The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

by Tom Nichols

Building on his enormously successful first edition, Tom Nichols confirms his thesis that events, such as the COVID pandemic, prove that the assault on expertise has only intensified.

Fully updated chapters continue to address how technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Over the past several years, the rise of populism and conspiracy theories have taken this to new levels. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise, Second Edition, follows up on how this rejection of experts has the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, and importantly, the election of Donald Trump. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Science, Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, Education

332 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 27, 2017

Reviews

[Emma Sea · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was disappointing. Nichols is pretty straight up: he blames "the public's own laziness" (p. 221) for the decline in esteem of expert opinion.

I was expecting a lot more interrogation of the corporatization of media and neoliberalism in general as a structure of disenfranchisement and disengagement. Instead Nichols calls Americans "childlike in their refusal to learn enough to govern themselves or to guide the policies that affect their lives" (p. 217), beset by a "toxic confluence of arrogance, narcissism, and cynicism that Americans now wear like a full suit of armor against the effects of experts and professionals." (p. 234).

Nichols gives particular attention to "the fragile egos of narcissistic students" who are "resentful and angry" (p. 233). In 1967 "young men about to be drafted and sent to an Asian jungle were understandably emotional" but contemporary students who protest against trans-exclusionary policies, LGBT rights, the appropriation of minority cultures, or systemic whitewashing of sexual assault are "explod[ing] over imagined slights that are not remotely in the same category as . . . being sent to war," and who are "build[ing] majestic Everests from the smallest molehills, and descend[ing] into hysteria." Nichols also calls the violence by 1960s "minority groups who were not fully citizens in the eyes of the law" inexcusable.

Nichols's writing flows well and his ideas are linked together logically, so it's not a terrible book: I simply disagree with him on a whole bunch of shit. The book came across as more of a polemic than an analysis of a complex situation.

For example, as this article discusses;

"the pressure to commercialize is directly or indirectly associated with adverse impacts on the research environment, science hype, premature implementation or translation of research results, loss of public trust in the university research enterprise, research policy conflicts and confusion, and damage to the long-term contributions of university research."

The very people Nichols would hold up as "experts" are themselves corrupting expertise. And yet to maintain college positions in an era of casualization of labor and the business model of education they need to engage in exactly this behavior. Nichols doesn't engage deeply enough with what neoliberalism has wrought over the last 40 years.

I found the book much less enlightening than I hoped, and I do not recommend it.

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3, 5.

Declinul încrederii în experți e general. De ce s-a ajuns la situația în care ignoranța trece drept virtute, iar știința drept elitism și fanfaronadă? Iată cîteva dintre răspunsurile lui Tom Nichols:

1. În universitățile americane, profesorii (și așa timorați de rigorile absurde ale corectitudinii politice) nu mai lucrează cu studenți, ci cu clienți. Cînd studentul plătește, profesorul devine un soi de chelner binevoitor. În România e la fel. Profesorul este plătit după numărul de studenți (la buget) și nu după competență. Dacă pică un student, își taie singur din salariu. Și profesorii din US, dar și cei de la noi, au învățat bine principiul următor: Nu ai voie să pui note mici (și cu atît mai puțin să lași repetenți). Dacă elevul / studentul are cumva note mici, vinovat e întotdeauna profesorul și nu elevul / studentul (p.96). Profesorul n-a pus destul suflet, n-a folosit cele mai moderne metode pedagogice. În plus, după cum au arătat experții psihologi, o notă mică îl poate traumatiza pe viață...

2. Termenul de „expert” s-a compromis. Specialiștii au fost înlocuiți peste tot de influenceri, de moderatorii de talk-show, de analfabeții îndrăzneți. Publicul are mai multă încredere în vedetele media decît în savanți. Savanții sînt plicticoși, spun lucruri răsuflate (că e bine să te vaccinezi, de pildă), nu au verva și istețimea vedetelor. În România, de altfel, există experți în orice: experți în situații de criză, experți în gestionarea evenimentelor neprevăzute, experți în medicina cuantică a dacilor. Proliferarea „experților” duce la proliferarea ingnoranței.

3. Apariția internetului. Accesul la cunoaștere (la articole și cărți) a devenit mult mai simplu. Poți consulta oricînd orice carte (ăsta e un lucru foarte bun). Din păcate, ușurința cu care ajungi la „surse” devine iluzia stăpînirii surselor. Dar a face căutări pe Google e departe de a cerceta un subiect (p.120). Internetul nu deosebește sursele demne de încredere de sursele îndoielnice. Iar cel care face căutări nici atît. Internetul oferă mormane de articole delirante, compilații aiuristice din cărți inexistente, traduceri dubioase după texte în engleză, bazaconii, fantasmagorii. El e departe de a semăna cu o bibliotecă. Internetul e haotic, biblioteca e o ordine (p.128).

4. Experții au avut grijă să se compromită singuri. Faptul că ești competent într-un domeniu nu înseamnă că ești competent în toate. Mulți savanți uită acest adevăr. Exemplele preferate ale lui Tom Nichols sînt Linus Pauling și Noam Chomsky. Primul a fost un chimist reputat (a luat premiul Nobel), dar a ajuns să susțină că vitamina C este remediul cancerului. Al doilea este un eminent lingvist, dar a ajuns să exprime păreri despre absolut orice, inclusiv despre mișcările politice. A devenit un soi de guru mondial...

5. Trăim într-o societate democratică, în care „un vot înseamnă un vot”. Votul (politic al) unui expert nu contează mai mult decît votul unui analfabet. Asta e democrația, punct. Dar egalitatea politică nu poate fi extinsă în toate domeniile (p.263). Opinia lui X nu cîntărește cît opinia lui Y. În ceea ce privește o epidemie, opinia unui medic e mai îndreptățită decît opinia unui regizor de film (oricît de genial ar fi). Dar nouă ne place regizorul și-l repudiem pe medic.

O carte din care putem învăța ceva despre lumea actuală și despre mentalitatea omului contemporan...

[Melora · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Nichols would be quick to point out, I was likely to enjoy this book about “the death of expertise” (more accurately, “the death of the acknowledgment of and respect for expertise”) due to the fact that it fits with my existing beliefs. Tom Nichols' book, based on his astonishingly prescient 2014 article in “The Federalist,” is a jeremiad on the loss of respect for the opinions of experts and for facts themselves. He discusses at length the issues of confirmation bias, anti-intellectualism, prioritization of feelings over facts at universities, the internet's creation of “instant experts,” the explosion of talk radio and cable news and growth of splinter “news” sources such as Alex Jones's “Infowars” to satisfy Americans' appetite for fantasy masquerading as fact, etc. He decries the tendency for the poorly informed to insist that their opinions, on everything from American foreign policy to childhood vaccinations, are as equally deserving of respect as those of experts in the various fields, and harkens back to a simpler time when “ordinary” citizens knew their place and listened respectfully to the wisdom of the well-credentialed. As you might expect, this aspect is where his book can become rather grating. He is quick to admit that “experts” do sometimes err, and points out that citizens have a duty to inform themselves (as best their often feeble abilities will allow), but reminds readers that experts' opinions are far more likely to be correct than those of the less well-trained. And he's right, but that doesn't save his repeated complaints about the failure of ordinary folks to respect experts from becoming irritating. To a large extent I think this is a function of a short magazine article being stretched into a full-length book when what it would have been better served by expansion into a long magazine piece. Despite its repetitiveness, his criticisms of a culture in which the belligerently ignorant insist that their views be treated as just as valid as those of the well-informed who base their ideas on actual facts are indisputable and timely. Three and a half stars.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marred by the author stepping out of his area of expertise and making causal and explanatory claims without proper data or argument on journalism, education, and philosophy of science.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a rant written by a jerk. That would not have been enough by itself to make me hate it. Nassim Taleb is a jerk, but he writes good books. The Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard is a bit of a jerk who writes novels as rants, yet I thoroughly enjoy his work. But I had two big problems with this book: 1. It passes off barely substantiated generalizations as expertise and established knowledge, and 2. it is guilty of some of the very sins that it decries, stating opinions as facts and failing to recognize the limits of the author's own knowledge. It is just the kind of book that others will cite as "proving" the truth of the arguments that it makes, so that it will become another non-authoritative source that purports to be authoritative, like many of the author's targets. I was not even able to find enjoyment in the irony of the unconscious self-parody because of the potential this kind of writing has for misuse. And it is the worse because I agree with many of the author's sentiments. I just don't like his exposition. I want to have smart, constructive, respectful people on my side, not ranting haters.

[Pavol Hardos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Our public debates lack intellectual rigor, our scientists no longer enjoy the respect of their authoritative position in a given field, common people ignore facts and asserts their know-nothing opinions as equally valuable. We are living, Nichols says, the age of the death of expertise. Paradoxically – and unfortunately – this book serves as the best argument for its main thesis.

Or maybe it could be read as a sort of elaborate test on the reader – are you capable of seeing through rhetoric & fanciful arguments lacking in empirical support? For if you take the book’s thesis at face value, if you agree with it, despite lacking a convincing argument, then you are what the book argues for – symptom of the true death of expertise.

For a work that talks about expertise and the importance of relying on authoritative judgment it is scant when it comes to actually relying on it. You'd be hard pressed to spot any references to works in the sociology of expertise, philosophy of expert knowledge, or at least some authoritative data (Tetlock’s classic study being a lone exception). What you do get instead are references to other similar tracts and complaints, ranging from Tocqueville, Ortega Y Gasset to Hofstadter, or C.S. Lewis.

We are repeatedly told that there is a change, a growth, a rise in the culture of ignorance, assertive arrogance of the know-nothings and never-learners, but we are given exactly zero data points to prove any of it. Zilch. We do get plenty of assertions that this is so. And anecdotes. Let's not forget the anecdotes. This is all the more irritating when you realize that the issues covered and some of the trends discussed might be worth the attention but are short-shifted by the overly flimsy style, journalistic overreach and – shockingly – lack of citations to relevant academic literature.

You might think I am being unfair, so here is a rundown of the contents:

The first chapter is probably the worst offender, we hear the main thesis asserted and hear nothing to back it up – apart from just-so stories. They sound plausible, but rest on misplaced nostalgia of ‘olden days when experts weren’t questioned’. You get a whiff of reactionary rhetoric, you’ve heard this before – things are terrible ‘these days’. But we do get, for example, a brief explanation of the concept of low information voter. As if to coin low-information pundit for himself, Nichols wheels out a well-known concept in political science on the general ignorance of voters and attempts to build a proof of the ‘culture of ignorance’. Of course, being ignorant and living in a ‘culture of ignorance’ are two very different things, but Nichols tries to get away with such equivocation anyway, probably because he knows most readers won’t notice.

