The Dark Side of Expertise
This was pretty ramble-y and pulled in some pretty unrelated examples.* We never get a clear answer for why the Civic Center Engineers got the inputs wrong, so we can't conclude that it was because of their expertise.* With the firefighters, there's a pretty easy proximal explanation, which again is not their expertise misleading them: panic. If anything, the solution to the problem shows that expertise was the solution to the problem, not the cause of it: by adding running without packs to their expertise in a concrete way, they were able to override panic.* With the priming examples, I can see how this might be related, but the only example which actually involves expertise leading them astray is the baseball example. But this priming research, contrary to what's claimed in the article, isn't reproduce-able. And even if it were, these sorts of lateral thinking exercises have pretty limited applicability: detectives or theoretical physicists use a high degree of lateral thinking, but many careers don't, and I didn't get those examples from the article, I had to come up with them myself: that hardly speaks to this being an insightful article. And ultimately, it's unclear whether expertise leads detectives or theoretical physicists astray: surely part of gaining expertise in a field that requires a lot of lateral thinking involves building the skill of putting aside preconceptions. Again, I don't think we can conclude that expertise is the problem: it may be the solution.Overall, this topic could be interesting, but this isn't an insightful article on it.