I am not sure savants (correctly ‘idiot savants’) have any such conception. They

I am not sure savants (correctly ‘idiot savants’) have any such conception. They have a more autistic near-rage at irreducibility to their frame. If you mean savants proper it really depends if they’re on the autistic spectrum or just very smart (ie: Terrance Tao). If they’re very smart they usually have a very practical understanding of their position. I think the problem we might consider is that very bright people are often aware that they have specialized in domain, where the signal of a ‘not so smart’ is someone who seems to believe expertise in one domain is transferrable to another – which is most of the problem with academics.

In economics we are sort of forced out of this, as are some people in physics – because specialization turns out to require very different premises in different sub-specializations. So questions like ‘x economists or y physicists’ are relatively stupid questions, since in each subdomain there are probably only two or three people of extraordinary competency and the rest have only familiarity. This is untrue in the soft sciences, and certainly in the liberal arts.