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

by Thomas M. Nichols

Because there’s too much of it, and it is too closely fused with entertainment.

more of everything does not mean more quality in everything. (Sturgeon’s Law is inescapable everywhere.)

Radio wasn’t dead, however. Especially on the AM band, radio offered something television could not: an interactive format. Relatively unhindered by the limits of airtime and cheap to produce, the idea behind talk radio was simple: give the host a microphone, hit the switch, and take calls from people who wanted to talk about the news and express their own views.

There is a reasonable argument that talk radio in the 1980s and 1990s was a necessary antidote to television and print outlets that had become politically complacent, ideologically monotonous, and too self-regarding.

The radio insurgency against the print and electronic media might not have spread farther than the AM band were it not for cable television and the Internet. Cable and the Internet, as alternative sources of news—and as platforms for attacks on established knowledge—actually reinforced each other throughout the 1990s.

The irony, however, is that neither cable nor the Internet pioneered the twenty-four-hour news cycle. For that, we can thank the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.

ABC filled the evening slot with a new program called Nightline devoted solely to coverage of the crisis.

Over a year later, the hostages came home, but Koppel and Nightline stayed on and ran for many more

The profusion of information and communication technology gave voice, and self-confidence, to people who previously would defer to authority.12

In 1980, the entrepreneur Ted Turner took a chance that people would, in fact, watch endless amounts of news when his invention, the Cable News Network, went on the air. CNN was denigrated by broadcast news executives as “the Chicken Noodle Network,”

There is no way to discuss the nexus between journalism and the death of expertise without considering the revolutionary change represented by the arrival of Fox News in 1996.

Fox put the last nail in the coffin of the news broadcast as a nominally apolitical review of the day’s events. The editor of the conservative

The bigger problem, on all of the major networks, is that the transition from news to entertainment is almost seamless and largely invisible: daytime fluff moves to afternoon

What was most startling in this study, however, was the presence of The Daily Show, a satire about the news hosted for many years by the comedian Jon Stewart, among the “most trusted” sources of news. Seventeen percent of liberal respondents named The Daily Show as their “most trusted source,” putting Stewart in a tie with CNN and public television and surpassing progressive MSNBC by seven points. MSNBC (whose motto for a time was “lean forward,” whatever that means) was the least-trusted source in 2014:

The problem is not that all these networks and celebrities exist, but that viewers pick and choose among them and then believe they’re informed. The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias.

This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they’re misinformed.

And, of course, the most misinformed citizens “tend to be the most confident in their views and are also the strongest partisans.”

Of course, people don’t really hate the media. They just hate the media that deliver news they don’t like or transmit views with which they don’t agree.

This shallowness is not because journalism attracts unintelligent people, but because in an age when everything is journalism, and everyone is a journalist, standards inevitably fall.

not understand the difference between “journalism” and “blogging.”

Facebook, for example, uses news curators to decide what shows up in a reader’s Facebook news feed. According to a 2016 exposé by Gizmodo.com, Facebook treated these reporters as low-level contractors while giving

them immense power over the news:

I’ve let only one group off the hook so far: experts. What happens when experts are wrong, and who should be responsible for deciding when to listen to them and when to ignore them? We’ll confront this question in the next chapter.

For these larger decisions, there are no licenses or certificates. There are no fines or suspensions if things go wrong. Indeed, there is very little direct accountability at all, which is why laypeople understandably fear the influence of experts.

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.

Other forms of expert failure, however, are more worrisome. Experts can go wrong, for example, when they try to stretch their expertise from one area to another.

areas. Yet

another problem is when

experts stay in their lane but the...

from explanation to p...

Experts face a difficult task in this respect, because no matter how many times scholars might emphasize that their goal is to explain the world rather than to predict discrete events, laypeople and policymakers prefer prediction.

Finally, there is outright deception and malfeasance. This is the rarest but most dangerous category. Here, experts for their own reasons (usually careerist defenses of their own shoddy work) intentionally falsify their results.

The early twenty-first century has seen some rough years for scientists. Retractions from scientific journals have reached record proportions. Cases of fraud or misconduct now seem almost routine.

Academic misconduct, however, is still a red line for many schools.

“replication crisis” in the scholarly community is not based on pure fraudulence.

Research in the social sciences and humanities is especially difficult to replicate because it is based not on experimental procedure but rather on expert interpretation of discrete works or events.

One of the most common errors experts make is to assume that because they are smarter than most people about certain things, they are smarter than everyone about everything.

Cross-expertise violations happen for a number of reasons, from innocent error to intellectual vanity.

Over the years, celebrities have steeped themselves in disputes about which they have very little knowledge. They push fads, create false alarms, and change the daily habits of millions of gullible fans.

Activism is the right of every person in an open and democratic society. There is a fundamental difference, however, between activism and a celebrity abusing his or her fame. Activism among laypeople requires taking sides among experts, and advocating for preferred policies.

Chomsky, by some counts, is the most widely cited living American intellectual, having written a stack of books on politics and foreign policy. His professorial post at MIT, however, was actually as a professor of linguistics.

the purpose of science is to explain, not to predict.

When polls and market research get something wrong, however, they can get it very wrong. The Coca-Cola Corporation’s introduction of “New Coke” in the mid-1980s was such a disaster that the term “New Coke” itself has become a meme for a failure to read public opinion accurately.

fact, a survey of pollsters in 2015 found that they believed their reputations had been tarnished by this string of misses. Some felt that this was a result of media bias (which favors covering failure more than success), while others admitted that technological and demographic changes were making accurate polling a more challenging endeavor. “Polls are wrong is a more interesting story than when the polls do well,” the polling expert Barbara Carvalho told FiveThirtyEight (itself a site dedicated to polling). But the pollster Matthew Towery admitted in 2015 that, “obviously,

The problem here is not so much with polling—whose accuracy is limited by the involvement of actual human beings—as it is with what people expect from polling.

The question wasn’t whether experts were no better than anyone else at prediction, but why some experts seemed better at prediction than others, which is a very different question.

Laypeople should not jump to the assumption that a missed call by the experts therefore means all opinions are equally valid (or equally worthless).

The attack on the experts was part of a strategy meant to capitalize on the political illiteracy of a fair number of British voters and their instinctive mistrust of the intellectual elites who overwhelmingly opposed Brexit. Within days—but with the votes safely counted—the Brexiteers admitted that many of their claims had been either exaggerated or even wrong.

Worse, voters not only didn’t care that Trump is ignorant or wrong, they likely were unable to recognize his ignorance or

love the poorly educated,” Trump exulted after winning the Nevada caucuses, and that love was clearly reciprocated.