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

by Thomas M. Nichols

I’m used to people disagreeing with me; in fact, I encourage it. Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.

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. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge.

a key skill called “metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong. Good singers know when they’ve hit a sour note; good directors know when a scene in a play isn’t working; good marketers know when an ad campaign is going to be a flop.

At its best, college should aim to produce graduates with a reasonable background in a subject, a willingness to continue learning for the rest of their lives, and an ability to assume roles as capable citizens.

Americans are burying themselves in a blizzard of degrees, certificates, and other affirmations of varying value. People eager to misinform their fellow citizens will often say that they have graduate education and that they are therefore to be taken seriously. 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.

In the same way that shopping for schools teaches young men and women to value a school for reasons other than an education, these accommodations to young activists encourage them to believe, once again, that the job of a college student is to enlighten the professors instead of the other way around.

Despite what irritated professionals may think, however, the Internet is not the primary cause of challenges to their expertise. Rather, the Internet has accelerated the collapse of communication between experts and laypeople by offering an apparent shortcut to erudition.

Libraries, or at least their reference and academic sections, once served as a kind of first cut through the noise of the marketplace. Visiting a library was an education in itself, especially for a reader who took the time to ask for help from a librarian.

This unwillingness to hear out others not only makes us all more unpleasant with each other in general, but also makes us less able to think, to argue persuasively, and to accept correction when we’re wrong. When we are incapable of sustaining a chain of reasoning past a few mouse clicks, we cannot tolerate even the smallest challenge to our beliefs or ideas. This is dangerous because it both undermines the role of knowledge and expertise in a modern society and corrodes the basic ability of people to get along with each other in a democracy.

This strange combination of distance and intimacy poisons conversation. Reasonable arguments require participants to be honest and well intentioned. Actual proximity builds trust and understanding. We are not just brains in a tank processing disparate pieces of data; we hear out another person in part by relying on multiple visual and auditory cues, not just by watching their words stream past our eyes. Teachers, especially, know that the same material delivered at a distance or on a screen has a different impact than personal interaction with a student who can ask questions, furrow a brow, or show an expression of sudden understanding.

Distance and anonymity remove patience and presumptions of goodwill.

But more of everything does not mean more quality in everything. (Sturgeon’s Law is inescapable everywhere.) To say that the citizens of the United States now have many more sources of news than ever before is like saying that they also have more dining choices than ever before: it’s true, but it doesn’t mean that anyone’s getting healthier by eating in America’s nearly three hundred thousand cheap chain restaurants and fast-food outlets.

To judge from the public’s awareness of major issues, what readers need is not more input into the stories, but basic information, including the occasional map with a “You Are Here” pointer on it.

This fusing of entertainment, news, punditry, and citizen participation is a chaotic mess that does not inform people so much as it creates the illusion of being informed.

If professional policymakers and staff in Washington can’t make sense of the news, how can anyone else? Who has enough time to sort through it all? The National Journal study even nodded to this time pressure by including a note that the study itself should take forty-five minutes to read in full, but only twenty to skim. The irony is both obvious and disturbing.

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. In November 1979, Iranian revolutionaries overran the US embassy in Tehran, taking dozens of American personnel as hostages. The spectacle shocked Americans who saw it all happen nearly in real time. The Iranian hostage drama was something new, a story in between a war and a crisis: Vietnam was a slow-motion debacle that dragged on for a decade, while the Cuban missile crisis took place in two weeks, faster than television and newspapers could fully report it. The hostage taking was fast, and then slow, with a few days of violence followed by a long grind of waiting and worrying.

Over a year later, the hostages came home, but Koppel and Nightline stayed on and ran for many more years. Cable provided the technology for later imitators, but Nightline provided the model. The “breaking” alerts and the chyrons—those little ribbons of news factoids that now scroll across the bottom of the screen on news networks—all originated with a program that was, in effect, created on the fly in response to a crisis.

For nearly thirty years, I’ve opened almost every class I teach at the college and graduate level by telling my students that no matter what else they do, they should consume a balanced daily diet of news. I tell them to follow the major newspapers; to watch at least two networks; to subscribe (online or otherwise) to at least one journal with which they consistently disagree. I

There is a huge difference between these two maladies. A 2000 study on public knowledge conducted by the University of Illinois, as the political scientist Anne Pluta later noted, found that “uninformed citizens don’t have any information at all, while those who are misinformed have information that conflicts with the best evidence and expert opinion.” Not only do these people “fill the gaps in their knowledge base by using their existing belief systems,” but over time those beliefs become “indistinguishable from hard data.” And, of course, the most misinformed citizens “tend to be the most confident in their views and are also the strongest partisans.”16

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. A Pew study in 2012 noted that two-thirds of Americans think news organizations in general are “often inaccurate,” but that same number drops to less than a third when people are asked the same question about the news organization “you use most.”18 This, as many observers have pointed out over the years, is much the same way everyone claims to hate Congress, when what they really mean is that they hate all the members of Congress but their own.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Bertrand Russell

Prediction is a problem for experts. It’s what the public wants, but experts usually aren’t very good at it. This is because they’re not supposed to be good at it; the purpose of science is to explain, not to predict. And yet predictions, like cross-expertise transgressions, are catnip to experts.

When unpredictable things happen, scientists have a new starting point for investigation. As the late science-fiction writer (and professor of biochemistry) Isaac Asimov said, the words that have spurred the greatest scientific breakthroughs are probably not “Eureka,” but “Gee, that’s funny.”

A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. James Madison

would be lamentable but perhaps not so worrisome if people had some sense of how imperfect their civic knowledge is. If they did, they could repair it. But the Dunning-Kruger Effect suggests something different.

As the psychologist Derek Kohler put it, Government action is guided in part by public opinion. Public opinion is guided in part by perceptions of what experts think. But public opinion may—and often does—deviate from expert opinion, not simply, it seems, because the public refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of experts, but also because the public may not be able to tell where the majority of expert opinion lies.21

When that trust breaks down, public ignorance can be turned by cynical manipulation into a political weapon. 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.

Experts need to remember, always, that they are the servants and not the masters of a democratic society and a republican government. If citizens, however, are to be the masters, they must equip themselves not just with education, but with the kind of civic virtue that keeps them involved in the running of their own country. Laypeople cannot do without experts, and they must accept this reality without rancor. Experts, likewise, must accept that their advice, which might seem obvious and right to them, will not always be taken in a democracy that may not value the same things they do. Otherwise, when democracy is understood as an unending demand for unearned respect for unfounded opinions, anything and everything becomes possible, including the end of democracy and republican government itself. That, at least, is my expert opinion on the matter. I could be wrong.