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April 9 - April 22, 2019
Each of us is now walking around with more accumulated information on a smartphone or tablet than ever existed in the entire Library of Alexandria.
the Internet has accelerated the collapse of communication between experts and laypeople by offering an apparent shortcut to erudition.
Pommer’s Law, in which the Internet can only change a person’s mind from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.
People do not do “research” so much as they “search for pretty pages online to provide answers they like with the least amount of effort and in the shortest time.”
This is erudition in the age of cyberspace: You surf until you reach the conclusion you’re after.
As a saying attributed to the British writer Alastair Cooke goes, “Professionals are people who can do their best work when they don’t feel like it.”
We’re not just associating with people more like ourselves, we’re actively breaking ties with everyone else, especially on social media.
There are well over a billion Christians in the world, and amazingly enough, a few of them caught the error.
Unfortunately, however, these kinds of mistakes happen a lot more frequently in the new world of twenty-first-century journalism. Worse, because of the Internet, misinformation spreads a lot faster and sticks around a lot longer.
How did this happen? How can people be more resistant to facts and knowledge in a world where they are constantly barraged with facts and knowledge?
by the time the spectacular 1995 murder trial of O. J. Simpson concluded, millions of laypeople had developed deep views on things they actually could not understand, from the statistics of DNA testing to the veracity of shoeprints.
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.
“It is mind bending how the Baby Boomers went from trusting no one under 30 to trusting any idiot with a symmetrical face dressed in business casual.”
In a democracy, this level of cynicism about the media is poisonous. All citizens, including experts, need news.
they assumed that “reporters who don’t have science chops” would discover the whole faked study was “laughably flimsy” once they reached out to a real scientist. They were wrong: nobody actually tried to vet the story with actual scientists.
I have four recommendations for you, the readers, when approaching the news: be humbler, be ecumenical, be less cynical, and be a lot more discriminating.
Academic misconduct, however, is still a red line for many schools. Academic freedom guarantees the right to express unpopular or unconventional ideas, but it is not a license to produce sloppy or intentionally misleading research.
the natural scientists can claim to have clearer standards: if someone asserts that a certain plastic melts at 100 degrees, then everyone else with a sample of the same material and a Bunsen burner can check the finding.
Under closer scrutiny, many of Barton’s claims collapsed. The readers of the History News Network later voted it “the least credible book in print,” but even more damning, the book’s publishers agreed that the book was so flawed that they withdrew it from circulation.
In the social sciences, as in the hard sciences, it is rare that any single study can influence the life of the average citizen without at least some reconsideration by other experts.
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.
ABC’s docudrama on a possible nuclear war, The Day After, debuted as the most-watched television program up until that time.
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.
Isaac Asimov said, the words that have spurred the greatest scientific breakthroughs are probably not “Eureka,” but “Gee, that’s funny.”
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.”
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 Spy Who Came In from the Cold
Anti-intellectualism and the consequent distrust of expertise, however, played a more immediate and central role in the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Consider the various ways in which Trump’s campaign represented a one-man campaign against established knowledge.
“What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” she asked. Pierson’s fellow guest was the attorney and political commentator Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel whose military specializations included chemical and nuclear issues, and who by any standard is an ultra-conservative. Schlichter was visibly astonished. “The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing,” he said emphatically.
In Trump, Americans who believe shadowy forces are ruining their lives and that any visible intellectual ability is itself a suspicious characteristic in a national leader found a champion.
the most disturbing aspect of the American march toward ignorance is “not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge.”
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.
laypeople, unfortunately, are not usually interested in finding experts with excellent track records: they are mostly interested in experts who are accessible without much effort and who already agree with their views.
The most poorly informed people among us are those who seem to be the most dismissive of experts and are demanding the greatest say in matters about which they have exerted almost no effort to educate themselves.
Anti-intellectualism is itself a means of short-circuiting democracy, because a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices.
Americans now think of democracy as a state of actual equality, in which every opinion is as good as any other on almost any subject under the sun.
Nothing, however, can overcome the toxic confluence of arrogance, narcissism, and cynicism that Americans now wear like full suit of armor
Laypeople cannot do without experts, and they must accept this reality without rancor.
Jef Rouner, “Guide to Arguing with a Snopes-Denier,” Houston Press, April 2, 2014.
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