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

by Thomas M. Nichols

Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.

Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.

But there is a self-righteousness and fury to this new rejection of expertise that suggest, at least to me, that this isn’t just mistrust or questioning or the pursuit of alternatives: it is narcissism, coupled to a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in self-actualization.

the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.

And some of us, as indelicate as it might be to say it, are not intelligent enough to know when we’re wrong, no matter how good our intentions. Just as we are not all equally able to carry a tune or draw a straight line, many people simply cannot recognize the gaps in their own knowledge or understand their own inability to construct a logical argument.

The Internet is a magnificent repository of knowledge, and yet it’s also the source and enabler of a spreading epidemic of misinformation. Not only is the Internet making many of us dumber, it’s making us meaner: alone behind their keyboards, people argue rather than discuss, and insult rather than listen.

In order to judge the performance of the experts, and to judge the votes and decisions of their representatives, laypeople must familiarize themselves with the issues at hand. This does not mean that every American must engage in deep study of policy, but if citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives, they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.

we cannot function without admitting the limits of our knowledge and trusting in the expertise of others. We sometimes resist this conclusion because it undermines our sense of independence and autonomy. 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. This natural human reaction among individuals is dangerous when it becomes a shared characteristic among entire societies.

All societies, no matter how advanced, have an undercurrent of resentment against educated elites, as well as persistent cultural attachments to folk wisdom, urban legends, and other irrational but normal human reactions to the complexity and confusion of modern life.

This distrust of intellectual authority was rooted, Tocqueville theorized, in the nature of American democracy. When “citizens, placed on an equal footing, are all closely seen by one another,” he wrote, they “are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence in this or that man which is destroyed, but the disposition to trust the authority of any man whatsoever.”

the “size and complexity of government” have made it “more difficult for voters with limited knowledge to monitor and evaluate the government’s many activities. The result is a polity in which the people often cannot exercise their sovereignty responsibly and effectively.” 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.

After all, when the Rwandan genocide broke out in 1994, future secretary of state Warren Christopher had to be shown the location of Rwanda. So why should the rest of us walk around carrying that kind of trivia in our heads?

The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge.

experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything.

the public constantly searches for the loopholes in expert knowledge that will allow them to disregard all expert advice they don’t like.

people who anxiously point back in history to the thalidomide disaster routinely pop dozens of drugs into their mouths, from aspirin to antihistamines, which are among the thousands and thousands of medications shown to be safe by decades of trials and tests conducted by experts.

Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult. And to refuse to acknowledge all views as worthy of consideration, no matter how fantastic or inane they are, is to be closed-minded.

I realized that reading things from a foreign country in a foreign language was a specific kind of expertise. It could not be distilled into a course or a test. There was no quick means to develop it as a skill: it took time, practice, and advice from more experienced experts in the same field.

Another mark of true experts is their acceptance of evaluation and correction by other experts.

Expert communities rely on these peer-run institutions to maintain standards and to enhance social trust. Mechanisms like peer review, board certification, professional associations, and other organizations and professions help to protect quality and to assure society—that is, the expert’s clients—that they’re safe in accepting expert claims of competence.

Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.

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. These images empower a certain kind of satisfying social fantasy, in which ordinary people out-perform the stuffy professor or the nerdy scientist through sheer grit and ingenuity.

In our intimate social circles, most of us think we’re competent and trustworthy, and we want others to see us that way, too. We all want to be taken seriously and to be respected. In practice, this means we don’t want anyone to think we’re dumb, and so we pretend to be smarter than we are. Over time, we even come to believe it.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb. Dunning and Kruger more gently label such people as “unskilled” or “incompetent.” But that doesn’t change their central finding: “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”

As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack 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. Their less competent counterparts, by comparison, have no such ability. They think they’re doing a great job.

Facts come and go as people find convenient at the moment. Thus, confirmation bias makes attempts at reasoned argument exhausting because it produces arguments and theories that are nonfalsifiable. It is the nature of confirmation bias itself to dismiss all contradictory evidence as irrelevant, and so my evidence is always the rule, your evidence is always a mistake or an exception. It’s impossible to argue with this kind of explanation, because by definition it’s never wrong.