In the next chapter, he explains why they likely won’t notice. It’s because we are stupid. This chapter offers an explainer of our biases, fallacious reasoning, meta-cognitive failures, conspiracy theorizing etc., as if our human inability to hold a reasoned argument were a) anything new and b) at all relevant to the thesis. It’s not – but it sounds nice and informative too.

Then we get the maybe-not-entirely-curmudgeonly-but-still-mostly-irrelevant gripes about the shape and trends in higher education. This chapter is basically an ABCs collection of complaints about students (too many!), administration, grade inflation, ratings, education for sale (students can’t be clients!), etc. There are probably better treatments of the subject (almost any editorial in Chronicle of Higher Education comes to mind), while Nichols strikes even this elitist curmudgeon as going too far. I mean, pointing to emails as too easily available and intimate a means of communication with teachers that can lead to eroding the respect for experts has got to be a stretch of some sorts, right? Right?

Well, the next chapter stretches to further latitudes and looks at the internet as a partial culprit. Of course, Nichols does not outright lay the blame on the Internet, it merely ‘accelerates’ a trend, and so on, he is too smart to do such a thing. But then he does it anyway – there is too much of everything, he says. Googling things gives you an illusion of competence – which owning a library card or a set of encyclopedias never did, oh no. You can find stuff online, but need to go through piles and piles of shit – as if there weren’t heuristics, filters, aggregators, newsletters, search engines, or learning curves of information processing already being developed, or the potential for institutional gate-keeping and information filtering weren’t a possibility. Some of the problems he describes are very real, Internet does still have its kinks, but then so did book-printing – again something he recognizes, but annoyingly fails to develop. Wouldn’t fit the dumb-mongering.

The stylized facts which have little to do with the main thesis continue with more old-fusspot gripes about journalism ‘these days’. Howlers and incorrect reporting have always been a feature of journalism, sometimes unavoidable in the rush to publish asap – but Nichols maintains that “these kinds of mistakes happen a lot more frequently in the new world of twenty-first-century journalism” (137). Now, kids, you might notice this is a factual statement of the empirical variety. Do you think Nichols backs it up with any data? Nah. Something like this would not fly by a neophyte Wikipedia editor, eagerly flagging [citation needed] left and right, but it seems good enough for the Oxford University Press. Anyway, much more could be said about this quaint chapter but to give you an idea of the general tenor it’s probably sufficient to note that Walter Cronkite types get name-checked here as ‘calming authoritative figures’ who used to report even ‘most awful events with aplomb and detachment’ (141). Crikey.

Finally, sixth chapter tackles the issue of expert failure. It would be entirely passable (if it weren’t so unintentionally ironic) and informative for anyone who has a very limited knowledge of how science is (or should be) done. However, it is not quite clear what Nichols intends to achieve with this chapter – that experts fail is hardly novel – and it should not make them less respected or useful. Of course, we now know more about their failures, thanks to increased education, and attention paid to their potential misconduct by a citizenry informed through the internet. He does not intend that knowing about the limits of expert knowledge is potentially bad, though given what came before that could be a possible conclusion one might draw here.

The conclusion discusses the necessity for finding the balance between experts and their clients – citizens in a democracy. You’d think Nichols finally dispenses some level-headed analysis of how experts should rebuild the lost trust, how the greatest challenge lies with them. Nope, it’s the proles’ problem. People need to step up, they should not be lazy and ignorant. Gee, thanks, great advice.

In general, arguments often take this painful form: a strong statement "There is X, it sucks!" is followed by an anecdote or two, which usually illustrate a minor 'x' or a related phenomenon, but doesn't really unequivocally support the main statement. Afterword, Nichols wisely offers a paragraph or two of caveats, why actually it isn't so simple and X is not the full story. But then he concludes that "Nevertheless, X!".

Here it is in equation form:

X!
[x, y, un-X1, un-X2, z]
X!

I don't know yet what to call this sandwich, but nothing flattering comes to mind.

Those are the perils of expanding a blog rant into a book. Once the strong statements of an article get to be unpacked, elaborated and supported with evidence, we see that it's a bit more complicated. Once you apply judicious analysis - something the author can do very well, lest I forget to mention this - the simplifications of the thesis no longer hold much water. But without the main thesis, we are left with nothing but qualifications and stories (however illuminating and entertaining on their own some of them may be).

But why do the hard intellectual work of abandoning a sexy thesis, when you can sell a book? The death of expertise indeed, the book seems a case in point. But it's not the public who are to blame. It's the experts, sadly. Resigned to their responsibilities, eager to provide a spotlight for themselves in the public ecosystem with whatever thesis secures popularity, selling the public their biases back with a sign of expert approval. The book is one long example of confirmation bias for those who like to think of themselves as smarter, more knowledgeable, ‘better’ – the book could be catnip to less discerning science-fans, debunkers, and skeptics.

When you want to decry a culture, look at what the producers of said culture do.

Indeed, there's a potential case to be made for the hollowing of our public discourse and the trust in expert knowledge, but this book serves not as prosecution, but as an exhibit.

[Mehrsa · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I read one more book that promises to be about something big, but then melts down into a rant about SJW college protestors. With all the problems in the world, is that one really the most important to some people?

I like the thesis of the book and I agree that there is a Dunning-Krueger effect writ large happening in our culture right now. The book made some great points, but it was super biased at points. One example, think of a linguist that has strayed far outside his area of expertise to opine on all sorts of things as though he were an expert. I would immediately think of Stephen Pinker, then John McWhorter and then Noam Chompsky. He doesn't even bring up Stephen Pinker in talking about expertise run wild but only talks about Noam. That is just one example, but there are plenty in here.

With experts that cherrypick like this and subtly make their point ideological, is it any wonder people don't trust experts anymore? (Not that I am defending the conspiracy people--I'd take the ideologically blind experts any day over the anti-vaxxers)

[Jennifer (Insert Lit Pun)]

A thought-provoking, impassioned case for what makes trust in experts necessary to a healthy, functioning democracy (or republic, a distinction made in the final chapter). I wasn’t expecting too much from this, as I find a lot of the content in The Federalist to be utter tripe (and Nichols is a senior contributor there), but it’s always nice to be pleasantly surprised by a book (and a good reminder that you don’t need to agree with someone’s politics to find their book worthwhile). Nichols’s writing is funny and sharp, and I’ll be incorporating some of his insights into my thought processes from now on.

Some examples:

-“The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.”

-“Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.”

-“[There is] an inability among laypeople to understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything.”

-“Americans no longer distinguish the phrase ‘you’re wrong’ from the phrase ‘you’re stupid.’ To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult. And to refuse to acknowledge all views as worthy of consideration, no matter how fantastic or inane they are, is to be close-minded.”

-“Public debate over almost everything devolves into trench warfare, in which the most important goal is to establish that the other person is wrong.”

-“The tendency in conversation is to use ‘evidence’ to mean ‘things which I perceive to be true,’ rather than ‘things that have been subjected to a test of their factual nature by agreed-upon rules.’”

And on and on. I highlighted dozens of passages, several of which included crucial distinctions I’ve never made before (like the difference between a generalization and a stereotype – the former can be useful at times, whereas the latter almost never is). This is a book written for laypeople, and so, ironically, it’s not particularly solid or methodical in the academic sense, but I didn’t mind that Nichols sacrificed rigor for approachability. He takes examples of poor logic from both the left and the right, which is fair and appropriate, although this leads to some false equivalency (judging by this book, you’d think that academic “safe spaces” and Fox News propaganda are equally responsible for the destruction of public intellect). But it’s impossible to read this kind of book without having little quibbles, and overall I recommend it.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Laypeople complain about the rule of experts and they demand greater involvement in complicated national questions, but many of them only express their anger and make these demands after abdicating their own important role in the process: namely, to stay informed and politically literate enough to choose representatives who can act on their behalf.”

The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols is a timely survey of what's happening in the US (and arguably many other regions) in regards to rationality, critical thinking, and the public distrust of experts, evidence, and research in general.

Nichols uses the book to pinpoint the different institutions that lead (and continue to perpetuate) this phenomenon, and none will come as a surprise; he calls higher education a customer service market where students are catered to rather than educated, he points to the vituperative internet with questionable and fake sources, outrage culture, and conspiracies, to the Media for click bait headlines instead of investigation, and finally to government and policy makers for ignoring the science and research to make lasting and costly unilateral decisions.

I read a similar book last month for #scienceseptember, Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger. It was more directive and specific to evidence-based activism and policy making, while this book is a social survey, but the call was the same: DON'T OUTSOURCE YOUR BRAIN.

Also BE HUMBLE and get over yourself. Realize that you don't know everything, and others know more and have a different lived experience than you do. And YES, sometimes experts are wrong, but they are *less* wrong than a non-expert. Shut up and listen, and then do your research. And lastly, reading an article on the internet is not the same as getting a PhD or decades working in a field.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

It should come as no surprise to many of you that I enjoyed this book. I read things like:
- You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
- Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
among others, and enjoy them.

This is in a similar vein, and slightly less humorous in the approach than some of the others, but that's OK. This book covers a lot of the same territory as those other books, including things like confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, and how we tend to see a lack of evidence for something as proof of its existence, particularly in conspiracy theories. It talks about how the internet has ruined everything while improving life exponentially. It talks about how journalism and the news no longer provides us with information that we should have and need to stay informed, now it's simply about keeping us entertained enough not to switch the channel to something else. It talks about how colleges have become safe spaces more than centers of learning, and how coddling peoples emotions and feelings has actually resulted in a role reversal, where the faculty is subordinate to the students. College is now ubiquitous, but meaningless. You might end up with a degree, but what did you actually LEARN other than Beer Pong and How To Avoid Having To Think About Concepts Outside Your Bubble 101? Colleges are a service industry now, he argues, and the customer (students and paying parents) are always right.

This book covers a LOT of ground. From science getting it wrong sometimes eroding the trust that people have in scientific methods, to WebMD creating monsters who now think that they know more after one 10 minute Google search than the doctor who studied for years, to well, how a completely unqualified and inept pathological liar ends up in the White House. Sigh.

The only thing that wasn't included was the Flat Earth Society, but that really started getting popular again after this book came out, so I guess I'll give it a pass. None of the events of 45's term is included either, which is probably a good thing, because Tom Nichols may have written himself to a coronary trying to break this shitfest of a trainwreck down.

It's a bit disheartening, honestly. Shit is bad. People are stupid. And it doesn't look to be getting better. But it is interesting because even though I know and admit and see for myself how easy it is to fall into this trap of agreeing with the info you WANT to believe rather than the truth, maybe books like this will help stem the tide.

