> right about everything else

I suggest people greatly underestimate how localized expertise is. How very rapidly someone's expertise deteriorates as you move away from some focus, from the usually-very-narrow region where that expertise is externally nurtured.

A snark characterization of that region being, the issues where someone badly fears getting something wrong, and by that being embarrassed in front of the people whose opinion they much care about. One can have what superficially look like intellectual communities (picture DC thinktanks), which largely lack this property.

You can have someone well respected in their "real" subfield of biology, while being basically nutter in another subfield, which they care and think about, but aren't professionally embedded.

Ask a quantum chemist a protein chemistry question, and don't be surprised by a grad student answer. Ask "what causes the seasons?", and perhaps high-school or middle-school. Why would it be otherwise?

Even within focus, a bunch of research community gossip is discount functions. "Don't believe his observations using <technique> - he sees what he wants to see". "She always looking for things to be <favorite mechanism>."

For a recent impactful example, someone can be a successful CEO, notable engineering manager, and unusually good at thinking from first principles... while simultaneously, on other topics, being so batshit-crazy nutter that closely-held important views are 5+ orders of magnitude disconnected from reality. Because on those topics, their external community is nutter. And instead of finding this juxtaposition unsurprising, commenters twist themselves up trying to level that curve.

It's the shitty textbook publisher fallacy of "We'll find ourselves an outstanding professor of chemistry, and he'll write us an outstanding chemistry textbook". That's just not how this works.

> monoculture

Which brings us to groupthink. Expertise is a community-associated property.

In foreign affairs for example, the investment community is good at noticing and correctly evaluating some aspects of reality but not others, and similarly for diplomatic community, development, business, political, etc. Each has a partial view with systemic flaws.

I suggest groupthink is a critically important aspect of most human behavior. And yet somehow, we rarely manage to discuss this, and are repeatedly surprised by it. I'm unclear on why.

For decades I thought it bizarre that the New York Times didn't even manage to say the word. Until Trump and MAGA. Yay, a breakthrough? No, at least not the last time I checked several years ago. It remained associated with only Trump and MAGA. Some things are easier to see across the battlefield, than in the mirror, or literally everywhere?

Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck