The most dangerous thing to be is an expert on something most people consider trivial, or in an arena dominated by fear. Data and general knowledge won't preven

The most dangerous thing to be is an expert on something most people consider trivial, or in an arena dominated by fear. Data and general knowledge won't prevent you from getting run over. The first (something considered trivial) is Parkinson's Law of Triviality, also known as the parable of the bike shed. I ran into this at Google in the Real Games debate. It's useless to get into the details, but this was an area where I was the expert, but because everyone thought "games are trivial" (mostly based on exposure to shitty games) there was an incredible amount of product-manager-style bikeshedding, with the actual experts aggressively pushed back. (Google may be a weird case. If a company thinks that engineering is Smart People Stuff and design, product management, and HR are Stupid People Stuff, what kind of product management is it going to get?) The second and more dangerous case is the one where anxiety (especially involving children) comes into play. There's no good reason to think that vaccines cause autism, or are in any way more dangerous than not having them, but because the stakes are so high, people feel a need to "do something" and take charge, but often end up making bad decisions. I think the insanity around expensive, private pre-schools ($40k per year, from preschool to college) in Manhattan and San Francisco is the same thing. It seems like a wasteful expense, and expectancy-wise it probably is, but when you consider the extreme stakes and what happens to people without connections, it's easy to see why people incinerate so much money on the hoity-toity private schools (most of which aren't even that good).