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

by Thomas M. Nichols

The fact of the matter is that experts are more often right than wrong, especially on essential matters of fact. And yet the public constantly searches for the loopholes in expert knowledge that will allow them to disregard all expert advice they don’t like.

Taxes

experts are the people who know considerably more on a subject than the rest of us, and are those to whom we turn when we need advice, education, or solutions in a particular area of human knowledge.

Experts stay engaged in their field, continually improve their skills, learn from their mistakes, and have visible track records. Over the span of their career, they get better, or at least maintain their high level of competence, and couple it to the wisdom—again, an intangible—that comes from time.

And if we feel socially or personally threatened, we will argue until we’re blue in the face.

Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.

College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades;

In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry.

But interestingly, they also claim some familiarity with concepts that are entirely made up, such as the plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine.

The term refers to the tendency to look for information that only confirms what we believe, to accept facts that only strengthen our preferred explanations, and to dismiss data that challenge what we already accept as truth.

In day-to-day matters, common sense serves us well and is usually better than needlessly complicated explanations. We don’t need to know, for example, exactly how fast a car can go in a rainstorm before the tires begin to lose contact with the road. Somewhere there’s a mathematical formula that would allow us to know the answer with great precision, but our common sense needs no such formula to tell us to slow down in bad weather, and that’s good enough.

When it comes to untangling more complicated issues, however, common sense is not sufficient.

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.

That’s why one of the most important characteristics of an expert is the ability to remain dispassionate, even on the most controversial issues. Experts must treat everything from cancer to nuclear war as problems to be solved with detachment and objectivity. Their distance from the subject enables open debate and consideration of alternatives,

People skim headlines or articles and share them on social media, but they do not read them. Nonetheless, because people want to be perceived by others as intelligent and well informed, they fake it as best they can.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt summed it up neatly when he observed that when facts conflict with our values, “almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.”

What hasn’t changed, however, is that the guesses of an experienced astrophysicist and a college sophomore are not equivalently good.

lousy student who attended a good school is still a lousy student; a diligent student from a small institution is no less intelligent for the lack of a famous pedigree.

students graduate with a high GPA that doesn’t reflect a corresponding level of education or intellectual achievement.

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.

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.

they decided beforehand what they believed and then went looking for a source on the Internet to buttress that belief.

As a University College of London (UCL) study found, people don’t actually read the articles they encounter during a search on the Internet. Instead, they glance at the top line or the first few sentences and then move on.

In 2014, two psychologists completed a study of what they called the “search engine manipulation effect” and claimed that their tests showed an ability “to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidate by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session,” and that this potentially constitutes a “serious threat to the democratic system of government.”14 It’s too early to say that search engines are undermining democracy

In the end, experts cannot guarantee outcomes. They cannot promise that they will never make mistakes or that they will not fall prey to the same shortcomings that govern all human deliberations.

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.

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.

The question is not whether experts should engage in prediction. They will. The society they live in and the leaders who govern it will ask them to do so. Rather, the issue is when and how experts should make predictions, and what to do about it when they’re wrong.

To be honest, I suspect that most experts and scholars would probably prefer that laypeople avoid doing so, because they would not understand most of what they were reading and their attempt to follow the professional debate would likely produce more public confusion than enlightenment.

Democracy cannot function when every citizen is an expert. Yes, it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a democracy while ignoring its voters;

Trump’s strongest support in 2016, unsurprisingly, was concentrated among people with low levels of education.

As the writer Susan Jacoby put it in 2008, the most disturbing aspect of the American march toward ignorance is “not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge.”

People know little and care less about how they are governed, or how their economic, scientific, or political structures actually function. Yet, as all of these processes thus become more incomprehensible, citizens feel more alienated. Overwhelmed, they turn away from education and civic involvement, and withdraw into other pursuits. This, in turn, makes them into less capable citizens, and the cycle continues and strengthens, especially when the public appetite for escape is easily fed by any number of leisure industries.

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.