Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell
Of all forms of caution
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I didn’t know Russell was a divorce lawyer on the side. 😉
He was a very talented guy, Felix, but genius in one field does not necessarily translate into genius in other fields. He might have been a very unskilled divorce lawyer.
Given his romantic history I think he was mostly a client of divorce lawyers.
I’ve never read his “The Conquest of Happiness” so this may be somewhat unfair, but I’ve always suspected that this quote has a lot to do with the self justification of his own romantic imprudence. Still at least he distinguished himself from the typical British leftists of the period but not being taken in by Lenin or the Bolsheviks (or for that matter by Marx or Hegel).
There’s a cognitive error that I recall is called “transference of expertise” or “expertise transference” (there may be other terms for this error, but I can’t remember any of them now).
Basically, the error is that someone who is an expert in one field of endeavor believes she/he is also an expert in another field.
As a baby lawyer working in a securities law firm a long time ago, I learned that the term, “doctors’ money”, when applied to a stock or a company meant the equivalent of “dumb money”.
Because a doctor’s extensive education and intellectual abilities in the medical field, many doctors felt their innate intelligence was such that they could pick companies and stock that was certain to appreciate. If a startup company was backed by a lot of investments by physicians, this constituted a warning flag for more savvy investors.
There was also a herd phenomenon that sometimes occurred when one doctor found what he/she believed was an excellent investment and told professional associates and friends about it and those people bought the same stock.