Why I don't offer surgical advice

Or listen to marketing influencers on automotive strategy

Ptahhotep. An early fan of intellectual humility. (Pic taken from Reddit)

As a heuristic, follow what experts, rather than non-experts, say is obviously reasonable.

In most cases seeking advice from people specifically qualified in a domain gets you better results. The cliché is that you don't ask your plumber how to fix teeth, or the dentist about unblocking toilets.

But what about when experts opine outside their credentialed domain. This is something we have become inured to in the era of ‘evidence-based-policy’, when the credentialed constantly elide the space between the current facts and what should be done about them.

Outside of their wheelhouse, the cleverest people are sometimes as obviously out of their depth as anyone else because what makes them clever in one area is not necessarily transferrable to another field. One problem with this is that, precisely because they're clever, they don't realise this.

Such tensions arise all the time in cognitively gifted people. Ian Leslie recently observed this, in light of consistently wild predictions for the future from people who develop generative AI tools:

they are experts in one thing: the abstract world of AI systems. They’re not experts in economics (plainly), or sociology or psychology. They know little about most of the industries they say will be transformed. They’re not the deepest thinkers about history or human nature. In short, when they make these sweeping predictions, they are way out of their lane. Yet their pronouncements are received with the utmost seriousness by the media, even though they might as well be pop stars opining on politics - The Ruffian ‘5 Reasons Why There Won’t Be an AI Jobs Apocolypse’

This blind spot leads to terrible communication from clever people.

Sometimes the cleverest people can be demonstrably ignorant, once they're opining outside their wheelhouse. The best example of this is the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who pronounces on gender ideology issues in ways that reveal naivety and ignorance.

What is going on with this? When you skim through the research on thinking styles and their respective foibles, quite a lot, as it turns out.

First there's a thing psychologists call 'Cognitive Fluency Bias'. This arises from the relative mental ease with which highly intelligent people are often able to process complex ideas. They do it faster than the rest of us in their own domain and can fluently account for their thinking. Such people can then interpret this as meaning that they possess a generalised superiority in thinking skills.

We're all subject to confirmation bias. It shouldn't be a surprise that smarter people are just better at mounting arguments that 'prove' what their instincts already suggest. Such arguments work equally as well on the self as they do with others, which is probably why clever people are sometimes identified in research studies as more prone to cognitive rigidity than less confident thinkers. And, of course, they are typically more influential because confidence is impressive, so even their poorly-founded conclusions have heft.

Good old groupishness and peer influence plays a role. We tend to share the values of our in-group, often unwittingly for social more than epistemological reasons. Clever people are naturally overrepresented in academia and it's been well chronicled that this world is becoming ever more homogenised on socio-political matters. Sometimes this is justified by appeal to a universal moral truth, which clever people attain by virtue of being clever and learning better ways of thinking. But that's more of a conversation-stopping assertion about the moral superiority of intelligent people than an objective fact about the world.

Being used to receiving deference in one field probably has an effect too. When I read Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland I was surprised to see him opining negatively on certain foundations of Marxism and found him unconvincing. Carlo is clearly brilliant on quantum mechanics and why the traditional materialistic view of the universe doesn't adequately explain everything, but his takedowns of Marx seemed thin and naive (even though, for me, bashing Marx is pushing on a door that swung open several years ago).

You can't ignore the power of language either. Many theorists in the recent tradition of 'critical studies' are obviously clever with language and obviously wrong about the world. But strong language skill can create the illusion of coherence and credibility flowing from flawed assumptions or baseless assertions. HAES (Health At Every Size) advocates are exemplars of this.

Then there's the philosophically naive assumption that knowing about material things is equivalent to knowing what to do about them. That's the fallacy underlying the creep of technocracy and machine regime governance. The difference between what Epicurus called 'Tẽchne' (know-how) and 'Sophia' (wisdom). I wrote about how sceptics also typically fail to appreciate this here.

