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

by Thomas M. Nichols

While expertise isn’t dead, however, it’s in trouble. Something is going terribly wrong. The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance. It’s not just that people don’t know a lot about science or politics or geography; they don’t, but that’s an old problem. And really, it’s not even a problem, insofar as we live in a society that works because of a division of labor, a system designed to relieve each of us of having to know about everything.

No, the bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing things. 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.

I’m used to people disagreeing with me; in fact, I encourage it. Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.

We no longer have those principled and informed arguments. The foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of “uninformed,” passed “misinformed” on the way down, and is now plummeting to “aggressively wrong.” People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs. I was not alive in the Middle Ages, so I cannot say it is unprecedented, but within my living memory I’ve never seen anything like it.

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. This makes it all the harder for experts to push back and to insist that people come to their senses. No matter what the subject, the argument always goes down the drain of an enraged ego and ends with minds unchanged, sometimes with professional relationships or even friendships damaged. Instead of arguing, experts today are supposed to accept such disagreements as, at worst, an honest difference of opinion. We are supposed to “agree to disagree,” a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we’re just being jerks, apparently.

We do not have a healthy skepticism about experts: instead, we actively resent them, with many people assuming that experts are wrong simply by virtue of being experts. We hiss at the “eggheads”—a pejorative coming back into vogue—while instructing our doctors about which medications we need or while insisting to teachers that our children’s answers on a test are right even if they’re wrong. Not only is everyone as smart as everyone else, but we all think we’re the smartest people ever. And we couldn’t be more wrong.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Isaac Asimov

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. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge.

This is more than a natural skepticism toward experts. I fear we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers—in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.

The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.

Any assertion of expertise from an actual expert, meanwhile, produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy. Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous. This book, then, is about expertise. Or, more accurately, it is about the relationship between experts and citizens in a democracy, why that relationship is collapsing, and what all of us, citizens and experts, might do about it.

Social changes only in the past half century finally broke down old barriers of race, class, and sex not only between Americans in general but also between uneducated citizens and elite experts in particular. A wider circle of debate meant more knowledge but more social friction. Universal education, the greater empowerment of women and minorities, the growth of a middle class, and increased social mobility all threw a minority of experts and the majority of citizens into direct contact, after nearly two centuries in which they rarely had to interact with each other. And yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but 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.

When students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge; worse, they do not develop the habits of critical thinking that would allow them to continue to learn and to evaluate the kinds of complex issues on which they will have to deliberate and vote as citizens.

Experts are not infallible. They have made terrible mistakes, with ghastly consequences. To defend the role of expertise in modern America is to invite a litany of these disasters and errors: thalidomide, Vietnam, the Challenger, the dire warnings about the dietary hazards of eggs. (Go ahead and enjoy them again. They’re off the list of things that are bad for you.) Experts, understandably, retort that this is the equivalent of remembering one plane crash and ignoring billions of safely traveled air miles. That may be true, but sometimes airplanes do crash, and sometimes they crash because an expert screwed up.

The United States is a republic, in which the people designate others to make decisions on their behalf. Those elected representatives cannot master every issue, and they rely on experts and professionals to help them. 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.

Experts have a responsibility to educate. Voters have a responsibility to learn. In the end, regardless of how much advice the professionals might provide, only the public can decide the direction of the important policy choices facing their nation. Only voters can resolve among the choices that affect their families and for their country, and only they bear the ultimate responsibility for those decisions.

WASHINGTON, DC—Citing years of frustration over their advice being misunderstood, misrepresented or simply ignored, America’s foremost experts in every field collectively tendered their resignation Monday. The Onion

We’ve all met them. They’re our coworkers, our friends, our family members. They are young and old, rich and poor, some with education, others armed only with a laptop or a library card. But they all have one thing in common: they are ordinary people who believe they are actually troves of knowledge. Convinced that they are more informed than the experts, more broadly knowledgeable than the professors, and more insightful than the gullible masses, they are the explainers who are more than happy to enlighten the rest of us about everything from the history of imperialism to the dangers of vaccines.

A kind of intellectual Gresham’s Law is gathering momentum: where once the rule was “bad money drives out good,” we now live in an age where misinformation pushes aside knowledge.

In the early 1970s, the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein issued a dictum, often quoted since, that “specialization is for insects.” Truly capable human beings, he wrote, should be able to do almost anything from changing a diaper to commanding a warship. It is a noble sentiment that celebrates human adaptability and resilience, but it’s wrong. While there was once a time when every homesteader lumbered his own trees and built his own house, this not only was inefficient, but produced only rudimentary housing.

The fact of the matter is that 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.

This change is not only unprecedented but dangerous. The distrust of experts and the more general anti-intellectual attitudes that go with it are problems that should be getting better, but instead are getting worse.

It would be easy to dismiss a distrust of established knowledge by attributing it to the stereotype of suspicious, uneducated yokels rejecting the big-city ways of the mysterious eggheads. But again the reality is far more unsettling: campaigns against established knowledge are being led by people who should know better.

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.

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.

