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

by Thomas M. Nichols

Internet users have created many humorous laws and corollaries to describe discussion in the electronic world. The tendency to bring up Nazi Germany in any argument inspired Godwin’s Law and the related reductio ad Hiterlum. The deeply entrenched and usually immutable views of 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. There are many others, including my personal favorite, Skitt’s Law: “Any Internet message correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself.” When it comes to the death of expertise, however, the law to bear in mind is an observation coined long before the advent of the personal computer: Sturgeon’s Law, named for the legendary science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. In the early 1950s, highbrow critics derided the quality of popular literature, particularly American science fiction. They considered sci-fi and fantasy writing a literary ghetto, and almost all of it, they sniffed, was worthless. Sturgeon angrily responded by noting that the critics were setting too high a bar. Most products in most fields, he argued, are of low quality, including what was then considered serious writing. “Ninety percent of everything,” Sturgeon decreed, “is crap.” Where the Internet is concerned, Sturgeon’s Law of 90 percent might be lowballing. The sheer size and volume of the Internet, and the inability to separate meaningful knowledge f...