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In short, high general intelligence can be a double-edged sword. It brings enviable powers of reasoning, pattern recognition and learning, but also overconfidence when venturing outside one's actual domain of expertise.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than on the hellsite known as LinkedIn.

A few weeks ago the car maker Jaguar's European sales were revealed to have plummeted by 97.5%.

This followed a controversial rebrand-signalling exercise at the end of 2024, which included an advert deemed to be 'Woke' because it featured what seemed to be gender non-conforming people.

There was a good old media ding dong about all that, most of which left me unimpressed.

I work in automotive and probably understand the British market more than the average person. I suppose this makes me a slight expert in the field.

The criticism of Jaguar's move seemed almost universal, but what was most interesting to me was that all the noise came from outside. The experts within my world discussed Jaguar's approach with curiosity, while outsiders confidently proclaimed the death of Jaguar.

Let's put something on record.

I think Jaguar decided to go specifically for the Tesla space, which was haemorrhaging catastrophically as Elon Musk became ever more publicly deranged. They knew what they were doing, right down to stoking such a huge amount of negative publicity. To this day I think that 30 seconds was brilliant.

But everyone else seems to think they know better. Including some very intelligent writers that I follow. One even seemed annoyed to receive pushback, on the basis that he's a comms and branding specialist.

Some background. Jaguar launched its 'Reimagine' strategy back in 2021. Production of almost all cars would end while the business transitioned to pure-electric luxury vehicles, closing or retooling plants and basically abandoning the volume market where every manufacturer is hostage to volume pricing. You won't get much Jag for under £100,000 when they come back.

Whether or not this is a wise, too-high-risk or brilliant strategy isn't the point. It's the strategy they launched.

Not building cars to sell is literally the current phase of this strategy.

But for about 10 days, LinkedIn was awash with people proclaiming 'go Woke, go broke' and similar platitudes. Look at the sales figures. Look how few people wanted a Jaguar this year. That proves how wrong Jaguar is. These people were often highly intelligent - mostly in branding and marketing - but deeply ignorant of what was happening.

But they couldn't resist opining.

Look - the iconic leaping cat logo has gone. Heritage blah.

They had no idea what they were talking about. And these were experts. Their credentials were sometimes impeccable. In. Their. Own. Wheelhouse.

Some of us couldn't resist trolling these people and, gradually, word spread that you can't sell cars if you aren't producing them. So they switched to opining about the strategy of pausing production.

As I write, 4 hours ago someone helpfully explained on LinkedIn that Jaguar 'tanked' its brand by having no inventory.

Lesson: stay in your wheelhouse

That person’s fluency gave them an out from admitting they were wrong about Jaguar. Less intelligent people would say 'oh, right, it's not what I thought'. Intelligent people can double down and are able to find arguments with surface plausibility to stay right where they were on an issue.

To me the problem seems to be one of appropriate humility and a willingness to recognise the non-equivalence of Tẽchne' and 'Sophia'.

I don't know where I'm going with this, by way of a conclusion. Perhaps something fluffy about being as willing as possible to recognise your limits rather than defaulting to feelings of superiority when other people see things differently.

A recurring thought is that teaching philosophy alongside technical disciplines might help. We're all taught (and I remember this all too well) what to think and how to solve problems rather than reflect on how to think and which problems require solving.

The problem with Neil deGrasse Tyson and the marketing influencers on LinkedIn is not that they're stupid. The problem is that they are smart.

This piece was inspired not just by the recent shenanigans on LinkedIn but by the wonderful Fall of Civilisations podcast (an antidote to political internet bullshit I unhesitatingly recommend). In Episode 18, about ancient Egypt, Paul Cooper cites Maxim 1 in Ptahhotep's The Maxims of Good Discourse.

“Don’t be proud of your knowledge.

Consult the ignorant and the wise;

The limits of art are not reached,

No artist’s skills are perfect;

Good speech is more hidden than greenstone,

Yet may be found among maids at the grindstones.”

Ptahhotep, eh. Still relevant after 4,400 years.

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