[twstws]

This attitude is frustrating and sadly widespread. Basically, you're saying that you can trust someone with some scientific training, but only up to an arbitrary limit. You assume this is a zero sum game, that it is impossible to learn a lot about biology without simultaneously acquiring some compensating deficiency. Or that only the deficient personality would pursue a Phd.

How is it anything but anti-intellectual to say that having too much expertise makes one a less capable leader?

[lmm]

I can only trust someone with substantial experience outside of academia. While there are people who have this and also have a PhD, they're a vanishingly small minority compared to those who have that experience and an MSc.

[twstws]

There is an important distinction between not trusting someone without non-academic experience, and not trusting someone with too much academic experience. I agree with the first, but was refuting the second.

In my experience, as someone who completed a Phd after a few years working, phds often have richer real-life experience than the 'average' person, and almost always richer than the common stereotype inferred in the comment i responded too.