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

by Thomas M. Nichols

People do not come to the Internet so that their bad information can be corrected or their cherished theories disproven. Rather, they ask the electronic oracle to confirm them in their ignorance. In 2015 a Washington Post writer, Caitlin Dewey, worried that fact-checking could never defeat myths and hoaxes because “no one has the time or cognitive capacity to reason all the apparent nuances and discrepancies out.”3 In the end, she sighed, “debunking them doesn’t do a darn thing.” Two months after she wrote those words, Dewey and the Post threw in the towel and ceased her weekly “what was fake on the Internet” column. There was no way to keep up with the madness, especially once hoaxers figured out how to make money out of spreading myths for precious clicks on websites. “Frankly,” Dewey told her readers, “this column wasn’t designed to address the current environment. This format doesn’t make sense.” More alarming were the conversations Dewey had with professional researchers who told her that “institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views—even when it’s demonstrably fake” (emphasis in the original).4 Dewey and the Post fought the Internet, and the Internet won.