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

by Thomas M. Nichols

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.

Restistance

We all suffer from problems, for example, like “confirmation bias,” the natural tendency only to accept evidence that confirms what we already believe.

Bias

In this hypercompetitive media environment, editors and producers no longer have the patience—or the financial luxury—to allow journalists to develop their own expertise or deep knowledge of a subject.

Deep

Despite what most people think, experts and policymakers are not the same people, and to confuse the two, as Americans often do, corrodes trust among experts, citizens, and political leaders.

Epolicy

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.

Trump

Experts have a responsibility to educate. Voters have a responsibility to learn.

Resp

autodidacts

Defined

Most define experts in a rather circular way, as people who have “comprehensive” and “authoritative” knowledge, which is another way of describing people whose command of a subject means that the information they provide the rest of us is true and can be trusted.

Expert

Rather, it means that experts in any given subject are, by their nature, a minority whose views are more likely to be “authoritative”—that is, correct or accurate—than anyone else’s.

Expert 2

an expert “is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.” (His fellow physicist Niels Bohr had a different take: “An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow

Exprt 3

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.

Quote

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.

Quandary Uote

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

Dunning effect

“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”2

Dunnimg 2

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,

Metacondioning

“law of parsimony,” meaning that the most likely explanation is the one that requires the fewest number of logical leaps or shaky assumptions.

Parsimony

Stereotypes are not predictions, they’re conclusions. That’s why it’s called “prejudice”: it relies on pre-judging.

Stereo

because these small schools cannot support a doctoral program in an established field, they construct esoteric interdisciplinary fields that exist only to create new credentials. It’s not hard to see how this ends up creating degrees that do not actually signal a corresponding level of knowledge. All of this borders on academic malpractice. The creation of graduate programs in colleges that can barely provide a reasonable undergraduate education cheats both graduates and undergrads. Small colleges do not have the resources—including the libraries, research facilities, and multiple programs—of large universities, and repainting the signs at the front gates cannot magically create that kind of academic infrastructure.

College

example, the most frequently given grade at Harvard was a straight A. At Yale, more than 60 percent of all grades are either A- or A.

Grade inflation

To faculty everywhere, the lesson was obvious: the campus of a top university is not a place for intellectual exploration. It is a luxury home, rented for four to six years, nine months at a time, by children of the elite who may shout at faculty as if they’re berating clumsy maids in a colonial mansion.

Elote

Although the Internet could be making all of us smarter, it makes many of us stupider, because it’s not just a magnet for the curious. It’s a sinkhole for the gullible. It renders everyone an instant expert. You have a degree? Well, I did a Google search! Frank Bruni Do not believe everything you read on the Internet, especially quotes from famous people.

Bruni

technology has created a world in which we’re all Cliff Clavin now. And that’s a problem.

Funny

Facts, as experts know, are not the same as knowledge or ability.

Knowledge

Internet users are the foundation of Pommer’s Law, in which the Internet can only change a person’s mind from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.

Pommers law

“Ninety percent of everything,” Sturgeon decreed, “is crap.”

Sturgeonslaw

Nonetheless, books from reputable presses go through at least a basic process of negotiation between authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers, including the book you’re reading right now. Books from self-published “vanity presses,” by contrast, are looked down upon by reviewers and readers alike, and with good reason.

Books

Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which the least competent people surfing the web are the least likely to realize that they’re not learning anything.

Dunning Krueger

A 2014 Pew research study found that liberals are more likely than conservatives to block or unfriend people with whom they disagreed, but mostly because conservatives already tended to have fewer people with whom they disagreed in their online social circles in the first place. (Or as a Washington Post review of the study put it, conservatives have “lower

Unfriendly

News organizations had to try to cover the broadest and most demographically marketable audience, and so newscasts in the United States through the 1960s and 1970s were remarkably alike, with calming, authoritative figures like Walter Cronkite and Harry Reasoner reporting even the most awful events with aplomb and detachment. However, this also meant that not everything counted as news.

60 70s

We just have to be more responsive to what the audience wants. I think the tradition in newspapers has been that we have set the agenda and we’ve told readers what we think they want to know. I think we need to come down off of that mountain a little bit and ask people, involve people in the conversation a little bit more.8

Whatwe needversus what we want.

Professionals in Washington, like everyone else, were “somewhat paralyzed” by a “glut” of news that left them “lacking confidence in individual sources and information.”11

Think

Limbaugh, however, did something unique, by setting himself up as a source of truth in opposition to the rest of the America media. Within a few years of his first broadcasts, Limbaugh was heard on more than six hundred stations nationwide. He told his listeners that the press and the national television networks were conspiring in a liberal echo chamber, and especially that they were in the tank for the new administration of President Bill Clinton. Not all of these charges were entirely fair, but not all of them were wrong either, and Limbaugh was able to mine the established media daily for examples of bias—of which there were plenty—and run with them.

The calls were screened and vetted; according to a manager at one of Limbaugh’s early affiliates, this was because Limbaugh felt that he was not very good at debate. Debate, however, was not the point: the object was to create a sense of community among people who already were inclined to agree with each other. Later, the Internet would overtake this kind of network building among people who rejected the mainstream media, but the phenomenon began on radio. The

Think

In 2011, Limbaugh referred to “government, academia, science, and the media” as the “four corners of deceit,” which pretty much covered everyone except Limbaugh.

Dictatorial

First Things, R. R. Reno, wrote in 2016 that Roger Ailes was “perhaps the single most influential person behind the transformation of politics into entertainment over the last generation,” but that he’s since had plenty of help:

Ailes

“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

Shucks

Shucks

Will Saletan told me, complicated stories require a lot more time than just blurting out whatever produces a click. Saletan

Speed

I have four recommendations for you, the readers, when approaching the news: be humbler, be ecumenical, be less cynical, and be a lot more discriminating.

Recommend

science is a process, not a conclusion.

Science

Experts face a difficult task in this respect, because no matter how many times scholars might emphasize that their goal is to explain the world rather than to predict discrete events, laypeople and policymakers prefer prediction. (And experts, even when they know better, often gladly oblige.)

Predicting

Pollsters and consultants like Bueno de Mesquita

Lookup

People with a very well-defined area of knowledge do not have many tools beyond their specialization, so their instinct is to take what they know and generalize it outward, no matter how poorly the fit is between their own area and the subject at hand.28

Ge eralize

The goal of expert advice and prediction is not to win a coin toss, it is to help guide decisions about possible futures.

Prediction

As the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in a 1928 essay, laypeople must evaluate expert claims by exercising their own careful logic as well. The skepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

Russell

What Gove was actually saying was that people should be free to build gratifying fantasies free from unpleasant facts.1

Gove

Trump’s strongest support in 2016, unsurprisingly, was concentrated among people with low levels of education. “I love the poorly educated,” Trump exulted after winning the Nevada caucuses, and that love was clearly reciprocated.

Poorly educated

Secret diplomacy and campaigns to win public opinion are part and parcel of the history of every democratic government, including

Seecret

The relationship between experts and citizens, like almost all relationships in a democracy, is built on trust. When that trust collapses, experts and laypeople become warring factions. And when that happens, democracy itself can enter a death spiral that presents an immediate danger of decay either into rule by the mob or toward elitist technocracy. Both are authoritarian outcomes, and both threaten the United States today. This is why the collapse of the relationship between experts and citizens is a dysfunction of democracy itself.

True

When voters remain utterly unwilling to understand important issues because they are too difficult or discomfiting, it is unsurprising that experts will give up talking to them and instead rely on their positions in the policy world to advocate for their own solutions. Experts

Technocratic