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

by Thomas M. Nichols

The writer Joshua Foust some years ago zeroed in on the practice of “embedding” journalists overseas with military forces, creating the illusion of experience among reporters who in fact had little idea where they were:

The story was in part based on studies that claim that one in four (sometimes reported as one in five) women in America’s colleges and universities will be sexually assaulted. Claims like these helped to enable the Rolling Stone hoax, when the statistics themselves and the studies on which they were based should have raised concerns. As Slate’s Emily Yoffe wrote in 2014, “the one-in-four assertion would mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.”25 Another study central to this dire narrative later turned out to have included “college aged men” who were as old as seventy-one, whose average age was over twenty-six, and none of whom actually lived on a college campus. But no matter: the statistic is out there now more as a slogan than as a fact, and anyone arguing about it will say, understandably, that “they saw it in the news.”

A beleaguered Veterans Administration—not exactly the most popular bureaucracy in America—tried in vain to note that according to a sizable 2012 study, suicides among veterans really hadn’t changed all that much since 1999. The New York Times duly reported on this study with a headline that read “As Suicides Rise in U.S., Veterans Are Less of Total.” The Washington Post headline implied an opposite conclusion: “VA Study Finds More Veterans Committing Suicide.” Both of these headlines, amazingly, were about the same study, and both, in a strictly factual sense, were true. The media, or at least some outlets, interviewed the scientist who wrote the study, but his answers made no difference to the narrative.

The assertion that there were “more suicides than combat deaths” will always be true by definition in any year where US forces aren’t involved in a lot of actual fighting.

To its credit, TIME ran a piece that got it right, even titling it “Military Suicides Top Combat Deaths—But Only Because the Wars Are Ending.”27 But, again, this should have been obvious to anyone who took even a moment to think about it, and it is remarkable that TIME or anyone else had to run such a story in the first place.

people genuinely concerned about veterans and suicide don’t really know any more about what’s going on with veterans today than they did before they read these stories. But they think they do, and heaven help the expert in any field who casts doubt on this public outrage or who even tries to explain the subject with a bit more nuance.

To experts, I will say, know when to say no. Some of the worst mistakes I ever made were when I was young and I could not resist giving an opinion.

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.

In the end, experts cannot guarantee outcomes. They cannot promise that they will never make mistakes or that they will not fall prey to the same shortcomings that govern all human deliberations. They can only promise to institute rules and methods that reduce the chance of such mistakes and to make those errors far less often than a layperson might. If we are to accept the benefits of a profession’s work, we have to accept something less than perfection, perhaps even a certain amount of risk.

Actually, the psychology studies might not even be poor research. Another group of scholars subsequently examined the investigation itself—this is how science works, after all—and concluded that it was, in the words of the Harvard scholar Gary King, “completely unfair—and even irresponsible.” King noted that while reproducibility is an “incredibly important” question that should “obsess” scholars, “it isn’t true that all social psychologists are making stuff up.”12 The whole business, including a rebuttal to the rebuttal, is now where it belongs: in the pages of the journal Science, where experts can continue to evaluate all of the arguments and subject them to further analysis.

autodidact

Or as James Surowiecki (the “wisdom of crowds” writer) pointed out, saying that “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.”26

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.

Laypeople tend to ignore these caveats, despite their importance, much as they ignore their local weather forecaster when told there is a 70 percent chance of rain. If the three in ten possibility of a sunny day arrives, they think the forecaster was wrong.

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 a different matter entirely.

The relationship between experts and citizens, like almost all relationships in a democracy, is built on trust. When that trust collapses, experts and laypeople become warring factions. And when that happens, democracy itself can enter a death spiral that presents an immediate danger of decay either into rule by the mob or toward elitist technocracy. Both are authoritarian outcomes, and both threaten the United States today.

This is why the collapse of the relationship between experts and citizens is a dysfunction of democracy itself. The abysmal literacy, both political and general, of the American public is the foundation for all of these problems. It is the soil in which all of the other dysfunctions have taken root and prospered, with the 2016 election only its most recent expression.

As the writer Susan Jacoby put it in 2008, the most disturbing aspect of the American march toward ignorance is “not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge.” The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place… . The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.11

This plummeting literacy and growth of willful ignorance is part of a vicious circle of disengagement between citizens and public policy. People know little and care less about how they are governed, or how their economic, scientific, or political structures actually function. Yet, as all of these processes thus become more incomprehensible, citizens feel more alienated. Overwhelmed, they turn away from education and civic involvement, and withdraw into other pursuits. This, in turn, makes them into less capable citizens, and the cycle continues and strengthens, especially when the public appetite for escape is easily fed by any number of leisure industries.

Americans have increasingly unrealistic expectations of what their political and economic system can provide. This sense of entitlement is one reason they are continually angry at “experts” and especially at “elitists,” a word that in modern American usage can mean almost anyone with any education who refuses to coddle the public’s mistaken beliefs.

When told that ending poverty or preventing terrorism is a lot harder than it looks, Americans roll their eyes. Unable to comprehend all of the complexity around them, they choose instead to comprehend almost none of it and then sullenly blame experts, politicians, and bureaucrats for seizing control of their lives.

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 will often hear only the parts they want to hear—specifically, the parts that will be popular with their respective constituencies.

Finally, experts can only offer alternatives. They cannot, however, make choices about values.

when the public no longer makes a distinction between experts and policymakers and merely wants to blame everyone in the policy world for outcomes that distress them, the eventual result will not be better policy but more politicization of expertise. Politicians will never stop relying on experts; they will, however, move to relying on experts who will tell them—and the angry laypeople banging on their office doors—whatever it is they want to hear. This is the worst of all worlds, in which both democracy and expertise are corrupted because neither democratic leaders nor their expert advisers want to tangle with an ignorant electorate. At that point, expertise no longer serves the public interest, but the interest of whatever political clique is taking the temperature of the public at any given moment. We are already perilously close to this outcome in modern America.

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. Neither, of course, was it 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.

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.

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked radio listeners to go and purchase maps so they could follow along as he narrated the progress of World War II. Maps quickly sold out across the country. In 2006, fewer than sixty-five years later, a national study found that nearly half of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four—that is, those most likely to have to fight in a war—did not think it was necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news was being made.

When resentful laypeople demand that all marks of achievement, including expertise, be leveled and equalized in the name of “democracy” and “fairness,” there is no hope for either democracy or fairness. Everything becomes a matter of opinion, with all views dragged to the lowest common denominator in the name of equality.

Democracy, as practiced in the United States in the early twenty-first century, has become a resentful, angry business. The fragile egos of narcissistic college students jostle against the outraged, wounded self-identity of talk-radio addicts, all of whom demand to be taken with equal seriousness by everyone else, regardless of how extreme or uninformed their views are.

I do not intend to end this book on such a note of pessimism, but I am not sure I have much choice. Most causes of ignorance can be overcome, if people are willing to learn. Nothing, however, can overcome the toxic confluence of arrogance, narcissism, and cynicism that Americans now wear like full suit of armor against the efforts of experts and professionals.