The hubris of brilliance

I have a good friend who is brilliant in his technical area, and in fact has risen to quite senior levels in his field. He has an idea that could revolutionize a major industry and make him millions of dollars. And yet, while someone will almost certainly eventually cash in on this idea and get the credit for it, it probably won’t be he.

The reason is that he is apparently quite unable to see or accept that successfully undertaking the construction of a major project requires political support, a comprehensive business plan, marketing support, a tight management structure, good systems engineering, and a variety of other specialties. He feels that these are minor issues, and in any case he thinks he already has them covered himself. He is seemingly blind to his own limitation.

I’ve pondered why this is, and concluded that the gift of brilliance too often carries with it the curse of hubris. I’ve noticed time and time again that people who are brilliant in one area tend to think they must be equally brilliant in other fields, when in fact they are, if anything, woefully naïve in many of those other fields. Not only that, they tend to assume that their own area of expertise is unusually complex while other fields are much simpler.

Strangely enough, business people usually recognize that scientific fields can be immensely complex, but scientists seldom seem to recognize that business specialties can be equally if not more complex. But of course they are.

I certainly notice this in the physicists who live around me. Physicists too often believe that physics is the most complex field around. I find that ludicrous. Particles transmuting from radioactive decay or accelerator collisions go through at most dozens of steps; yet biochemical pathways in the cell often go through thousands or even tens of thousands of steps. Physical forces can be relied on to always behave in the same way; they don’t behave differently because they were raised in a different culture or because the experimenter reminds them of their despised third-grade teacher, problems that bedevil the social sciences.

But I see it in other fields as well. Doctors are notorious for getting taken in investment scams. Of course they are often wealthy and so obvious targets for such scams, but in addition they seem prone to think that since they have mastered the complexities of medicine, they are equally skilled in picking investments. That delusion, of course, makes them easy prey.

Of course brilliance and wisdom are two different things. The brilliant person knows a great deal about some narrow field. The wise person recognizes that there are many fields, and no one can be competent, let alone brilliant, in more than a very few.