I will say that this book was a bit repetitive and could have been a wee bit more concise, but maybe the editors let it go because of the subject matter. We need repetition for stuff to stick, clearly.

Finally, I definitely recommend this book, but if you pick it up, I would suggest NOT doing the audio, or using earphones if you do. I listened to this in the car, which I do ALL THE TIME, but the reader made it super annoying for this book. He has a nice voice, and he's a good reader, but his tone is all over the place, and I'd miss words or phrases because he dropped into a lower pitch and road noise would drown him out. I'd be listening along and then all of a sudden, he goes into this conspiratorial low tone, and I can't hear it anymore. Then he's back to normal with the next line... things are fine, then drops out again. And again. I had to max out my car stereo volume to avoid this, and when he was at normal loudness, it was uncomfortably loud. My car is NOT loud. It's a normal car. Windows up, driving along, I usually listen to music at level 10-15 or so, and if I'm jamming, probably 25-30, and audiobooks I usually bump up to 30-35 range, because they tend to be lower volume overall. I had to max out at 45 just to hear all of the tone dropped phrases because of this reader. SUPER annoying.

Still, I would recommend the book regardless of format, just be aware that the reader is all over the place.

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is sure to put some people off. With good reason, too. We've become accustomed to think of ourselves as experts on everything. We're all guilty of it from time to time. Nichols points out that he himself is not immune. Still, there is a serious crisis of authority in not only the United States (although the affliction is largely here) that says an opinion is as good as fact. "I think" becomes "that's the way it really is." Facts have to be qualified as real or alternative. And it's happening in real time.

As Nichols points out, the real problem is that many people are arrogant about their lack of learning. That arrogance leads them to despise those who have actual expertise in an area. Reading for a doctorate, for example, generally results in someone being an expert in her or his area. If the school is sound, this is the best way we can know if someone knows what s/he's talking about. Americans tend to hate such experts, castigating them as "know it alls" who think their opinions are more valid. The sad fact is, as Nichols points out, those opinions are more valid.

This era of misfortune known as the Trump administration is sad testimony to the state of our national hatred of factual evidence. Opinion and pride outweigh objective learning. Nichols admits he doesn't know everything. He's an expert on Russian relations, and he admits to knowing less about other things. Those of us with doctorates (I'm a specialist on the obscure goddess Asherah) know to admit when we're speaking outside our areas of learning. The more education one has, the more humble one should become. Those, however, without education speak loudly and proudly and declare that experts are the problem.

Nichols shows how our entire civilization is built on the assumption of expertise. The division of labor can't function without it. Still, largely because of the Internet, we've decided that loud voices are the right voices, no matter what the experts say. This is a provocative and very important book.

I say a bit more about it on my blog: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

[Tony61 · Rating 2 out of 5]

(Borrowed hard cover, library)

Short review: If you want to know about the measurement and limitations of expertise, read Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise or anything by Nassim Taleb, both of whom are mentioned and grossly misunderstood by Nichols.

Long review: Nichols subtitles the book “The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters”, which is appealing to anyone who considers themselves an expert at something. (And who doesn’t?) At first this seemed a bit gratuitous for an ivory tower type to bemoan the affrontery of the hoi polloi dismissing the ivory tower experts! The gall! But after reading a few chapters I realize that not only is this thesis gratuitous, it’s arrogantly gratuitous.

But hey, I’m okay with a little arrogance, and g-d knows I love gratuity as much as the next guy, so read on I did. The first chapter shows us that most people are stupid. He cites statistics about how little citizens know about their government and foreign aid and says that “the death of expertise actually threatens to reverse the gains of years of knowledge…” (emphasis in original). Really? Knowledge will go away? Please.

People have always been stupid and Nichols even quotes Isaac Asimov from more than two generations ago: “There is a cult of ignorance in America, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a thread winding its way through our political and cultural life…” And yet, we don’t seem to have lost any gains over the last 60 years. In fact, the gains in tangible well-being have been nothing but staggeringly positive if you look at measurable things like infant mortality, life expectancy, cancer therapies, foodborne illness, energy acquisition, war death, murder rates, abortion rates, wealth generation, etc, etc…. So where is all the increasing tragedy?
No data is offered.

And this is the issue. Despite an explosion of big data over the last 10-15 years, Nichols looks at very little tangible data to back up his claims. On the one hand he argues that even experts cannot predict the future and the value in expertise is explaining the past, yet he makes little attempt to collate and analyze the data of even the recent past. Instead he complains about how expertise is being disrespected while doing the exact thing that deserves this often deserved disrespect.

Nichols makes bold claims about the lack of seriousness of students today, but compared to whom? Were college students more serious in the 1970’s, 80’s, 90’s? Nichols could provide evidence of dope smoking or poorer exam scores or grade inflation, but he never does. He only makes anecdotal claims about students giving poor professor reviews or he relates media accounts of students complaining about political correctness. Okay, so a tenured professor may or may not have been fired because of student pressure over some quibble. Is this a trend or a one-off? This never happened in 1965, or 1665 for that matter?

He notes that the 1980’s were marked by HIV/AIDS denialists, which is true, yet AIDS deaths have nevertheless plummeted and HIV carriers who were relegated to horrific certain death just a short while ago now live relatively normal lives. Willful ignorance by the few has not reversed any gains. Science marches on.

Even vaccine denialism is self-limited. When large groups eschew vaccination for misguided reasons, outbreaks do occur; however, as in the famous case in Southern California, a few cases led to a stark realization and parents quickly vaccinated their kids. Such behavior has always been present and the effects are self-limiting.

Interestingly, Nichols makes seemingly valid arguments when he criticizes his own field--higher education-- which has become a profit-center to the detriment of students who struggle with crushing debt and spotty quality. Yet he offers no statistical numbers to back his claim (although I know it exists), but more damning, Nichols proposes no solution, which any quality polemic would do. Of all people and all issues, I would think Nichols would be the perfect individual to provide wisdom and remedy.

Nichols points out that confirmation bias is rife and the internet has indeed provided myriad echo chambers for wackos and ignoramuses to promote conspiracy theories, charlatanism and even foment violence. However, he neglects to add that the dissemination of data over the internet has also sped up solutions to almost every major dilemma we face. Most disturbingly, Nichols looks at no data to backup his claims that confirmation bias is any worse than in past generations or has led to observable negative trends. Maybe he’s correct that terrorism is worse today, but the evidence I’ve seen shows the opposite.

He also has much criticism for the media outlets and especially the ideologically driven media outlets that push hard right or hard left. Again, he may have a point that these are increasing in influence, but he offers no objective data to back that claim. Muckrakers and yellow journalism have been ever present in human history dating back to the hellenistic schools of rhetoric. Is today any worse, or are the stakes just higher with the shrinking global community? Nichols doesn't lend much insight, only anecdotal complaint.

In reference to my short review above, Nichols broaches Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb, two thinkers from very different backgrounds who have written much better tomes on the subjects of how humans process information and what it all means. Nichols seems to misunderstand these two authors’ take home messages.

Nate Silver wrote "The Signal and the Noise", which is an excellent explanation and demonstration of Bayesian probability using real numbers. Nichols mischaracterizes Silver’s prediction of the 2016 presidential election as a failure. Silver was more correct than anyone, and he never made any “prediction”; that’s not how Bayesian probability works. Silver basically said there were equal probabilities of any of three scenarios, a) 33% chance that Clinton wins in a landslide, b) 33% chance that Clinton wins in a squeaker, and c) 33% chance that Trump wins in a squeaker. Silver wasn’t wrong. The fact that Nichols misrepresents this thesis shows that he might not understand the concept of probability. As a wise person once said, before you get to statistics you must understand probability.

Likewise with Nassim Taleb, Nichols notes that Taleb decries the whole enterprise of prediction as “epistemic arrogance” and therefore should be avoided. Nichols argues that prediction cannot be avoided because it’s human nature to try to foretell the future and therefore we should try to get it right. Fine, try any fool thing you like, but expect to be wrong. That’s kinda Taleb’s whole point.

In fact, The Death of Expertise is a book-length example of what Taleb would call “the narrative fallacy.” Nichols fails to see any alternate view that might explain reality and presents no data or data analysis. Are students worse today than ever before? Is the internet making the world less safe and people more ignorant? Is media derelict in its duty?

In his conclusions, Nichols makes some inane argument that “fed up” experts are going to revolt, almost like an Ayn Randian argument to Go Galt. He says that there will be some cataclysm that will show the need for experts. Please spare me the drama. In fact, it was the expert class, including Nichols himself, that contributed to the decreased faith in expertise. When the Iraq war was on Cheney’s agenda, Nichols and his ilk were all in for an invasion. Even today he defends the invasion as necessary. How much more epistemically arrogant can a person get?

Move on. There are much better books that do what Nichols is trying to do here.

[Lenny D · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible. Formally shoddy, intellectually bankrupt, curmudgeonly ranting. The Death of Expertise is an ugly look at just how narrow-minded a career in academia can make someone. Nichols, who does somehow come off as intelligent, has written an argument of monumental cluelessness that reveals far more about his own ego than about the state of “established knowledge.”

Reading this book is to suffer the extended grumble of a crotchety elitist who seems to hate most of what’s in the world. Nichols’ fundamental argument is that our society is in a crisis in which the expertise of people like him—he really truly means specifically people like him—is being drowned out by the fraudulent knowledge of random people on the Internet.

The book starts off OK, with rants about Jenny McCarthy and Gwenyth Paltrow. But when Nichols runs out of easy examples and persists in his argument apace, without evidence, it quickly becomes clear that this is one guy’s personal philippic about not getting enough respect.

The problem with his rant is threefold.

First, the bare minimum of writing a book about an epidemic of social hostility to expertise is convincing me that this trend is actually happening. Nichols does not do this.

The subtitle warns of a “campaign against established knowledge,” but he never remotely proves this campaign to be real, or pervasive, or new. Instead, he restates unsubstantiated generalizations over and over. In this book, the ignorant, overconfident enemy is “most people.” His diagnoses of the problem are substanceless vagaries like how “The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of positive hostility to such knowledge.” (20) Ok, but uninformed people have always had opinions and mistrusted ivory tower elites, and in the blogosphere, now, each voice is more amplified than any other point in history. You have to do more to show me this is a real, current issue.

Instead, this passage from the intro typifies his passive-tense glossiness:

The result [of recent social changes and universal education] has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else…. We now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing. (7)

Is it? Is this even happening in society? Look, I’m not going to deny any Never Trump Republican, like Nichols, the right to bitch about how unbelievably fucking stupid the people around them are. But to whom exactly is this statement supposed to refer? Yes, there are some people who don’t believe in vaccination, but knowing of them and their dangerous impact on society is what got me to pick up the book in the first place. In order to walk me further into his theory, Nichols would need to prove that people like that have a malign influence all over society. He doesn’t even try. Instead, he continually and haughtily alludes to the problem, expecting his entire audience to be nodding along.