Many of the thorniest research problems often have counterintuitive answers that by their nature defy our common sense. (Simple observation, after all, told early humans that the sun revolved around the earth, not the other way around.) The simple tools of common sense can betray us and make us susceptible to errors both great and small, which is why laypeople and experts so often talk past each other even on relatively trivial issues like superstitions and folk wisdom.

We should only work our way up toward more complicated explanations if we need them. This is also called the “law of parsimony,” meaning that the most likely explanation is the one that requires the fewest number of logical leaps or shaky assumptions.

Conspiracy theories are also a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing more than the random cruelty either of an uncaring universe or an incomprehensible deity. These are awful choices, and even thinking about them can induce the kind of existential despair that leads a character in the nineteenth-century classic The Brothers Karamazov to make a famous declaration about tragedy: “If the sufferings of children go to make up the sum of the sufferings necessary to buy truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”

Stereotyping is an ugly social habit, but generalization is at the root of every form of science. Generalizations are probabilistic statements, based in observable facts. They are not, however, explanations in themselves—another important difference from stereotypes. They’re measurable and verifiable.

The key to a stereotype is that it is impervious to factual testing. A stereotype brooks no annoying interference with reality, and it relies on the clever use of confirmation bias to dismiss all exceptions as irrelevant.

Some of our most stubborn misbeliefs arise not from primitive childlike intuitions or careless category errors, but from the very values and philosophies that define who we are as individuals. Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs—narratives about the self, ideas about the social order—that essentially cannot be violated: To contradict them would call into question our very self-worth. As such, these views demand fealty from other opinions.

when facts conflict with our values, “almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.”

respecting a person’s opinion does not mean granting equal respect to that person’s knowledge.

But faculty both in the classroom and on social media report that incidents where students take correction as an insult are occurring more frequently. Unearned praise and hollow successes build a fragile arrogance in students that can lead them to lash out at the first teacher or employer who dispels that illusion, a habit that proves hard to break in adulthood.

It was probably inevitable that the anti-intellectualism of American life would invade college campuses, but that is no reason to surrender to it.

The Internet is a vessel, not a referee.

This is no help, unfortunately, for a student or an untrained layperson who has never been taught how to judge the provenance of information or the reputability of a writer.

On the Internet as in life, money and popularity unfortunately count for a lot.

Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, the Internet is making us meaner, shorter-fused, and incapable of conducting discussions where anyone learns anything. The major problem with instantaneous communication is that it’s instantaneous. While the Internet enables more people to talk to each other than ever before—a distinctly new historical condition—everyone talking immediately to everyone else might not always be such a good idea. Sometimes, human beings need to pause and to reflect, to give themselves time to absorb information and to digest it. Instead, the Internet is an arena in which people can react without thinking, and thus in turn they become invested in defending their gut reactions rather than accepting new information or admitting a mistake—

“The anti-vaccine agitators can always find a renegade researcher or random ‘study’ to back them up. This is erudition in the age of cyberspace: You surf until you reach the conclusion you’re after. You click your way to validation, confusing the presence of a website with the plausibility of an argument.”

Accessing the Internet can actually make people dumber than if they had never engaged a subject at all. The very act of searching for information makes people think they’ve learned something, when in fact they’re more likely to be immersed in yet more data they do not understand. This happens because after enough time surfing, people no longer can distinguish between things that may have flashed before their eyes and things they actually know.

Instead, they glance at the top line or the first few sentences and then move on. Internet users, the researchers noted, “are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed, there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

knowledge is about a lot more than assembling a box of factoids or making coin-toss predictions. Facts do not speak for themselves.

Learning new things requires patience and the ability to listen to other people. The Internet and social media, however, are making us less social and more confrontational. Online, as in life, people are clustering into small echo chambers, preferring only to talk to those with whom they already agree.

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.

Distance and anonymity remove patience and presumptions of goodwill. Rapid access to information and the ability to speak without having to listen, combined with the “keyboard courage” that allows people to say things to each other electronically they would never say in person, kill conversation.