A Failure Mode of Really Smart People

Dim people have an obvious failure mode. They aren't good at taking in or processing information. So they have a lot of wrong beliefs about the world. 

Smart people have a less obvious failure mode. They tend to know how smart they are, so they assume that any conclusions they hold are the result of careful reflection. They've applied their big brain with it's impressive horsepower to an issue, so their resulting opinion on it must be well informed. Unfortunately, in most cases no such quiet reflection ever took place, no careful study of the facts, no exegesis of the relevant literature. They just assume they must be right because they're so smart. It's almost a form of moral hazard: they are less careful because they are in some sense more capable of reaching the truth. Call it overconfidence. 

I see this all the time. I want to say, "Dude, you're a physicist. We value your big brain because it's good at solving physics problems. You're not a tax policy expert. (Or an expert on employment regulations such as the minimum wage, or an expert on healthcare policy...) The things you're saying about it don't make any sense, you don't have even a tenuous grasp of the relevant economic theory, and you're trying to shoehorn the problem into your existing toolbox (which has impressive methods for solving physics problem, but they just aren't relevant to policy problems, sorry). It's okay, nobody values you for being 'right' about things outside your realm of expertise. We'll come to you when we have a physics problem that needs solved." It's not exactly "stay in your lane," and by the way I hate that phrase and the sentiment it implies. It's more like, "You didn't even bother to check what's happening in this other lane before spouting off." 

I also want to slap some sense into these Silicon Valley data scientists and software engineers who have appointed themselves the arbiters of truth. They're taking down or tagging social media content that they have "fact-checked" and found wanting (by their standards). Obviously these people are not qualified to decisively appraise claims about, say, virology or immunology. When there are dueling experts who disagree about what's true, they are likewise not qualified to anoint one side of the dispute the "winner." And yet this is precisely what they are doing. I see it as another example of smart people being overconfident and thinking they have a direct line to cosmic truth.