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

by Tom Nichols

Be ecumenical. Vary your diet. You wouldn’t eat the same thing all day, so don’t consume the same sources of media all day.

Be less cynical—or don’t be so cynical.

Be more discriminating. If you see something in a major media outlet that doesn’t seem right to you, finding some half-baked website isn’t the answer.

There isn’t much anyone, including experts, can do about this kind of failure, because it is not so much a failure as it is an integral part of science and scholarship. Laypeople are uncomfortable with ambiguity, and they prefer answers rather than caveats. 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 we are to accept the benefits of a profession’s work, we must accept something less than perfection, perhaps even a certain amount of risk.

Experts can go wrong, for example, when they try to stretch their expertise from one area to another.

In the natural sciences, prediction and explanation go hand in hand: once a physical phenomenon is understood, its behavior should be predictable, and can even sometimes be expressed as a law. Social scientists, historians, and other observers of human behavior, by contrast, tend to favor explanation over raw prediction. In many fields outside the hard sciences, conclusions are probabilistic rather than absolute. And yet, society as a client tends to demand, from all experts, far more prediction than explanation. Worse, laypeople tend to regard failures of prediction as indications of the worthlessness of expertise.

The promises of a prognosis, even if speculative, are always more welcome than the absolute certainties of an autopsy.

Sometimes, in the very worst cases, experts aren’t experts. People lie, and lie brazenly, about their credentials.

Likewise, no single study in public policy establishes an expert’s credentials. Even when a scholar comes to the attention of the policy community because of a book or an article, his or her influence does not rest on the scientific replicability of the work but on the ideas it puts forward.

What fraud does in any field, however, is to waste time and to delay progress.

Timothy Caulfield, a Canadian health policy specialist, is one of many experts who has had enough. He wrote a book criticizing assaults on established knowledge from celebrities, and by one celebrity in particular: Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong about Everything? When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash.

The expert community is full of such examples. The most famous, at least if measured by impact on the global public, is the MIT professor Noam Chomsky, a figure revered by millions of readers around the world. Chomsky, by some counts, is the most widely cited living American intellectual, having written a stack of books on politics and foreign policy. His post at MIT, however, was as a professor of linguistics. Chomsky is regarded as a pioneer, even a giant, in his own field, but he is no more an expert in foreign policy than, say, the late George Kennan was on the origins of human language. Nonetheless, he is more famous among the general public for his writings on politics than in his area of expertise; indeed, I often encountered college students over the years who were quite familiar with Chomsky but who had no idea his actual field of expertise was linguistics, rather than politics or international affairs.

The public is remarkably tolerant of such trespasses, and this itself is a paradox: while some laypeople do not respect an expert’s actual area of knowledge, others assume that expertise and achievement are so generic that experts and intellectuals can weigh in with some authority on almost anything.

Prediction is a problem for experts. It’s what the public wants, but experts usually aren’t very good at it. This is because they’re not supposed to be good at it; the purpose of science is to explain, not to predict. And yet predictions, like cross-expertise transgressions, are catnip to experts.

Some pollsters are partisans who slant their results toward a preferred outcome, but most have an academic background in statistics and methods that allows them, in the main, to make reasonably accurate calls.

media bias (which favors covering failure more than success),

As is always the case, however, people tend to remember the bad calls—especially if they didn’t like the results—while ignoring the more numerous successes.

James Surowiecki (the “wisdom of crowds” writer) pointed out that although “cognitive diversity” is important—meaning that many views can be better than one—it does not mean that if “you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert’s.”

Tetlock used the British thinker Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “hedgehogs” and “foxes” to distinguish between experts whose knowledge was wide and inclusive (“the fox knows many things”) from those whose expertise is narrow and deep (“the hedgehog knows but one”). Tetlock’s study is one of the most important works ever written on how experts think, and it deserves a full reading.

In general, however, one of his more intriguing findings can be summarized by noting that while experts ran into trouble when trying to move from explanation to prediction, the “foxes” generally outperformed the “hedgehogs,” for many reasons. Hedgehogs, for example, tended to be overly focused on generalizing their specific knowledge to situations that were outside of their competence, while foxes were better able to integrate more information and to change their minds when presented with new or better data. “The foxes’ self-critical, point-counterpoint style of thinking,” Tetlock found, “prevented them from building up the sorts of excessive enthusiasm for their predictions that hedgehogs, especially well-informed ones, displayed for theirs.”35

The goal of expert advice and prediction is not to win a coin toss, it is to help guide decisions about possible futures. To ask in 1980 whether the Soviet Union would fall before the year 2000 is a yes-or-no question. To ask during the previous decades how best to bring about a peaceful Soviet collapse and to alter the probability of that event (and to lessen the chances of others) is an entirely different matter.

I want to point out three ways in which responses to the pandemic, especially in the United States, worsened the crisis of expertise. First, the social and cultural environment heading into 2020 was already infused with distrust and even paranoia about science and expert knowledge, and among many people, the pandemic deepened those feelings. Second, the polarized condition of American politics and the failure of leadership in the national government virtually ensured that a natural disaster would become a political weapon in the hands of charlatans and opportunists. And third, the experts made both honest mistakes and unarguably poor decisions. The history of COVID around the world includes inspiring stories of wise decisions, medical gallantry, public sacrifice, and scientific triumph. Unfortunately, that history is also marred by panic, ignorance, cowardice, venality, and political mendacity that cost lives, damaged democratic institutions, and accelerated the declining respect for knowledge.

Today, anti-science paranoia in the United States is mostly a characteristic of the far right, and it has been institutionalized in the Republican Party.

As the body count grew, a nation already prone to narcissism and grievance-mongering turned on itself in the scramble to fix blame.

