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

by Thomas M. Nichols

This kind of Internet grazing—mistakenly called “research” by laypeople—makes interactions between experts and professionals arduous. Once again, confirmation bias is a major culprit: although many stories on the Internet are false or inaccurate, the one-in-a-billion story where Google gets it right and the experts get it wrong goes viral. In a tragic case in 2015, for example, a British teenager was misdiagnosed by doctors who told her to “stop Googling her symptoms.”10 The patient insisted she had a rare cancer, a possibility the doctors dismissed. She was right, they were wrong, and she died. The British teen’s story made big news, and a rare mistake likely convinced a great many people to be their own doctors. Of course, people who have died because they used a computer to misdiagnose their heart disease as indigestion never make the front page. But none of that matters. These David-and-Goliath stories (a teenager against her team of doctors) feed the public’s insatiable confirmation bias and fuel their cynicism in established knowledge while bolstering their false hopes that the solutions to their problems are just a few mouse clicks away.