Everyone is conservative about what they know best.
Conquest's first law is his least contentious and the most widely applicable: expertise produces caution about the specific thing, not about everything.
In practice
- A surgeon is the most cautious person in the room about a new surgical device and the most relaxed about the new anaesthetic protocol.
- An economist is scathing about the modelling in a public health paper and credulous about the epidemiology in a newspaper.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is information: someone who knows a field understands how its parts depend on each other and what a proposed change would break, which produces caution about that field specifically.
- In its favour
- It is consistent with research on expertise, in which experts see more constraints than novices, and it predicts the common pattern of radical opinions on everything except one's own subject.
- Against it
- It is an aphorism with no measurement behind it, expertise can also produce impatience with a status quo the expert knows to be bad, and what counts as conservative here is doing a lot of quiet work.
- Standing
- Conquest also stated a second and third law; the second is an explicitly partisan claim about institutional drift and is contested.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life