Trump treated the virus the same way he treated many other moments of adversity during his administration: as a personal affront and a threat to his political fortunes that had to be defused. All other decisions flowed from this one imperative.

Or, as a member of the group noted simply about the course of the pandemic and the American lives lost: “Trump was a comorbidity.”29

The available evidence does not so far suggest that the protests created a major surge in COVID infections, but to argue that the demonstrations did not result in more infections is a post-hoc rationalization—and, for experts, a trap. At the time, medical guidance was clear that people should not gather in large groups or be in close proximity, and certainly not while singing and shouting. Thus, if the doctors believed that the risks of such gatherings could be mitigated with masks or by being outdoors, they should have already been pressing for the lifting of the strictest measures everywhere with the same advice they gave the protesters. If, however, they were still holding to the theories that underpinned the lockdowns—and especially the school closures—then their approval of the demonstrations meant they were consciously setting aside those concerns in the name of a cause with which they agreed. Either way, they were acting as political advocates rather than scientists, and in the words of retired environmental scientist Peter Sandman, they “clearly damaged the credibility of public health as a scientific enterprise that struggles to be politically neutral.”48

A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. James Madison

“parasocial relationships,” in which people feel a deep personal connection to famous people who, in the main, have no idea who they are.

Expertise and government rely upon each other, especially in a democracy. The technological and economic progress that ensures the well-being of a population requires the division of labor, which in turn leads to the creation of professions. Professionalism encourages experts to do their best in serving their clients, to respect their own boundaries, and to demand their boundaries be respected by others, as part of an overall service to the ultimate client: society itself.

This underscores another problem motivating the death spiral in which democracy and expertise are caught: citizens do not understand, or choose not to understand, the difference between experts and elected policymakers. For many Americans, all elites are now just an undifferentiated mass of educated, rich, and powerful people. This is patent silliness.

Whatever else George W. Bush may have gotten wrong during his presidency, he was right when he reminded Americans that when it came to the actions of his administration, he was “the decider.” Experts can only propose; elected leaders dispose. In fact, policymaking experts and elected leaders are almost never the same group, and it cannot be otherwise: there are simply not enough hours in the day for a legislator, even in a city council or a small US state (and much less for a president) to master the many issues required to make policy. This is why policymakers engage experts—the knowers—to advise them.

This call to fall back on the knowledge and virtue of laypeople, however, is irresponsible romanticism.

Sometimes, the remedy for expert failure is the time-honored blue-ribbon panel and its recommendations. Sometimes the answer is just to fire somebody. In his seminal work on expertise, however, Philip Tetlock suggests other ways in which experts might be held more accountable without merely trashing the entire relationship between experts and the public. There are many possibilities, including more transparency and competition, including institutions requiring experts in any field not only to maintain a complete record of their work, but to come clean about how often they were right or wrong. Journals, universities, and other gatekeepers can and should hold their peers responsible more often for mistakes. Whether this would work is another matter—for one thing, “right” and “wrong” are often more complicated conclusions than a straight yes-or-no determination—and Tetlock acknowledges the many barriers to such solutions.

Among the many misconceptions the public has about experts and policymakers, five are especially worth considering. First, experts are not puppeteers. They cannot control when leaders take their advice.

Second, experts cannot control how leaders implement their advice.

Third, no single expert guides a policy from conception through execution, a reality that the public often finds bewildering and frustrating.

Fourth, experts cannot control how much of their advice leaders will take. Experts can offer advice, but often political leaders hear only the parts they want to hear—specifically, the parts that will be popular with their respective constituencies.

The experts, however, cannot control the fact that politicians might well choose all of the options anyway, even if they conflict with each other.

When nutritional scientists took eggs off the list of dietary culprits, they did not intend for people to order fast-food egg sandwiches every morning as part of a healthy breakfast. People hear what they want to hear and then stop listening. And when their incomplete adoption of an expert’s advice produces poor results, they blame the experts for being incompetent, because everybody needs to blame somebody.

Finally, experts can only offer alternatives. They cannot, however, make choices about values. They can describe problems, but they cannot tell people what they should want to do about those problems, even when there is wide agreement on the nature of those challenges.

Experts can tell the voters what is likely to happen, but voters must engage those issues and decide what they value most, and therefore what they want done.

This is crucial because laypeople too easily forget that the republican form of government under which they live was not designed for mass decisions about complicated issues. Indeed, it is specifically engineered to prevent such plebiscites; there is no mechanism in the United States for a Brexit-like, single national vote on major issues. Neither, of course, was the American republic designed for rule by a tiny group of technocrats or experts. Rather, it was meant to be the vehicle by which an informed electorate—informed being the key word here—could choose other people to represent them and to make decisions on their behalf.

As the writer Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in 2010, large organizations do not make decisions by polling everyone in them, no matter how “democratic” it might seem. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?19

Even when most people know what they’re doing in their own area of competence, they cannot agglomerate their decisions into coherent public policy the same way as if they are guessing the weight of a bull or trying to pin down the target price of a stock. The republican solution allows a smaller group of people to aggregate the public’s often irresolvable demands while leavening them with expert knowledge.

tearing down is easier than building up.

The relationship between experts and citizens is not “democratic.” All people are not, and can never be, equally talented or intelligent. Democratic societies, however, are always tempted to this resentful insistence on equality, which becomes oppressive ignorance if given its head.

The creation of a vibrant intellectual and scientific culture in the West and in the United States required democracy, secular tolerance, and trust. Without such virtues, knowledge and progress fall prey to ideological, religious, and populist attacks. Nations that have given in to such temptations have suffered any number of terrible fates, including mass repression, cultural and material poverty, and defeat in war.