[notabee]

It's not surprising, actually. The problem with very smart people is that they're often very smart in their particular domains of expertise, but socially they will be treated as just very smart in general. This often leads to an emotional overconfidence in assessing fields outside their domains of expertise, and that extreme cleverness becomes more of a tool to create complex rationalizations of uninformed biases rather than being used humbly, empirically, and diligently as should be the case for a beginner in any topic.

And yes, I'm aware that's essentially a paraphrase of the Dunning-Kruger concept. We're all probably making similar assumptions about domains of knowledge we don't know much about, because that's what the brain does. Just like human vision appears solid and complete but is actually a stitched together amalgamation of the small, receptor-dense fovea in the center darting around constantly, and the rest being filled in by the brain instead of direct perception, so is our impression of the world, and we won't know things for sure unless we take time to study them up close.