Here’s an example of what he offers his imaginary crowd of cranks, from chapter 3, which is about why democratized access to college annoys him.

Higher education is supposed to cure us of the false belief that everyone is as smart as everyone else.

(Hold up: Imagine thinking that the purpose of college is literally to be better than someone else. Should give you a feel for the nursing home La-Z-Boy Nichols is shouting from. Anyway, moving on:)

Unfortunately, in the twenty-first century the effect of widespread college attendance is just the opposite: the great number of people who have been in or near a college think of themselves as educated peers of even the most accomplished scholars and experts.

No one in the goddamn fucking world thinks this. Listen, I’ve been to college. I even had the kind of perfunctory, mediocre university experience he hates. And in my demographic, people tend to know when they're talking to someone who actually knows what they're talking about. Yes, we are passionate about political ideas (I'll get to that in a second) but in my experience, the people who are much more confident they know how the world should work are the less educated; the everyman pragmatists; and especially, the old people who get their information from social media and cable news. Let’s finish.

College is no longer a time devoted to learning and personal maturation; instead the stampede of young Americans into college and the consequent competition for their tuition dollars have produced a consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right.

There’s obviously truth to this last sweeping generalization, but it is untrue to say that it is no longer a place where knowledge can be transmitted. Listen, I hate that our current academic system requires a diploma mostly to prove your class provenance. I also think that there's a reason why today's citizen needs a more expansive base of knowledge than we did in previous eras, simply due to the greater amount of "established knowledge" available. The amount of information in a single scientific discipline today exceeds the amount of total information available to a scientific polymath in the era when universities began. But Nichols just brushes this dynamic away in a nuclear blast.

His real complaint is that “conversations” have “become exhausting.” That’s the title of chapter 2, and it has much more to do with people he considers stupid being emboldened to not revere his opinion than with any change in society.

He gets the Dunning-Kruger Effect wrong by defining it as “the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.” As if to prove his point, this is absolutely not correct. The theory associates the variables of skill and confidence, not whatever horseshit intelligence metric he believes in. I honestly felt like I was gonna drift into negroid vs. oriental phrenology in parts of this book.

More importantly, Nichols is simply unrelatable on his central frustration. Here are his words from p. 45:

Pair [incompetent and self-unaware] people with experts, and, predictably enough, misery results. The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don’t know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they’re failing to make a logical argument. In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry.

This is a good place to remember that this complaint was written by someone who thinks it permissible to use the terms “experts, professionals, and intellectuals” interchangeably.

The experience he’s describing is not something I come across often. When someone loses an argument due to truly knowing a lot less than someone else, it’s usually obvious to all parties. It’s a beatdown. Sure, someone can be intransigent and stupid, but who cares? Is this really a problem gnawing at Nichols so acutely that he had to write a book about it? In short, he never establishes that it does.

The second problem with his argument is that Nichols never fully acknowledges that, if people are reluctant to trust the word of experts, we have damn good reason.

To prove justness of any potential suspicion for the word of "experts," we need look no further than his area of expertise: national security and geopolitics. The biggest single lesson in American life over the last sixty years has been that we ought to presume mendacity and incompetence and cynical intentions from the US government—and all its brahmin “experts”—on the subject of foreign policy, especially where, how, when, and why we wage war. My generation alone witnessed the president lie blatantly on national television and start a war we’re still not out of. I don’t throw this phrase around often, because I do agree it’s a dangerous and jejune sentiment… but in Nichols' area of “expertise,” what have the experts really done for us? If anything, people like him have forced a right-thinking citizen to second-guess everything he says.

If we have an epistemological crisis in this country, it’s because of what “the experts” have sold to us. We are up to our fucking eardrums in marketing and propaganda; monied interests and nation-states actively concoct the bullshit ravaging our politics; the US government has a tendency to lie about its activities; “medical experts” have a tendency to push harmful advice on us, from cigarettes to white bread to opioid pain medication; “economic experts” have driven jobs and community and soul out of rural America; and we literally have no godforsaken idea what images or statements to believe anymore. Those are the roots of our “war on established knowledge.” Nichols includes a chapter called "When the Experts Are Wrong" that nonetheless fails to address this element of modern life.

The third problem with Nichols’ argument is that he insists that the only channel through which one can gain expertise is academia. This is exactly the kind of small-mindedness that often lead experts to be blind to events and factors outside their specialized purview.

In Nichols’ telling, experts are people who have gotten advanced degrees from top schools in a given area of study. (Yes, he even distinguishes between good and bad grad programs. Such an arrogant prick.)

There’s a lot wrong with this idea. Aside from the fact that this model obviously flatters the course in life he happens to have taken, and that academia itself is a wheezing red giant, how would any new expertise ever be created if it had to come from some accredited program? How could a lifetime of rigorous, intelligent study in an area be less valid than formal training in that area?

His point is easier to understand given that his true targets are the Jenny McCarthys of the world, who read and propagate garbage information on the internet. But his theory is crafted badly enough that he also throws in Noam Chomsky as an example of someone who, like McCarthy, claims to be an expert in something he didn’t study (194). It’s a patently ludicrous idea that Noam Chomsky is some keyboard warrior who should really stick to linguistics and leave the (checks notes) US foreign policy to the geniuses who have certainly not led us into any fifty-year wars recently.

I’d like to close this out by attempting to wrestle with the legitimate question this book does pose, and that’s on the definition of expertise itself.

First off, there should be no confusion of the terms 'intellectual,' 'expert,' or 'academic.' These are different, even complementary ways to approach an area of human knowledge. An "expert" is the person who knows exactly how Snowden got his documents out of the NSA computer system, but an "intellectual" is someone more interested in the moral implications of a surveillance state. The distinction is obvious, and any insinuation otherwise is a signal of Nichols' head-smacking obtuseness.

Second, we need to acknowledge that relative expertise is possible. A lot of the most vital and formative areas of momentum in our world are ones in which no one is an actual expert, and we’re all just figuring it out as we go along. No one knows for sure how long it will take to create generalized AI, for example, but there are certainly experts in the space, and they are in fact proving to be monumentally important to the future of our species.

The best definition of “expert” I could come up with was “a person who is a root resource in a specific domain.” Someone who is the best possible (meaning available, not necessarily conceivable) knower of a specific field of human knowledge. “Expertise” is reaching the end of the line in terms of what humans know about something. Going to an expert is going to the source.

This definition also acknowledges the Foucaultian idea that knowledge itself is site-dependent. All thinking transpires from and towards a context, and expertise exemplifies that fact. (Consider the differences between an expert in statecraft during Old Kingdom Egypt vs. one negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership.) Expertise is doing the best we can with what we have to achieve the goals we think are best.

Which goes to another point I wanted to shout at Nichols: the implication that only accredited expertise belongs in roles of leadership is wrong. Vision is what counts.

In a democracy, politics is supposed to be demotic. It is supposed to be something built around priorities and ideologies—areas in which there is no way to be an expert. At some point, you have to decide what you want the federal budget to prioritize for the citizenry, and let the experts execute that vision. The record producer doesn’t need to be an expert in sound engineering; it helps, but their value is being able to direct an expert engineer to achieve a vision. Product managers vs. software engineers, and so on. Forming a cogent vision is a kind of expertise, but what’s really important is being able to marshal and guide other skills and disciplines. Expertise is inert without vision.

In closing, look: people have always had opinions. They’ve always stemmed from the very human attempt to make patterns out of what we see and orient the world around what we irrationally believe to be right. These days, no one needs to be qualified to amplify their voices beyond the reach of even the most broadcast figures of a few decades ago. More of these untested, and yes, stupid, opinions are available to all of us today, but that doesn’t signal the “end of expertise.” It signals the beginning of a new age of information consumption.

Rethinking our social contract in light of the new dynamics of information is an urgent challenge that this book fails to consider. In not bothering to deal with the epistemological realities of our times, and instead clawing for an imagined bygone era, this book is useless—and probably Nichols along with it.

[Simona · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another rant from a privileged academic who bemoans the fact that the real life consequences that people face when the "experts" engage in detached experimentation in economic, social and foreign policy has made them bitter and cynical of the so-called "experts". People are losing good paying jobs while experts in academia like Nichols enjoy no real effect of how their thesis and prediction fails in real world. The experts return with new justifications for their relevance again and again after failing every single time.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"That's just like, your opinion, man" ~ The Dude Abides 1998 (The Big Lebowski)

Discussions of politics or matters of substance these days are exhausting, especially over social media. Polarity, discord, and maddening versions of "the truth" abound. As Cicero once said on Facebook, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, just not their own facts.

Dr. Nichols, Professor at the Naval War College, and 5 time Jeopardy champion, expands on his 2013 seminal namesake article. While there are numerous pieces and pundits who can adroitly "admire the problem", what sets Dr. Nichols' work apart is the context by which he associates the various disconnects and scenarios between laymen and experts. Deep insights are gained as Dr. Nichols weaves us through engagements in public policy, the Internet, higher education, and journalism.

[Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2014, shortly after completing my PhD in Biomedical Sciences (specializing in vaccines and virology), an outbreak of Ebola occurred in Western Africa in some of the most densely populated cities on the continent which would last, to one degree or another, for two years as the world scrambled to respond to a virus which killed ~50% of the people it infected. During this time, especially at the beginning, there was a lot of fear and speculation about what would happen if the virus spread beyond Africa to the rest of the world. On social media, as one would expect, the takes were particularly hyperbolic. There was one person in my feed who was convinced that, not only would the virus come to America and begin to spread, civilization as a whole was on the brink of collapse (a la the movie Contagion). Being an informed person about how Ebola spreads I commented that I thought this was unlikely due to a number of factors that I won't go into in this review. In the end I noted that Ebola does not spread particularly easily and that if she was still worried that she should be careful to wash her hands frequently and avoid touching her face. My comments, however, fell on deaf ears as I was told that "washing hands wasn't going to help."

This is exactly the type of interaction that Nichols finds so disturbing that he wrote a whole book on the subject. Specifically, the American populace has become so distrusting of experts that, as a group, they tend to ignore any information coming from "so-called experts" and even revel in their state of ignorance (see: Trump campaign 2016). This book reviews the causes of this problem, as seen by Nichols, which range from social media echo chambers, confirmation bias, and changes in university culture to expert mistakes and failures. All of this is examined, broadly, through the lens of how this attitude is effecting the voting public (again, see the Presidential campaign of 2016). This war on expertise goes beyond that though, affecting our interactions with specialists in almost all walks of life including doctor visits, foreign policy, media, and so on.

