People tend to overestimate the general applicability of expertise of all sorts. There are plenty of brilliant surgeons that I would not trust for a second with a question about marine biology or politics or philosophy or classic literature or any other intellectual pursuit.
We really need to dismantle the concept of “intelligence” because it just isn’t real. There’s no such thing as a smart person or a dumb person. Just people with varying levels of skill and expertise in any number of different things.
There are plenty of brilliant surgeons that I would not trust for a second with a question about marine biology or politics or philosophy or classic literature or any other intellectual pursuit.
there are plenty of brilliant surgeons i wouldn’t trust with a mop and a bucket of water
There’s also the issue where, if you’ll cede for the sake of argument that general intelligence exists, that does not mean that being very educated in one thing gives you an education in other things, and there are principles of reasoning (and proofs and such) that are present and frequently used in some fields but not others, so general intelligence doesn’t get you very far when you are deeply uninformed because even basic reasoning within a field may be beyond you in many cases (unless you actually study it like the people in that field did).
There are plenty of brilliant surgeons that I would not trust for a second with a question about marine biology or politics or philosophy or classic literature or any other intellectual pursuit.
I would not trust the world’s greatest heart surgeon to operate on my brain. The same thing applies to lawyers. Some lawyer who specializes in copyright law knows jack shit about inheritance and handling an estate. Professors are hyperfocused on their particular field, and depending on how much of a crank they are or how much of an ego they have, completely tunnelvision on their own idiosyncratic understanding of the field even as the field, headed by younger professors with less of an ego, move on.
People tend to overestimate the general applicability of expertise of all sorts. There are plenty of brilliant surgeons that I would not trust for a second with a question about marine biology or politics or philosophy or classic literature or any other intellectual pursuit.
We really need to dismantle the concept of “intelligence” because it just isn’t real. There’s no such thing as a smart person or a dumb person. Just people with varying levels of skill and expertise in any number of different things.
there are plenty of brilliant surgeons i wouldn’t trust with a mop and a bucket of water
There’s also the issue where, if you’ll cede for the sake of argument that general intelligence exists, that does not mean that being very educated in one thing gives you an education in other things, and there are principles of reasoning (and proofs and such) that are present and frequently used in some fields but not others, so general intelligence doesn’t get you very far when you are deeply uninformed because even basic reasoning within a field may be beyond you in many cases (unless you actually study it like the people in that field did).
I would not trust the world’s greatest heart surgeon to operate on my brain. The same thing applies to lawyers. Some lawyer who specializes in copyright law knows jack shit about inheritance and handling an estate. Professors are hyperfocused on their particular field, and depending on how much of a crank they are or how much of an ego they have, completely tunnelvision on their own idiosyncratic understanding of the field even as the field, headed by younger professors with less of an ego, move on.