A few centuries earlier … humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. “The Dude,” The Big Lebowski

This phenomenon is called “the Dunning-Kruger Effect,” named for David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the research psychologists at Cornell University who identified it in a landmark 1999 study. 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.”2

“Confirmation bias” is the most common—and easily the most irritating—obstacle to productive conversation, and not just between experts and laypeople. 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. We all do it, and you can be certain that you and I and everyone who’s ever had an argument with anyone about anything has infuriated someone else with it.

The most extreme cases of confirmation bias are found not in the wives’ tales and superstitions of the ignorant, but in the conspiracy theories of more educated or intelligent people. Unlike superstitions, which are simple, conspiracy theories are horrendously complicated. Indeed, it takes a reasonably smart person to construct a really interesting conspiracy theory, because conspiracy theories are actually highly complex explanations. They are also challenging intellectual exercises both for those who hold them and those who would disprove them. Superstitions are generally easy enough to disprove. Any statistician can verify that my cat is probably no more or less dangerous than any other on a staircase. Deep down, we know it anyway, which is why superstitions tend to be little more than harmless habits. Conspiracy theories, by contrast, are frustrating precisely because they are so intricate. Each rejoinder or contradiction only produces a more complicated theory. Conspiracy theorists manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as even stronger confirmation. After all, what better sign of a really effective conspiracy is there than a complete lack of any trace that the conspiracy exists? Facts, the absence of facts, contradictory facts: everything is proof. Nothing can ever challenge the underlying belief.

These kinds of overcomplicated explanations violate the famous concept of “Occam’s Razor” (sometimes spelled “Ockham”), named for the medieval monk who advocated the straightforward idea that we should always begin from the simplest explanation for anything we see. 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.

Those persons whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens. Thomas Jefferson

Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work? Benjamin: You got me. The Graduate

Higher education is supposed to cure us of the false belief that everyone is as smart as everyone else. Unfortunately, in the twenty-first century the effect of widespread college attendance is just the opposite: the great number of people who have been in or near a college think of themselves as the educated peers of even the most accomplished scholars and experts. College is no longer a time devoted to learning and personal maturation; instead, the stampede of young Americans into college and the consequent competition for their tuition dollars have produced a consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right.

This is because attendance at a postsecondary institution no longer guarantees a “college education.” Instead, colleges and universities now provide a full-service experience of “going to college.” These are not remotely the same thing, and students now graduate believing they know a lot more than they actually do. Today, when an expert says, “Well, I went to college,” it’s hard to blame the public for answering, “Who hasn’t?” Americans with college degrees now broadly think of themselves as “educated” when in reality the best that many of them can say is that they’ve continued on in some kind of classroom setting after high school, with wildly varying results.

The influx of students into America’s postsecondary schools has driven an increasing commodification of education. Students at most schools today are treated as clients, rather than as students. Younger people, barely out of high school, are pandered to both materially and intellectually, reinforcing some of the worst tendencies in students who have not yet learned the self-discipline that once was essential to the pursuit of higher education. Colleges now are marketed like multiyear vacation packages, rather than as a contract with an institution and its faculty for a course of educational study. This commodification of the college experience itself as a product is not only destroying the value of college degrees but is also undermining confidence among ordinary Americans that college means anything.

When I first arrived at Dartmouth at the end of the 1980s, I was told a story about a well-known (and, at the time, still-living) member of the faculty that in a small way illustrates this problem and the challenge it presents to experts and educators. The renowned astrophysicist Robert Jastrow gave a lecture on President Ronald Reagan’s plan to develop space-based missile defenses, which he strongly supported. An undergraduate challenged Jastrow during the question-and-answer period, and by all accounts Jastrow was patient but held to his belief that such a program was possible and necessary. The student, realizing that a scientist at a major university was not going to change his mind after a few minutes of arguing with a sophomore, finally shrugged and gave up. “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.” Professor Jastrow has since passed away, and I never got the chance while I was in Hanover to ask him what happened that day. But I suspect that he was trying to teach some life lessons that are increasingly resisted by college students and citizens alike: that admission to college is the beginning, not the end, of education and that respecting a person’s opinion does not mean granting equal respect to that person’s knowledge. Whether national missile defenses are a wise policy is still debatable. What hasn’t changed, however, is that th...

To take a less rarified example, a young woman in 2013 took to social media for help with a class assignment. (Where she lives or where she was studying is unclear, but she described herself as a future doctor.) She apparently was tasked with researching the deadly chemical substance Sarin, and, as she explained to thousands on Twitter, she needed help because she had to watch her child while doing her assignment. In minutes, her request was answered by Dan Kaszeta, the director of a security consulting firm in London and a top expert in the field of chemical weapons, who volunteered to help her. What happened next transfixed many readers. (Jeffrey Lewis, an arms expert in California, captured and posted the exchange online.) “I can’t find the chemical and physical properties of sarin gas [sic] someone please help me,” the student tweeted. Kaszeta offered his help. He corrected her by noting that Sarin isn’t a gas and that the word should be capitalized. As Lewis later wryly noted, “Dan’s help [met] with a welcome sigh of relief from our beleaguered student.” Actually, it met with a string of expletives. The student lectured the expert in a gale-force storm of outraged ego: “yes the [expletive] it is a gas you ignorant [expletive]. sarin is a liquid & can evaporate … shut the [expletive] up.” Kaszeta, clearly stunned, tried one more time: “Google me. I’m an expert on Sarin. Sorry for offering to help.” Things did not improve before the exchange finally ended. One smug Dart...