In all, this was a very interesting read, though, as an "expert", I may have enjoyed it because of my own confirmation bias. I am probably considered an expert at a couple of topics though I always hesitate to put that label on myself. After the above encounter on social media, I fell into one of the traps that Nichols talks about in that I simply stopped interacting with people in regards to serious subjects like infectious disease. It is definitely my experience that no one likes a know-it-all and so, I reasoned, all the more reason to shut up and let people believe what they want. However, Nichols argues that it is the responsibility of experts to stay engaged and look for ways to constructively share their knowledge. So I'm going to have to try and do better. But we all have a responsibility to be more engaged, more informed, and more willing to listen to experts because, though we all may be experts at something, none of us are experts at everything.

[Whitney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall: I really wanted to like this book and though it covers many very important issues, it just fell a bit short for me. Very important topics, makes you think, but overall a bit preachy, negative, and I think it could have been better. Most of these topics have all been discussed elsewhere and there was not much new brought in to the discussion with this book. 6/10 or 3.5/5

Summary: I am going to summarize the entire book in the author’s words, the goal of this book is to examine “ the relationship between experts and citizens in a democracy, why that relationship is collapsing, and what all of us, citizens and experts, might do about it… Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue…To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

The Good: The book is divided into several sections and each delves into an important topic. Some of these include higher education, the development of the internet and google, the role of media, and several others. All of these topics are important, well researched, and the author does a very thorough job analyzing and going into detail on them. For the most part nothing felt too long or drawn out.

My favorite discussion was surrounding the Dunning–Kruger effect and the concept of metacognition. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which those who are incompetent, for lack of a better term, have little insight into their incompetence. Nichols defines this as “the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong…“The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don’t know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they’re failing to make a logical argument …. Even more exasperating is that there is no way to educate or inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.”

The Bad: Many other authors have discussed all these topics before and I actually really liked the author’s notes where he lists some great references. The overall tone of this book is quite negative and I feel that it may offend a lot of people. Though there are some really important points, they aren’t really new and the people that should read and learn about them probably won’t. Still, this is a well-written and researched book on an important issue.

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very sloppy, especially considered it was published and edited by Oxford Press. The author is your average Political Science professor whose views on this subject have little more depth than a well researched article by the New Yorker. He quotes studies, reports and anecdotes that are old news to anyone even remotely interested in this issue.

[Saleh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing to say the least. I am very interested in this particular issue and I expected to find answers. When I stumbled upon this book, without a second thought, I bought it and started reading immediately. I tried to avoid rating and commenting mainly because I expect once enough of those accumulate, two main populations will emerge, Nichols' laypeople and his experts, and I want to belong to neither one. I couldn't resist!

1- The final chapter is the only one that could arguable fall under Nichols expertise. The rest of the book, not really! I hate myself for writing this, but since he kept ranting about it and he decided to dedicate a whole book precisely about the issue, I forgive myself. (the same goes for the other comments)

2- Rigor? no thanks, said Nichols. The book is basically, in his words, an extended article (or a blog post to be precise). For prospective readers; don't expect more! He cites some research publications here and there, but resorted to many other factoids and many other outright baseless claims.

3- I expected an extensive analysis of what it means to be an "Expert". I know this is difficult, but its unavoidable, especially given the topic of the book. I find his reports in this matter lacking.

4- Not much of interesting takeaways. The least I expected are some well thought of recommendations throughout the book. Instead, I can polish his recommendations the best as follows; be good, and there will be good. I afraid life isn't this simple! and that is why this book could have been more useful.

I will stop here to avoid becoming the layperson disdaining the "expert"

-----------------------------
Update [Oct 2017]: For those interested in this subject, Machine, Platform, Crowd - Harnessing Our Digital Future tells, although tangentially rather than a main subject of study, the story of an opposite camp which I find more considerate of the complexity and randomness theories.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing.

I agree with the thesis, that the cultural loss of trust in "established knowledge" and the professionals who specialize in such knowledge for the sake of the broader society, is a significant problem. I was hoping for a book that would offer some realistic proposals to address this problem, or at least a cogent analysis of the situation, not a minimally researched extended rant from an old fogey elitist.

Nichols seems oblivious to both economic reality and his own privilege. Never does he acknowledge that a significant reason many Americans attempt DIY solutions to various problems rather than consulting experts is THEY CAN'T AFFORD THEM. Chapters on the state of higher education and journalism ignore the financial pressures that impinge on the decisions made by individuals and institutions in those fields. He hardly seems to be aware of the existence of citizens who don't attend college at all, or who attend but don't complete at least a bachelor's degree, or who can't afford to take their teenagers on road trips to visit every university with amenities that strike their fancy. The narrowness of his view of society handicaps his account.

The descriptions of "how things used to be" vs. "how things are now" seem to based entirely on his own observations/memory, not any serious historical work.

The objection might be made that Nichols is simply trying to "stay in his own lane" as an expert in political science and public policy, not history, economics, or journalism, but this doesn't justify a failure to at least consult experts in those fields by doing some routine library research and/or interviews.

President Trump, the poster child for the death of expertise, wants to "Make America Great Again," and seems to think that just repeating that mantra often enough will magically make it happen. His critic, Nichols, wants to make America trust experts again -- but with hardly any greater attention to how that might come to pass than the politician he critiques.

Recommendation: Just read the Federalist article that grew into this book and call it good. The book-length version does not add enough of substance to make it worth your time.

[CS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bullet Review:

Absolutely brilliant, this book punches through to the heart of why Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and other inane beliefs such as why were having “debates” on vaccines and the flat earth movement.

Of course, this is probably confirmation bias, as I know I’m not as smart as many other people and defer often to their better knowledge. Wish more of my fellow Americans were like this.

Everyone needs to read this with a little bit of goddamn humility. Yes, it’s hard to hear that Trump is partially my fault, but I was disengaged for years so yeah, it’s kinda true.

[Mike Robbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book. I have the odd reservation. But I think it’s important reading, especially at a time like this (I am writing in the depths of the Corona pandemic).

Tom Nichols is a lecturer in international and strategic affairs who taught for some years at two of America’s most exclusive institutions, Dartmouth College and later Georgetown University. He is now Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, a venerable institution in Newport, Rhode Island. He is a conservative, though with a small C; he never bought into Trump and finally left the Republican Party after the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. In 2017 he published The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.

The Death of Expertise is, in some respects, a good old-fashioned rant. The possession of facts does not, says Nichols, equate to knowledge, but too many people do not understand the difference. The Internet has driven some of this, making everyone an instant expert. It offers an “apparent shortcut to expertise”, but actually just a limitless supply of facts, which does not constitute knowledge. “The Internet,” says Nichols, “lets a billion flowers bloom, and most of them stink.”

Ignorance, says Nichols, has become hip. He cites the raw milk movement – people who demand untreated dairy products. He quotes Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker (April 2012) saying that untreated milk, which is often from pasture animals, is said to be “richer and sweeter, and, sometimes, to retain a whiff of the farm – the slightly discomfiting flavor known to connoisseurs as ‘cow butt’.” As Nichols points out, the Centers for Disease Control reckon unpasteurized products are 150 times more likely to cause food-borne illnesses. Still, says Nichols, it’s a free country, and if adults wish to risk a trip to hospital for “the scent of a cow’s nether regions in their coffee”, that’s up to them. He also describes how Gwyneth Paltrow has encouraged people to steam their vaginas, which she claims (he says; I haven’t checked) cleans your uterus and helps balance your hormones. People have always been stupid, but the Net does not help; as he says, “in an earlier time, a sensible American woman would have had to exert a great deal of initiative to find out how a Hollywood actress parboils her plumbing.”

All of which is funny, but actually not new. People do not need the Internet to be daft. I remember, a few years before it arrived, there was a fad for colonic irrigation, which some very fashionable people did in London in 1990. I asked a doctor friend what the health benefits were likely to be. “Peritonitis,” she said crisply. The following year I was travelling in Ecuador and found a craze for the so-called pulsera de balance, a wrist ornament that was supposed to deliver energy and equilibrium. In an earlier era the travel writer Norman Lewis and his brother-in law, passing through Madrid in 1934, decided to investigate a reported mania amongst madrileños for drinking animal blood. They visited a slaughterhouse, but were “deterred by a woman on her way out, made terrible by the smile painted by the blood on her lips.” We have never needed the Internet to be bizarre. There's nothing much new in the world. Is Nichols just having a good grumble?

Not entirely. Nichols is not simply being (or at least, only being) a grumpy old man. There is something new going on, in its extent if not in principle. This is not just about parboiling one’s plumbing; in ceasing to respect expertise, people no longer acknowledge that the world cannot be run without it. “It is ...ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those more educated and experienced than themselves,” says Nichols. This was, he says, directly reflected in the 2016 election result. Trump’s election was, in his view, partly achieved by sneering at experts – which tapped into a long-standing American prejudice. “Trump’s eventual victory ...was ...undeniably one of the most recent – and one of the loudest – trumpets sounding the impending death of expertise.” And he adds elsewhere: “The celebration of ignorance cannot launch communications satellites ...or provide for effective medications.”

Why is this happening? Nichols has more than one target; the Internet, to be sure, but also a decline in academia. He opines that universities are not teaching critical thinking; that they are instead just peddling the “college experience”, part of the “commodification of education”. He may be right here. Given the mountain of debt with which students emerge from college, it is not surprising that they see themselves, sometimes, as customers, rather than realise they are there to learn intellectual rigour. This is also a problem in the UK, where the introduction of tuition fees means that students are, increasingly, being sold a product, and that they expect to get concrete promised returns afterwards, having paid for it. A recent £65,000 settlement won by a student in England because she felt her degree was not meaningful could be seen as a demonstration of this. Objective data on this commodification is hard to find, and universities have always varied in quality. Still, Nichols may have a point – he talks, for example, about lecturers being evaluated the way a Yelp review is done of a restaurant. He is right to object to this. University teachers are there to make students think, not to make them comfortable, and should not be evaluated the way one would an online delivery service. And it is by definition absurd to have situations where all the students are above average.

Academics get a battering in this book for other reasons, too. Nichols devotes a chapter to saying that experts themselves have been producing research that cannot be replicated (there is a “replicability crisis” going on, especially in some areas of the social sciences). There is great pressure on academics to publish, which does not help. Neither are research journals always so rigorous as they should be. I cannot help wondering how Andrew Wakefield’s notorious MMR-and-autism study was published by the The Lancet. But it would at least not have done it if it had suspected that data had been falsified. Other journals might not have been so scrupulous. All of this has helped build public distrust of “experts”.

