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

by Thomas M. Nichols

This is new in American culture, and it represents the aggressive replacement of expert views or established knowledge with the insistence that every opinion on any matter is as

good as every other...

But again the reality is far more unsettling: campaigns against established knowledge are being led by people who should know better.

At the root of all this 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

rarely occurs to the skeptics that for every terrible mistake, there are countless successes that prolong their lives.

Political debate and the making of public policy are not science. They are rooted in conflict, sometimes conducted as respectful disagreement but more often as a hockey game with no referees and a standing invitation for spectators to rush onto the ice.

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.

EXPERTS AND CITIZENS

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. Note that this does not mean that experts know all there is to know about something.

Formal training or education is the most obvious mark of expert status, and the easiest to identify, but it is only a start.

There is no denying that good colleges have graduated a lot of people without a lick of common sense. Lesser institutions have likewise produced geniuses. But as the saying goes, while the race may not always be to the swift, that’s the way to bet.

Another mark of true experts is their acceptance of evaluation and correction by other experts.

Expert communities rely on these peer-run institutions to maintain standards and to enhance social trust. Mechanisms like peer review, board certification, professional associations, and other organizations and professions help to protect quality and to assure society—that is, the expert’s clients—that they’re safe in accepting

Conversation in the twenty-first century is sometimes exhausting and often maddening, not only between experts and laypeople, but among everyone else, too. If in a previous era too much deference was paid to experts, today there is little

deference paid to anyone at all.

Experts are no exception here; like everyone else, we want to believe what we want to believe.

And as we’ll see, the people who are the most certain about being right tend to be the people with the least reason to have such self-confidence.

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

Other than in fields like athletic competition, where incompetence is manifest and undeniable, it’s normal for people to avoid saying they’re bad at something.

Not everyone, however, is incompetent, and almost no one is incompetent at everything.

“Confirmation bias” is the most common—and easily the most irritating—obstacle to productive conversation, and not just between experts and laypeople. The term refers to the tendency to look for information that only confirms what we believe, to accept facts that only strengthen our preferred explanations, and to dismiss data that challenge what we already accept as truth.

None of us is perfectly rational, and most of us fear situations in which we are not in control.

We are gripped by irrational fear rather than irrational optimism because confirmation bias is, in a way, a kind of survival mechanism. Good things come and go, but dying is forever.

Even though every researcher is told that “a negative result is still a result,” no one really wants to discover that their initial assumptions went up in smoke.

In modern life outside of the academy, however, arguments and debates have no external review. Facts come and go as people find convenient at the moment.

When it comes to untangling more complicated issues, however, common sense is not sufficient. Cause and effect, the nature of evidence, and statistical frequency are far more intricate than common sense can handle.

The most extreme cases of confirmation bias are found not in the wives’ tales and superstitions of the ignorant, but in the conspiracy theories of more educated or intelligent people. Unlike superstitions, which are simple, conspiracy theories are horrendously complicated. Indeed, it takes a reasonably smart person to construct a really interesting conspiracy theory, because conspiracy theories are actually

Conspiracy theories, by contrast, are frustrating precisely because they are so intricate. Each rejoinder or contradiction only produces a more complicated theory.

Conspiracy theorists manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as even stronger confirmation. After all, what better sign of a really effective conspiracy is there than a complete lack of any trace that the conspiracy exists?

In the 1970s, for example, the novelist Robert Ludlum excelled at creating such conspiracies in a hugely popular series of novels, including one about a circle of political killers who were responsible for the assassination of President Franklin Roosevelt. (But wait, you say: FDR wasn’t assassinated. Exactly.) Ludlum sold millions of books and created the fictional superassassin Jason Bourne, who was the main character in a string of lucrative movies in the twenty-first century.

One reason we all love a good conspiracy thriller is that it appeals to our sense of heroism. A

Just as individuals facing grief and confusion look for reasons where none may

In the aftermath, millions of people find themselves casting about for an answer to the ancient question of why bad things happen to good people.”

Today, conspiracy theories are reactions mostly to the economic and social dislocations of globalization, just as they were to the aftermath of war and the advent of rapid industrialization in the 1920s and 1930s. This is not a trivial obstacle when it comes to the problems of expert engagement with the public:

Conspiracy theories are not harmless. At their worst, conspiracy theories can produce a moral panic in which innocent people get hurt.

trying to get around confirmation bias is difficult, trying to deal with a conspiracy theory is impossible.

Such theories are the ultimate bulwark against expertise, because of course every expert who contradicts the theory is ipso facto part of the conspiracy.

Fortunately, these large-scale cases of irrationality are far and few between. The more prosaic and common unwillingness to accept expert advice, however, is rooted in the same kind of populist suspicion of those perceived as smarter or more educated than the general public.

What most people usually mean when they object to “generalizing,” however, is not that we shouldn’t generalize, but that we shouldn’t stereotype, which is a different issue.

The hard work of explanation comes after generalization.

say that all Chinese people are short, however, is to stereotype. The key to a stereotype is that it is impervious to factual testing. A stereotype brooks no annoying interference with reality, and it relies on the clever use of confirmation bias to dismiss all exceptions as irrelevant.

Stereotypes are not predictions, they’re conclusions. That’s why it’s called “prejudice”: it relies on pre-judging.

That’s why one of the most important characteristics of an expert is the ability to remain dispassionate, even on the most controversial issues. Experts must treat everything from cancer to nuclear war as problems to be solved with detachment and objectivity.

The less competent person wanted to be respected and involved by not being seen as wrong or uninformed. The more competent person, meanwhile, did not want to alienate anyone by being consistently right. This might make for a pleasant afternoon, but it’s a lousy way to make decisions.

As Chris Mooney, a Washington Post science writer, noted, this kind of social dynamic might grease the wheels of human relationships, but it can do real harm where facts are at stake.

People skim headlines or articles and share them on social media, but they do not read them. Nonetheless, because people want to be perceived by others as intelligent and well informed, they fake it as best they can.

Laypeople want a definitive answer from the experts, but none can be had because there is not one answer but many, depending on circumstances.

when exposed to scientific research that challenged their views, both liberals and conservatives reacted by doubting the science, rather than themselves.

This is why, as we’ll see later in this book, the only way to resolve these debates in terms of policy choices is to move them from the realm of research to the arena of politics and democratic choice. If

Higher education is supposed to cure us of the false belief that everyone is as smart as everyone else. 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 the educated peers of even the most accomplished scholars and experts.