could achieve nothing, and they'd need a miracle to survive. The soldiers knew someone had blundered. Oh well, they were soldiers. Orders were orders. The bugle sounded. Cardigan kept the pace steady. There was a mile and a half to the end of the valley. The horses couldn't charge at full speed all that way, but one soldier seemed impatient.

He broke ranks and rode out in front. It was Captain Nolan. What was he doing? Perhaps he'd only just understood the blunder that was about to unfold and was trying to change the light brigade's direction. Perhaps the impatient young captain just wanted to be front and centre. We shall never know. No sooner had Captain Nolan ridden ahead than a Russian shell exploded right in front of him and a shard of hot metal ripped through his chest.

Nolan was the first to die. He was not the last. Struck full in the face, his blood and brains bespattering us who rode near. Streaks of fire about two feet long and a foot thick in the centre of a gush of thick white smoke. Cannonballs tearing the earth up and musket balls coming like hail. Old Grey Mare kept alongside of me for some distance, tearing out her entrails as she galloped. Had his head blown off.

Rode about 30 yards before he fell. Poor dumb brutes. Galloping about were numbers, they marred wild beasts. My overalls are massive blood. The flame, the smoke, the roar were in our faces. It is not an exaggeration to compare the sensation to that of riding into the mouth of a volcano. No.

Up on the Sapoon Heights, General Raglan watched dumbfounded as the light brigade disappeared at full pelt into a bank of smoke. The Times' war correspondent scribbled furiously in his notebook. The French commander, General Bosquet, delivered a verdict for the ages. It was magnificent, but no way to wage a war.

When the smoke cleared, one in six of the light brigade had been killed. More were captured or wounded. Incredibly, more than half made it back with barely a scratch. The charge had achieved precisely nothing. The loss of life and limb was senseless. From our modern perspective, so was the whole Crimean War. So it seems jarring that the survivors were not just offered sympathy, but hailed as heroes.

When can their glory fade? Oh, the wild charge they made! All the world wondered. To know that you've got no choice in a doomed and dangerous mission because of some hideous cock-up, and to give it anyway your full-blooded commitment, it no longer seems magnificent to us. But we can at least admire the courage.

And since Tennyson's poem is easily the most famous memorial to this disaster, maybe he should get the last word. Honour the charge they made. Honour the Light Brigade. Noble 600. MUSIC

Key sources for this episode include Hell Riders by Terry Brighton and The Charge by Mark Adkin, along with Elizabeth Newton's dissertation, The Rocky Road from Actions to Intentions. For a full list of references, see timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.

♪♪

This show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Aniela Lacan, and Maya Koenig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review.

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