Nichols also blames the media for the tidal wave of ignorance. They fail, he says, to check facts and they spread disinformation through sheer laziness. The classic case he describes is a story that claimed new research had found that chocolate helps weight loss. There is of course no real evidence for anything of the kind. The story had been cooked up by a science writer, John Bohannon, to demonstrate bad science and how easily its “results” could be accepted (I Fooled Millions into thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here’s how). The institute claimed to have done the research did not exist. But the journalists who spread the story did nothing to check. It wasn’t difficult, because journalists are lazy and want a ready-made story.

But perhaps the most important driver for the celebration of stupidity is one that Nichols mentions only briefly. He quotes political scientist Richard Hofstadter, writing in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), as follows: “In the original American dream, the omnicompetence of the common man was fundamental and indispensable… Today, he knows that he cannot even make his breakfast without using devices ...which expertise has put at his disposal; and ...he reads about a whole range of issues and acknowledges, if he is candid with himself, that he has not acquired competence to judge most of them.” Hofstadter said that this complexity induced feelings of helplessness and anger among a people that knew they were at the mercy of smarter elites. “Once,” says Hofstadter, “the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.”

This is a rich vein that Nichols could have mined much more deeply than he does. If people seek to decry expertise and abandon complexity, could this be the real reason? Not so much narcissism (I do not need experts) as fear (I am losing control of my world)? And either way, what is the answer? Nichols does not really supply one; he is better at diagnostics than treatment.

For me, there are flaws in this book. Nichols presents the celebration of ignorance as a new phenomenon, but it isn't; it predates the Internet by a long way - in fact, it was one of the underpinnings of fascism. He does not look for subtler causes for the malady (such as Hofstadter’s). And he doesn’t really suggest a remedy.

Yet in many ways he is not wrong. Willful ignorance might not be new; but what is, is its presence at the highest level of Western governments. Nichols is right, too, about the Internet's ability to spread idiocy that much faster. He is probably also right about the commodification of education, even if no real measure of this exists. Last but not least, he has a warning for us about the decline in critical thinking. We live in a world where few seem really to understand the difference between an assertion and a statement, a hypothesis and a result, or a rumour and a fact.

We may come to regret that more than ever in this time of pandemic, when fear stalks us all and only clear heads and science can protect us.

[Roxana Chirilă · Rating 2 out of 5]

How is this book peer-reviewed and published by the Oxford University Press? *sigh*

The thing is, I started out reading this book from a position friendly to Tom Nichols'. I, too, believe that there is a "death of expertise", in the sense that experts are no longer treated as authorities in their own domains. I, too, believe that the modern world of googling and oceans of misinformation has led to an astonishing number of people who have strong opinions on things they don't know. I, too, believe this is a problem today, perhaps more so than in other decades, though who am I to tell?

I wanted to hear what an expert had to say about it. How do people with the knowledge and resources to write about this topic, well, write about it?

The answer is: badly.

For all that Tom Nichols lets us know about the dangers of "confirmation bias" and cherry-picking examples that confirm a thesis (rather than looking at hard data), he wrote a book in which he cherry-picked examples that confirmed his thesis (rather than looking at hard data).

I am deeply disappointed.

"The Death of Expertise" is a long, ranty essay about the state of the world today. People have access to more information, but not better information. Colleges treat students like clients rather than people who need to be shown their way in life (providing the experience of studenthood, rather than an education). The media is biased and unprincipled. The internet is a double-edged sword and it cuts hard and deep. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, I can get behind all that. Tell me more!

Unfortunately, Nichols manages to botch it up by offering simplistic, sweeping explanations with little to back them up except anecdotes, while repeating his rants, fear-mongering as well as being gratuitously insulting.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you're not actually dumb. Dunning and Kruger more gently label such people as "unskilled" or "incompetent".

*sigh*

I really do think Dunning and Krueger mean unskilled, Nichols, you nincompoop. You, too, later discuss experts who voice their opinions confidently on specializations they don't understand too well. Are those experts dumb? Obviously not. (I wonder if Nichols thinks there's another, fancier effect that's essentially Dunning-Kruger, but for elites?)

Tom Nichols is also quite undecided when it comes to perspectives and solutions. In the chapter on universities, he wants students to act like adults, while in the next breath he huffs at the idea of being equal to children in any sense of the word. Which is it: are students adults who should act like it, or are they children who must not be listened to? Later on, he wants people to defer to experts, but not the wrong ones, which should be distrusted. They should do their own research, but not try to understand expert texts too deeply (lest they get them wrong). They should be more informed and educated, and if they are not - that's their own fault.

In the same vein of superficiality, he blames college-educated journalists for the sad state of news today, without even stopping to consider the business decisions that created and maintains today's hellish landscape of misinformation (ads, cutting costs, crunching content for ratings and clicks don't get mentioned even in passing). It's all, somehow, the fault of the individual and not that of the system. What we must do is work harder and educate ourselves.

But not, you know, by watching the news. Which Nichols bemoans: we don't trust it anymore, despite the media's many faults!

*slow clap*

Nichols tells us to verify things. Find the right experts. He tells us not to say we don't have time for that - we do, he tells us, we really do.

...do we, though? I tried to check every interesting news article I came across for a while, and it was exhausting - enlightening, but exhausting. The only way to verify news is to consume much less of it.

Another issue: One thing I would expect from an expert is information, but #nope.

Overall, Nichols offers us very little actual data (e.g. the average grade in Harvard has apparently become A in recent years due to grade inflation; I appreciate this info), instead focusing on the scandals that hit the news: students protesting against offensive Halloween costumes or demanding a change in their core courses. There's no context. Are these isolated incidents, reported and mediatized due to their outstanding nature, or common issues?

Even regarding those incidents, I'm not entirely sure I agree with his takes - he paints student outrage against possibly racist Halloween costumes as an attack on intellectual exploration. While I think it's possible to discuss the topic intellectually, and while I think the outrage might have been overblown, the costumes themselves are not an intellectual exploration, nor the outcry about them an attack on intellectuality.

Alas, I wanted to learn from this book, but I am merely annoyed and disappointed. It's a waste of paper. Perhaps reading the original article it's based on would have been a better experience; if nothing else, I'm sure it was more to the point - and I wouldn't have expected to read a book written at academic standards. After all, if you can't count of university presses to provide expert literature at high standards, whom can you trust?

[seo · Rating 1 out of 5]

imagine writing a whole book about how no one is taking experts seriously and then that entire book is you bitching about things not in your field of expertise… without even the citations to back up the wild generalizations (except the miserable number of quotes he deigns to include)

[Maria Ferreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

A competência está a morrer, quem o diz é Tom Nichols, professor de temas de segurança e estratégia da US Naval War College, no Center for Strategic and International Studies e na Universidade de Harvard, para além de ser considerado um dos melhores especialistas em políticos Soviéticos.

Nichols aponta cinco dedos em simultâneo, a massificação da Internet, a massificação do Ensino Superior, incompetência dos peritos, os media populistas, a ignorância da população.

Vamos por partes:

Começando pela Internet, refere o autor que a partir da web 2.0, o momento em que qualquer cidadão passou a ter acesso e a postar informação na Internet deu origem ao boom de informações, sem qualquer critério de escrutínio de verificação da sua veracidade, ou seja, o que inicialmente as pessoas postavam que seria a sua mera opinião, hoje, temos pessoas renumeradas para fazer e difundir opiniões sobre factos que não são verídicos ou parcialmente verídicos, e que apenas têm o propósito de criar ruido e manipular o pensamento dos cidadãos.

Os cidadãos confiam no Dr Google e tudo o que ele lhes dá como resposta às suas buscas, a questão é que as buscas são feitas de modo a confirmarem a opinião que o cidadão já detêm, o viés da confirmação, ao invés de contrariar as buscas e questionar sobre outras opiniões diferentes da sua e tentarem compreender o que os outros dizem. Nichols afirma que o cidadão comum é leigo, está cada vez mais intolerante quanto à aceitação de uma opinião diferente da sua, e esta intolerância verifica-se em relação à opinião comum de qualquer cidadão, e verifica-se em relação ao perito que estudou aquele assunto durante anos. Para o cidadão comum, a opinião de um perito vale tanto como a opinião de um amigo pouco informado.

A massificação do ensino, é outro problema, porque com a ideia generalizada que todos os alunos têm de frequentar o ensino superior, deu origem a uma proliferação de Universidades de pequena e média dimensão, muitas delas privadas que cativam os estudantes mais pelos serviços de bem-estar que oferecem, como os aposentos, restaurantes e outros serviços, e menos pela qualidade do ensino. Pior, é que os pais e os alunos quando vão escolher a universidade, escolhem pelo conforto que pode proporcionar ao aluno, e não pelo currículo em si. A ideia instituída na população americana é que, o que importa é ter um curso superior, pois aumenta o estatuto social, sobe a autoestima, e eleva a pessoa à condição de perito, legitimando a sua opinião sobre todos os assuntos.

Por outro lado, é o aluno que paga e mantém a universidade aberta, daí que universidade exerça uma enorme pressão sobre os professores para que estes atribuam boas classificações aos alunos, de forma a mantê-los na faculdade e atraírem mais alunos. É sabido que se os alunos não obtiverem sucesso, a culpa recai sobre o professor, que não tem competência para ensinar, isto tanto vale para o aluno excelente como para o medíocre. De certa forma, os professores estão reféns dos seus alunos e estão cientes disso, contudo, esta situação origina grandes problemas internos: deceção e instabilidade da classe docente, sendo a consequência mais visível a falta de empenho e vontade de melhorar as competências, que por sua vez afasta os bons alunos e mantém os medíocres.

“Como escreveu James Piereson, do Manhattan Institute, em 2016, é «Seguir o dinheiro». O cerne da questão é que as universidades privadas-pelo menos aquelas que não são elite- estão desesperadas por alunos e dispostas a receber alunos sem habilitação desde que isso traga mais dinheiro de propinas”

Conclusão, a qualidade de ensino tem vindo a baixar e produz-se mais pessoas formadas, mas com menos informação, conhecimento e competências.

Quanto aos peritos, Nichols faz várias advertências, estes são, normalmente, professores investigadores que no exercício da sua profissão tendem muitas vezes a serem incorretos na sua prática, uns porque são preguiçosos e não cumprem escrupulosamente os métodos científicos, outros, porque ignoram parte dos resultados para obterem a confirmação da sua hipótese, e com isso darem a resposta que o seu cliente solicitou. Algumas vezes são descobertas irregularidades e são até retratadas publicamente, mas na maioria das vezes tarde demais.

