Source: TW
It is important in life to develop heuristics for how much to trust the claims/predictions/judgments of a person.
One commonly applied measure is if a person is badly wrong in a given domain,
then he is likely to have bad judgment across domains;
hence, he is taken as not very trustworthy.
There is some basis for this
if the domains are heavily dependent on cognitive power
because cognitive capacity has a general influence across domains.(5)
Hence, people like to say, “he’s smart guy”.
However, if one closely observes, one finds that the angular difference between the “mathematical” IQ and “verbal” IQ can come into play in judgments
and someone with mathematical brilliance can trip up in a domain more dependent on something verbal. (4)
Beyond cognitive capacity, there is raw and ready knowledge of the facts.
Even LLMs are still not able to substitute entirely for that “paNDita” like capacity needed to reach right judgments or make right predictions.
LLMs might improve the ordinary but there is something with weeding out the unnecessary
that comes from a special intuition.
Here, a combination of a person’s domain knowledge depth and intuition
can result in him having vastly different predictive/judgment outcomes in different fields.
I’ve personally found myself simultaneously above average and dismal in domains that I respectively know well and poorly.
However, there is a domain of discernment beyond IQ, and this is primarily visible as ideology and belief.
Any judgment dependent on that tends to produce wildly different results,
juxtaposing the sublime and the ridiculous in the same person.
Such people tend to be thrown out by heuristics that go by the consistency of their track record between fields.
However, often, it is such people who are hugely wrong and insightful at the same time.
If one develops the capacity to discriminate between their productions, one benefits.