For many years, Father James Schall at Georgetown University would shock his political philosophy students at the very first class meeting by handing out an essay he’d written called “What a Student Owes His Teacher.” Here’s a sample: Students have obligations to teachers. I know this sounds like strange doctrine, but let it stand. The first obligation, particularly operative during the first weeks of a new semester, is a moderately good will toward the teacher, a trust, a confidence that is willing to admit to oneself that the teacher has probably been through the matter, and, unlike the student, knows where it all leads. I do not want here to neglect the dangers of the ideological professor, of course, the one who imposes his mind on what is. But to be a student requires a certain modicum of humility. Thus, the student owes the teacher trust, docility, effort, thinking.12 Schall made that essay required reading for many years before retiring. One can only imagine the howls of outrage it would provoke now on most campuses to tell students they need to work harder, have more perspective about their own talents, and trust their teachers. Many faculty members today might agree with Schall, but they cannot risk aggravating the students, because, as everyone in any service industry knows, the customer is always right.

Students, well intentioned or otherwise, are poorly served by the idea that students and teachers are intellectual and social equals and that a student’s opinion is as good as a professor’s knowledge. Rather than disabusing young people of these myths, college too often encourages them, with the result that people end up convinced they’re actually smarter than they are. As the social psychologist David Dunning has noted, “The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance—as an absence of knowledge—leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education, even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence.”13

Students will likely object that the demands of their major are a lot more work than I’m giving credit for here. Perhaps, but that depends on the major itself. The requirements of a degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), a demanding foreign language, or a rigorous degree in the humanities can be a different matter than a major in communications or visual arts or—as much as it pains me to say it—political science. Every campus has “default majors,” chosen when a student has no real idea what to do, some of which are off-ramps from more demanding programs after students learn the limits of their abilities.

I should clarify a few points. First, it’s not news to me or anyone else in higher education that even the best schools have “gut” courses, the class a student can pass by exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide for a set number of weeks. Perhaps it might be shocking for a professor to admit this, but there’s nothing wrong with easy or fun courses. I would even defend at least some of them as necessary. There should be classes where students can experiment with a subject, take something enjoyable, and get credit for learning something. The problem comes when all the courses start to look like gut courses. They exist in the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, and their numbers, at least by my subjective judgment, are growing. No field is immune, and a look through the offerings of many programs around the country—as well as a compilation of the grades given in them—suggests that what were once isolated professorial vices are now common departmental habits.

I should also note that I am not making an argument here for slimming colleges down to a bunch of STEM departments with a smattering of English or history majors. I deplore those kinds of arguments, and I have long objected to what I see as an assault on the liberal arts. Too often, those who denigrate the liberal arts are in reality advocating for nothing less than turning colleges into trade schools. Art history majors always take the cheap shots here, even though many people don’t realize that a lot of art history majors go on to some pretty lucrative careers. In any c...

There’s nothing wrong with personal fulfillment or following your bliss—if you can afford it. If a small college has a history course that interests you, by all means, take it. It might be terrific. But students who choose majors with little thought about where their school stands, what academic resources it can offer in that program, or where it places graduates from those programs will risk leaving campus (whenever they finally finish) with less knowledge than they’ve been led to believe, a problem at the core of a lot of needless arguments with people who are deeply mistaken about the quality of their own education.

The British scholar Richard Dawkins, something of a scourge to conservatives because of his views on religion, was perplexed by the whole idea of “safe spaces,” the places American students demand as a respite from any form of political expression they might find “triggering.” Dawkins minced no words: “A university is not a ‘safe space,’ ” he said on Twitter. “If you need a safe space, leave, go home, hug your teddy and suck your thumb until ready for university.”

Meanwhile, a libertarian columnist and University of Tennessee law professor, Glenn Reynolds, suggested a more dramatic solution. To be a voter, one must be able to participate in adult political discussions. It’s necessary to be able to listen to opposing arguments and even—as I’m doing right here in this column—to change your mind in response to new evidence. So maybe we should raise the voting age to 25, an age at which, one fervently hopes, some degree of maturity will have set in. It’s bad enough to have to treat college students like children. But it’s intolerable to be governed by spoiled children. People who can’t discuss Halloween costumes rationally don’t deserve to play a role in running a great nation.21 It’s a safe bet that no one’s going to amend the Constitution in response to Professor Reynolds’s suggestion, but his comments, like those of other observers, point to the bizarre paradox in which college students are demanding to run the school while at the same time insisting that they be treated as children.

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. Nicholas Carr

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....

In fact, who is anyone to argue with anyone? In the Information Age, there’s no such thing as an irresolvable argument. Each of us is now walking around with more accumulated information on a smartphone or tablet than ever existed in the entire Library of Alexandria.