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

by Thomas M. Nichols

At the root of all this is an inability among laypeople to understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything.

“Well,” the student said, “your guess is as good as mine.” Jastrow stopped the young man short. “No, no, no,” he said emphatically. “My guesses are much, much better than yours.”

The same people who might doubt their family physician about the safety of vaccines will buy a book on nuclear weapons because the author’s title includes the magic letters “MD.”