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April 9 - April 22, 2019
the bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing things.
Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.
People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.
it is narcissism, coupled to a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in self-actualization.
“agree to disagree,” a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher.
the public not only expressed strong views, but respondents actually showed enthusiasm for military intervention in Ukraine in direct proportion to their lack of knowledge about Ukraine.
These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.
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.
The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.
the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.
the broad availability of a college education—paradoxically—is making many people think they’ve become smarter when in fact they’ve gained only an illusory intelligence bolstered by a degree of dubious worth.
While the Internet doesn’t explain all of the death of expertise, it explains quite a lot of it, at least in the twenty-first century.
A modern society cannot function without a social division of labor and a reliance on experts, professionals, and intellectuals.
We want to believe we are capable of making all kinds of decisions, and we chafe at the person who corrects us, or tells us we’re wrong, or instructs us in things we don’t understand.
Over a half century ago, the political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote that “the complexity of modern life has steadily whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can intelligently and competently perform for himself.”
More disturbing is that Americans have done little in those intervening decades to remedy the gap between their own knowledge and the level of information required to participate in an advanced democracy.
When Professor Somin and others note that the public’s ignorance is no worse than it was a half century ago, this in itself should be a cause for alarm, if not panic. Holding the line isn’t good enough.
public schools. The parents more likely to
Indeed, ignorance has become hip, with some Americans now wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of cultural sophistication.
Another mark of true experts is their acceptance of evaluation and correction by other experts.
experts will make mistakes, but they are far less likely to make mistakes than a layperson.
American culture tends to fuel these kinds of romantic notions about the wisdom of the common person or the gumption of the self-educated genius.
Damon and Affleck went home with Oscars for the screenplay, and no doubt they encouraged at least some viewers to believe that reading enough books is almost like going to school.
No one’s knowledge is complete, and experts realize this better than anyone.
We all have an inherent and natural tendency to search for evidence that already meshes with our beliefs.
No one likes to be called stupid: it’s a judgmental, harsh word that implies not only a lack of intelligence, but a willful ignorance almost to the point of moral failure. (I have used it, more than I should. So have you, most likely.)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.
In other words, the least-competent people were the least likely to know they were wrong or to know that others were right, the most likely to try to fake it, and the least able to learn anything.
“the innumerate will inevitably respond with the non sequitur, ‘Yes, but what if you’re that one,’ and then nod knowingly, as if they’ve demolished your argument with their penetrating insight.”
it would waste a lot of time for every research program to begin from the assumption that no one knows anything and nothing ever happened before today.
(The proposal for the book you’re reading right now was peer-reviewed: that doesn’t mean that the scholars who read it agreed with it, but that they were asked to consider the arguments and present whatever objections or advice they might have.)
it takes a reasonably smart person to construct a really interesting conspiracy theory, because conspiracy theories are actually highly complex explanations.
American culture in particular is attracted to the idea of the talented amateur (as opposed, say, to the experts and elites) who can take on entire governments—or even bigger organizations—and win.
“we can’t speak of conspiracy thinking as a fringe phenomenon, nor one that has only a negligible impact on the civic sphere and cultural values.”
What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists
critical thinking: the ability to examine new information and competing ideas dispassionately, logically, and without emotional or personal preconceptions.
Americans with college degrees now broadly think of themselves as “educated” when in reality the best that many of them can say is that they’ve continued on in some kind of classroom setting after high school, with wildly varying results.
College is supposed to be an uncomfortable experience. It is where a person leaves behind the rote learning of childhood and accepts the anxiety, discomfort, and challenge of complexity that leads to the acquisition of deeper knowledge—hopefully, for a lifetime.
College students may not be dumber than they were thirty years ago, but their sense of entitlement and their unfounded self-confidence have grown considerably.
more people than ever before are going to college, mostly by tapping a virtually inexhaustible supply of ruinous loans.
(I am leaving aside for-profit schools here, which are largely only factories that create debt and that in general I exclude from the definition of “higher education.”)
The student, realizing that a scientist at a major university was not going to change his mind after a few minutes of arguing with a sophomore, finally shrugged and gave up. “Well,” the student said, “your guess is as good as mine.” Jastrow stopped the young man short. “No, no, no,” he said emphatically. “My guesses are much, much better than yours.”
the social psychologist David Dunning has noted, “The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance—as an absence of knowledge—leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education, even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence.”
The only thing more disheartening than finding out these folks are lying about possessing multiple degrees is to find out that they’re telling the truth.
Too often, those who denigrate the liberal arts are in reality advocating for nothing less than turning colleges into trade schools.
Grades in the A and B range together now account for more than 80 percent of all grades in all subjects, a trend that continues unabated.17 In other words, all the children are now above average.
Evaluating teachers creates a habit of mind in which the layperson becomes accustomed to judging the expert, despite being in an obvious position of having inferior knowledge of the subject material.
We applaud student activism if we like the cause, and we deplore it if we disagree.
the students are learning that emotion and volume can always defeat reason and substance, thus building about themselves fortresses that no future teacher, expert, or intellectual will ever be able to breach.
if college graduates can no longer be counted on to lead reasoned debate and discussion in American life, and to know the difference between knowledge and feeling, then we’re indeed in the kind of deep trouble no expert can fix.
