Yes, this is completely abstract and hypothetical. I’ve been asking for something specific, and that shows why these differing “perspectives” have any relevance to any practical problem.

For example, let’s say that the guy who goes to the state law school in Kansas is more likely to have lived on a farm than Yale Law graduates. I’d bet anything that that’s true. And if the subject in question is agricultural law, then maybe there’d be a point in having lawyers who know something about agriculture.

But how on earth does that turn into a general principle that in the 99% of cases that don’t involve agricultural law, this Kansas lawyer is by definition going to add a new and valuable “perspective”? What is it that farmers, qua farmers, have as a perspective on cases that involve the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, or ERISA, or the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, or the Internal Revenue Code, or the 1996 Telecommunications Act?

THAT’S WHAT I MEAN when I say “be specific.” I’m not interested in abstractions about “perspectives.” I want to know why all of these “perspectives” are going to be useful in specific cases.

And this is not just about the law—I want to know why the traditionally-trained oncologist is going to benefit from teaming up with the homeopathist, and so forth.

What do hierarchies have to do with anything? It seems the results of this study should be robust wrt hieracrchies. They’d seem to apply equally well to a group planning a block party (no hierarchy), to a neighborhood group trying to get the city to improve the street lighting (figuring out how to deal with superiors), and a group designing a high-school curriculum (figuring out how to deal with inferiors.)

Okay, against all better judgement, ignoring the many questionable aspects of the narrowly conceived strawman argument that you have constructed, let me offer a specific hypothetical example from … gee, let’s say the practice of law.

A competing law firm employs uniformly very bright, well-schooled attorneys, who are walking encyclopedias of nuance and precedent in their various specialized fields. Competence, neigh brilliance (and the academic credentials to prove it), reigns supreme. However, after a series of comments period of time you notice that there appears to be a lack of “out-of-the-box” and empathetic thinking, that the lawyers of the firm seem to be unable to “walk around in the other fellow’s shoes”, that they instead seem to increasingly cling to their own confidence, and reputation for brilliance in interpreting and manipulating the specialized constructs of the law.

Is there an opportunity here? Possibly. Put together a team to develop and execute strategies for winning over a significant proportion of the customer base from the competing firm. What are some of the avenues open for attack? Anticipate the likely response of the competing firm.

Look, I can accept this. Intellectual diversity > intellectual homogeneity. What I find to be a complete non sequitur is this notion that people who make lower grades and who attend lower-ranked colleges are thereby more intellectually “diverse.” Says who? In what field is that true? Stop being so damn abstract (this goes for Henry too) and give a specific example.

Your incredulity at this argument is itself a demonstration of Page’s point. There is a vast literature out there on the limits of expertise and the fact that expert knowledge is, in general, no better calibrated than amateur knowledge. (In other words, most experts don’t know what they know and what they don’t know—they’re as confident in their wrong judgments as in their right ones.) There is also a vast literature out there on the perils of homogeneity in groups, and the way homogeneous groups find it difficult to see their own blind spots and to anticipate problems. We know that experts are likely to be homogeneous in their thinking, because that’s what gets them defined as experts—in general, expertise consists in performing well according to certain well-defined protocols. So teams made up of the cream of the crop, particularly those that have all been educated at the same universities, are more likely to be (not guaranteed to be, but more likely to be) homogeneous than teams that draw from a wider range of performance abilities. The benefits of the latter may not outweigh the former in all cases, but that the benefits of the latter exist has been demonstrated both in the laboratory and empirically. Familiarize yourself with the literature, and then come back and explain why it’s wrong, instead of simply offering up hypotheses.

More generally, the art of creating apt analogies involves what Brewer describes as “an uncodifiable imaginative moment” which “is not unfamiliar in other areas of reasoning in whose rational force our intellectual culture has placed great confidence – namely both the empirical and the demonstrative sciences.” (p.954). Page demonstrates how these “uncodifiable imaginative moments” in the natural sciences may draw upon heuristics from completely non-scientific experiences, including those from everyday life histories, allowing apparently insoluble problems to be understood in novel and illuminating ways.
It seems to beggar belief that this doesn’t apply in the law too (and indeed I’m quite sure from extended experience with lawyers that it does). It’s a commonplace among people studying innovation that the sources of creativity often exactly involve the application of perspectives or heuristics from one field of endeavour into another, which is apparently entirely unrelated (Page provides us with one conceptual language that we can use to grasp how this happens).

This is why simply hiring people who graduated near the top of their class at elite schools isn’t necessarily a good idea. These people are very likely to have the appropriate jesuitical skills. They may however have quite similar backgrounds in other ways, meaning that as a group they have less conceptual resources to draw on when dealing with issues that require genuine creativity than would a more variegated bunch of people.