Estas retratações são normais nas ciências exatas afirma Nichols, com frequência existem estudos a refutar estudos anteriores, isto porque é mais fácil de detetar e refazer a investigação em ciências exatas do que nas ciências sociais, que depende de muitos fatores contextuais, tais como: a população, o ambiente, as condições socioeconómicas, etc. Desta forma, não pode ter a mesma credibilidade junto da população, os resultados das investigações operadas entre os dois tipos de ciência, enquanto nas ciências exatas é possível a avaliação pelos pares e refazer a investigação promovendo mais certezas, nas ciências sociais os resultados da investigação são meras opiniões do investigador, porque na maioria das vezes a investigação é impossível de se recriar com as mesmas condições contextuais.

Por outro lado, as pressões que os investigadores sentem também origina a falhas, projetos mal desenhados e orçamentos mal feitos acaba por pôr fim à investigação sem que a mesma esteja concluída. Tudo isto é grave, se pensarmos que o governo se baseia na competência dos peritos para alicerçar as suas decisões, Nichols dá imensos exemplos de más decisões políticas com sérias implicações para a sociedade por advir de peritos incompetentes.

Os peritos são competentes na maioria das vezes, todavia, muitos cientistas gostam de falar também sobre assuntos que não dominam. Como diz Nichols os cientistas investigam o passado e mas a maior parte deles gostam de dar palpites e adivinhar o futuro, e sobre esse futuro nem sempre acertam, ou por outra, quase nunca acertam o que provoca uma descrença na população face às investigações e opiniões dos peritos. Isto vez-me lembrar Youval Harari, no livro Homo Deus, pode ser um ótimo cientista a investigar e a discursar sobre o passado, mas a falar sobre Inteligência Artificial é um embuste.

Relativamente aos média, Nichols aponta o dedo à imprensa jornalística, à rádio e à televisão que tende a oferecer conteúdos desinteressantes, fazedores de opiniões políticas e generalistas, informa as pessoas muito superficialmente, ocultando informação específica, por partir do princípio de que o cidadão leigo, não irá compreender, e como tal tenderá a abandonar ou a mudar de canal. Desta forma a tendência em todos os média é contratar uma ou várias personagens para comentar todos os assuntos, da medicina à pobreza, das armas nucleares à vida sexual de uma celebridade.

Por fim temos a população, o cidadão americano comum, refere Nichols, é leigo, não se quer dar ao trabalho de se informar, busca na internet as suas respostas para refutar contra qualquer um, seja perito ou leigo naquele assunto. Não está disposto a ouvir os outros e a tentar compreender para lá da sua crença. Nichols refere que a maioria da população sofre do efeito de Dunning-Kruger, são ignorantes, mas não têm a noção de que o são, ou seja, a própria ignorância não lhes permite ver o quanto não sabem e não dominam o assunto do qual falam.

Porque é que a competência está a morrer

Os pilares da democracia, advoga que todos os cidadãos são iguais, ou seja, têm os mesmos direitos e deveres, levado à letra todos os cidadãos podem dar a sua opinião e todas elas são aceites e têm o mesmo valor, ora isto é falso, como Nichols demonstra e bem, na minha opinião, todos os cidadãos podem ter opinião, mas as opiniões não têm todas o mesmo valor. A opinião de um perito que estuda anos a fio determinado assunto está melhor preparado para falar sobre o assunto do que um leigo que teve duas horas na internet a inteirar-se do assunto. Os leigos tendem a não compreender esta diferença e como não aceita que a sua opinião seja inferior, tende a não ouvir e opta pela desamigação, ou seja, tende a cortar laços com os peritos.

Por outro lado, os peritos, que embora se possam enganar de vez em quando, são competentes na maioria das vezes, sabem o que dizem e conseguem explicar detalhadamente as suas opiniões, contudo, conscientes do papel que desempenham na sociedade que é de informar as suas descobertas à população, sentem demasiadas vezes que falam para o boneco, isto é, a população não os quer ouvir e pior que isso, tende a não confiar neles. Como resultado, os peritos tendem em conversar entre si, e menos com a população em geral.

Os líderes políticos, são pessoas que não dominam todos os assuntos, mas, como têm forçosamente de tomar decisões, apoiam-se nas competências e opiniões dos peritos para os ajudar nessas tarefas. Os peritos sabem da importância que têm junto dos governos, que é de aconselhar, contudo se algo não correr bem é a cabeça do decisor que rola. Por outro lado, são os leigos que votam no líder político.

Esta tríade torna-se complexa: os leigos desleixam os conhecimentos básicos e desinteressam-se pela política, mas são estes que votam nos líderes que regularão as suas vidas. Os peritos estão cada vez mais desacreditados perante a opinião pública, mas são estes que aconselham os líderes políticos nas decisões que irão tomar para regular a vida dos leigos. Por sua vez os decisores políticos para se manterem no poder precisam do voto da população, mas não pode ignorar os conselhos dos peritos.

Em resumo:

Os leigos tendem a ser cada vez, menos competentes, apesar de acharem que dominam tudo sobre todos os assuntos.

Os peritos tendem a ser cada vez menos competentes, porque estão cada vez mais sós, calam-se
porque o leigo não os quer ouvir, calam-se porque os líderes políticos tendem a ser populistas e querem ganhar os votos da população, por causa disso, ignoram demasiadas vezes as advertências e conselhos dos peritos.

Um caso paradigmático que ilustra esta situação é em relação às políticas ambientais, a controvérsia está instalada. A falta de competências dos decisores, a falta de competência da população e a falta de competência dos peritos em se fazerem ouvir, leva-nos a uma beco sem saída.

Uma nota sobre o autor. Nota-se no discurso do autor, ao longo de todo o livro, algum elitismo, e diria mesmo algum ressabiamento. Deu-me a impressão que haveria aqui, mais do que alertas e advertências, o envio de recados para algumas personalidades. Pode ter sido apenas impressão minha, ou não.

[Gabrielė Bužinskaitė · Rating 4 out of 5]

A provocative and haunting analysis of our willingly ignorant society.

"Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s."

The death of expertise, according to the author, is not the lack of expert knowledge, but its diminishing role in society. In the eyes of many, experts are now the annoyingly out-of-touch elites who try to impose authority without being selected by the vote of the people.

While Nichols covers issues like political polarization, echo chambers, and growing anti-intellectualism, his most intriguing claim is that our narcissistic culture is deeply enabled, if not promoted (!), by many educational institutions today.

He argues that schools and universities are increasingly run like businesses, adopting a customer-is-always-right mindset. This mindset encourages faculty to tiptoe around students and their feelings rather than intellectually challenge them.

Grades, too, he says, have been steadily inflating, not because of improved performance, but as a way to maintain student (clients’) satisfaction and institutional reputation (market’s value). Thus many students now graduate with an exaggerated sense of competence (and importance), relying heavily on personal judgement that can be easily distorted by informational chaos and algorithmic plays.

What ought we do? Nichols proposes solutions, but all of them require a system-wide change, which leaves little room for optimism.

Overall, the book has been an intellectually stimulating treat. Although, the author could have been less condescending in his tone.

[Tonstant Weader · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Death of Expertise addresses one of the most dangerous trends in modern America, one that threatens to swamp our democracy and our future. The United States has always had an anti-elitist tradition, a distrust of authority, and a reverence for the common man. There is a malignant difference today. People are not just ignorant and wary of expertise, they are belligerently ignorant and actively hostile to expertise. Tom Nichols takes a look at this dangerous trend to describe how it manifests, what might be making it worse, and what could be done to fight back on behalf of knowledge itself.

The author, Tom Nichols, is a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. In addition, he is a contributor to The Federalist, the magazine of the conservative Federalist Society. He’s also a Jeopardy champion so he is probably well-versed in general knowledge outside his area of expertise–a fox, not a hedgehog.

The book is often amusing as Nichols excels at snark. He appeals to that mean streak we like to pretend we don’t have. He’s not going to protect the tender ears of the ignorant. It’s safe to assume they won’t read his book in the first place, so why mince words? This means he won’t be persuading anyone to his opinion, but he will cheer and perhaps invigorate those who already agree. I think his assessment is correct. People who think headlines tell the entire story, who can’t be bothered to read to the end, who assume they know as much as climate scientists about climate change and as doctors about vaccines will not be reading a book about the war on expertise unless they thought the book was to cheer the war on.

Nichols does a good job of identifying the symptoms and the disease. He does sound like a crotchety old uncle ruining Thanksgiving dinner when he talks about KIDS NOWADAYS. He is highly critical of the devaluation and debasement of higher education. I agree, higher education produces less competent citizens, but then the reason people go to college has changed from getting an education to qualifying for a job. Education is not pursued for its own sake, it’s now a checkmark you need on a application. This is manifest in the widespread contempt for liberal arts.

I think he misidentifies the root cause, though. Conservatives are inclined to blame individuals while liberals like me are inclined to look systemically. He blames it on parents and students who feel entitled to A’s and a luxury spa education. I look back to when the big push to save education was to RUN IT LIKE A BUSINESS and the appointment of more business executives to be university regents that resulted in MBAs displacing academics in administration and governance. This resulted in devaluing labor, of course, with the growth of adjunct professors and the weakening of faculty senates. Money that should go to teaching goes to infrastructure that can be marketed, like fancy dorms and natatoriums (To be fair, Macalester’s Natatorium was called that back in my day, too.)

I enjoyed Nichols’The Death of Expertise. There were times I think he went awry. He is spectacularly wrong in writing about what happened at Missouri University–the protests that resulted in the university president’s resignation. Nichols describes students drawing a swastika on the wall in feces as a “juvenile incident” and says, “Exactly what Missouri’s flagship university was supposed to do, other than wash the wall, was unclear but the campus erupted anyway.” First, the University had a better sense of what to do than Nichols, because they called the police. Contrary to being the sole cause of the controversy, the feces incident was just the straw breaking a very burdened camel’s back. There had been a series of incidents that seemed to be escalating. University President Wolfe could not be bothered to meet with students which incited their anger. Is it confirmation bias when I note that he was never an educator, but a businessman in the computer industry before Mizzou hired him to “run it like a business.” But besides mischaracterizing the totality of what happened at Mizzou, Nichols obviously hopes people will not remember the pernicious lying articles published by The Federalist, that alleged that there was no such incident and that the entire thing was a hoax. That is something easily disproven if the “journalists” writing those Federalist lies had actually asked someone. After all, there was a police report.

Nichols wrote a chapter about junk reporting and how false information gets left up on the internet and spread all over, but failed to point out the lies from The Federalist. He would have been wise to leave out the entire Mizzou incident, because his presentation of the controversy while omitting The Federalist shameful demagoguery undercuts his credibility. Besides, including the controversy while excluding the malpractice of the magazine where he writes is just bad form.

Nichols does not let his political affiliation keep him from pointing out the toxic effects of talk radio such as practiced by Rush Limbaugh or the collapse of journalistic standards by cable television, including FOX News, or the conspiracist dangers of demagogues like Alex Jones. This is a good thing and I appreciate it. When it comes to people distrusting science, treating it as though it were as optional and unsupported as religion, he focuses on GMOs and vaccines. These are serious issues that have profound implications for all of us. Just this week, there is news of a spate of measles cases in Minneapolis which is getting too darn close to home.

Of course, the convenient thing about vaccines and GMOs is that he can focus on liberal propagators of bunkum and hoodoo like Robert Kennedy, Jr. and give the impression that it’s a liberal problem, though that particular brand of anti-science hoodoo is actually bipartisan. What is surprising is that he gives such short shrift to the far more consequential, well-funded, deliberate, and dubious anti-science crusade against acknowledging climate change. Nichols is not so silly as to leave it out completely, but it gets a paragraph or two–hardly enough for an issue that already costs lives, causes wars, and endangers life on earth. It is, however, a partisan issue and his folks are on the wrong side of science. I find it puzzling how so many people who are anti-science expect technology to save us…as though technology is divorced completely from science. He does not mention evolution either, not even in passing, which is just sad. That would be a great example of the longitudinal war on expertise and the shifting strategies and growing sophistication of the grifters who spread false “science”.

I care about this war on science. I will be at the March For Science tomorrow. I would not be surprised if Nichols also went to one near him. He’s no fan of the avatar of belligerent ignorance occupying the White House.

I think this is a good book, the level of snark delights me, though I realize it will not persuade anyone who is anti-knowledge. It brings together serious issues that I care about a lot and I agree with a lot of what Nichols argues, particularly in not ceding ground. People calling anti-vaxxer garbage the garbage that it is seems to be turning the tide. It would be great, too, if we could get reporters to understand that when an expert gets it wrong, they still probably got it less wrong than Joe Plumber would have. Also sometimes when reporters say experts got it wrong, they really didn’t. For example, polling on the election is widely panned as completely wrong, but was it? The results are well within the margin of error. Analysts read too much certainty into trends but were the polls actually wrong? For the most part, no, but most people do not understand probability which is why casinos make the big bucks.

Aside from just leaving out his wildly off base section on Missouri University, the other thing I wish Nichols would do is consider the deleterious effect of treating mission-based sectors "like a business." It is not just people changing, it is not just technology. It is the MBA cancer spreading into academia and journalism. Great news organizations became great because there was a sense of mission. Great universities became great because there was a mission. Did the clerics and educators who founded Oxford University so long ago the date is lost to history chart their Return on Investment before welcoming Emo of Friesland? I googled that by the way.

Mission-based enterprises need to run away from the MBAs who want to run it like Acme Magnets. I hope Nichols will take that factor into consideration in the future even though it is antithetical to his ideology. After all, I am perfectly happy to agree with him that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a numpty.

The Death of Expertise will be released May 1st. I was provided a e-galley by the publisher through NetGalley.

★★★★
Yes, liberals can like books by conservatives.
http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpres...

[Book Shark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols

“The Death of Expertise” is an intellectually stimulating book that looks at how a movement of ignorance has threatened our ability to rely on expertise. Professor Tom Nichols takes the reader on a journey that shows that not only have we dismissed expertise we are now proud of our own ignorance. This interesting 272-page book includes the following six chapters: 1. Experts and Citizens, 2. How Conversation Became Exhausting, 3. Higher Education: The Customer Is Always Right, 4. Let Me Google That for You: How Unlimited Information Is Making Us Dumber, 5. The “New” New Journalism, and Lots of It, and 6. When the Experts Are Wrong.

Positives:
1. A well written, and engaging book.
2. An interesting and timely topic, the campaign against established knowledge in the hands of a perceptive author. He’s also fair and even handed.
3. The book flows nicely. It has a good rhythm and it’s fun to read. Each chapter begins with a chapter-appropriate quote. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”” by Isaac Asimov.
4. Doesn’t waste time in getting to the main point. “The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance.” “Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge.”
5. Provides many examples of ignorance throughout the book. “The antics of clownish antivaccine crusaders like actors Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy undeniably make for great television or for a fun afternoon of reading on Twitter. But when they and other uninformed celebrities and public figures seize on myths and misinformation about the dangers of vaccines, millions of people could once again be in serious danger from preventable afflictions like measles and whooping cough.”
6. Many factoids spruced throughout the book. “The CDC issued a report in 2012 that noted that raw dairy products were 150 times more likely than pasteurized products to cause food-borne illness.”
7. In defense of experts. “Put another way, experts are the people who know considerably more on a subject than the rest of us, and are those to whom we turn when we need advice, education, or solutions in a particular area of human knowledge.”
8. Explains a prevailing phenomenon, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. “This phenomenon is called “the Dunning-Kruger Effect,” named for David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the research psychologists at Cornell University who identified it in a landmark 1999 study. The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.”
9. Explains the appeal of conspiracies. “More important and more relevant to the death of expertise, however, is that conspiracy theories are deeply attractive to people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated world and who have no patience for less dramatic explanations.”
10. Learn something every day. “Stereotypes are not predictions, they’re conclusions. That’s why it’s called “prejudice”: it relies on pre-judging.”
11. Insightful observations. “The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt summed it up neatly when he observed that when facts conflict with our values, “almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.””
12. Explains how colleges and universities have become an important part of the problem. “Still, the fact of the matter is that many of those American higher educational institutions are failing to provide to their students the basic knowledge and skills that form expertise. More important, they are failing to provide the ability to recognize expertise and to engage productively with experts and other professionals in daily life.” “When college is a business, you can’t flunk the customers.”
13. Provides some compelling and constructive criticism of campuses. “When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.”
14. The deceiving power of the Internet. “Unfortunately, people thinking they’re smart because they searched the Internet is like thinking they’re good swimmers because they got wet walking through a rainstorm.”
15. The challenges of Wiki-pedia and similar crowd-sourced projects. “Even with the best of intentions, crowd-sourced projects like Wikipedia suffer from an important but often unremarked distinction between laypeople and professionals: volunteers do what interests them at any given time, while professionals employ their expertise every day.”
16. Describes the rise of Rush Limbaugh. “In 2011, Limbaugh referred to “government, academia, science, and the media” as the “four corners of deceit,” which pretty much covered everyone except Limbaugh.”
17. Recommendations on how to be a better consumer of news. “The consumers of news have some important obligations here as well. I have four recommendations for you, the readers, when approaching the news: be humbler, be ecumenical, be less cynical, and be a lot more discriminating.”
18. Provides many examples of when experts get it wrong. “In the 1970s, America’s top nutritional scientists told the United States government that eggs, among many other foods, might be lethal.”
19. Explains the value of science. “But science is a process, not a conclusion. Science subjects itself to constant testing by a set of careful rules under which theories can only be displaced by better theories. Laypeople cannot expect experts never to be wrong; if they were capable of such accuracy, they wouldn’t need to do research and run experiments in the first place. If policy experts were clairvoyant or omniscient, governments would never run deficits and wars would only break out at the instigation of madmen.” “the purpose of science is to explain, not to predict.”
20. The final chapter does a good job of describing the role of experts in democracy. The five misconceptions about experts and policymakers. “First, experts are not puppeteers. They cannot control when leaders take their advice.”
21. The lack of balance. “A talk show, for example, with one scientist who says genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are safe and one activist who says they are dangerous looks “balanced,” but in reality that is ridiculously skewed, because nearly nine out of ten scientists think GMOs are safe for consumption.”

Negatives:
1. I was disappointed that climate change science didn’t play a bigger role in this book.
2. Lacked supplementary material that could have complemented the excellent narrative.
3. Some repetition.

In summary, this is a fun social study book about the relationship between experts and citizens in the democracy, and why that relationship is weakening. Tom Nichols does an excellent job of capturing the key elements to the collapse of our expertise and describes what we can do as citizens to put a stop to it. A very solid read, my only disappointment besides the lack of supplementary material is the fact that climate change played a miniscule role. That said, I recommend it!

Further suggestions: “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” by Richard Hofstadter, “The War on Science” by Shawn Lawrence Otto, “Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent and Mangle Science” by Dave Levitan, “Denying to the Grave” by Sara E. and Jack M. Gorman, “Everybody Lies” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes, “No, Is Not Enough” by Naomi Klein, and “The Republican War on Science” by Chris Mooney.

[Julia Chupryna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Як часто ми себе ловимо на думці, що починаємо складати сентенції на теми, у яких не те що нічого не тямимо, а й напросто навіть не здогадувались, що маємо певну позицію щодо них? Чи правильно відстоювати свою думку, якщо вона така далека від хоч якогось фактичного обґрунтування, а не просто наша постава видати себе за поінформованих людей? На думку автора, це зовсім не риторичні питання. Вони мають чітку відповідь - НІ. Залишимо роботу фахівцям, а не Google (бо все таки лікарі трішки краще вміють справлятися з порадами, а гуманітарії трохи критичніше оцінюють джерела). Проблема в тому, що фаховість у XXI ст. тихо і не дуже помітно йде на дно. Громадськість краще знає (Інтернет їй на допомогу), що робити з питаннями, які виходять за межі будь-яких суспільних компетенцій. Нам більше не потрібні вузькопрофільні фахівці, які своєю працею відділяли тонни куколі від пшениці, у нас є пошукові системи на запит яких знайдеться найбільш таргетовані сайти із заздалегідь сформованою думкою. І навіть більше, лише зараз невігластво досягло того рівня, коли не його відсутність, а його наявність є приводом для хизування. Те, що я можу загуглити щось так само як це зробить професіонал - далеко не ставить мене на його рівень і отримані відповіді ми інтерпретуватимемо по-різному. Але люди - такі люди, загальний доступ і відкритість джерел інформації чи не вперше з часів світу можуть зіграти з нами досить неприємний жарт.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early on in Professor Nichols’s book, he makes this statement: “Expertise is not dead, but it’s in trouble.” This acts as a thesis and underpinning to all that follows. That the United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance, and we’ve gone from uninformed to misinformed to aggressively wrong.

Two strong takeaways for me are 1) that experts are wrong in certain things doesn’t mean they should be ignored wholesale. This is common sense, but, as they say, sense isn’t as common anymore. 2) The Dunning-Kruger effect is something I’ve never encountered before. The author defines it in a typically blunt way: “the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.”

In these postmodern times, where people are increasingly skeptical about what truth is and where you can find it, this is a helpful guide.