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

by Thomas M. Nichols

At the beginning of this book, I mentioned the character Cliff Clavin from the classic television show Cheers, the local know-it-all who routinely lectured the other regulars in a Boston pub on every subject under the sun. But Cliff couldn’t exist today: at the first claim of “it’s a known fact,” everyone in the bar could pull out a phone and verify (or more likely disprove) any of Cliff’s claims. Put another way, technology has created a world in which we’re all Cliff Clavin now. And that’s a problem.

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...

The most obvious problem is that the freedom to post anything online floods the public square with bad information and half-baked thinking. The Internet lets a billion flowers bloom, and most of them stink, including everything from the idle thoughts of random bloggers and the conspiracy theories of cranks all the way to the sophisticated campaigns of disinformation conducted by groups and governments. Some of the information on the Internet is wrong because of sloppiness, some of it is wrong because well-meaning people just don’t know any better, and some of it is wrong because it was put there out of greed or even sheer malice. The medium itself, without comment or editorial intervention, displays it all with equal speed. The Internet is a vessel, not a referee. This, of course, is no more and no less than an updated version of the basic paradox of the printing press. As the writer Nicholas Carr pointed out, the arrival of Gutenberg’s invention in the fifteenth century set off a “round of teeth gnashing” among early humanists, who worried that “printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery.”2 Those medieval naysayers weren’t entirely wrong. The printing press was used to mass-produce Bibles, to teach people to read, and eventually to empower the literacy that drives so much of human freedom. Of course, it also enabled the dissemination of insanity like the Protocols of the El...

Plugging words into a browser window isn’t research: it’s asking questions of programmable machines that themselves cannot actually understand human beings. Actual research is hard, and for people raised in an environment of constant electronic stimulation, it’s also boring. Research requires the ability to find authentic information, summarize it, analyze it, write it up, and present it to other people. It is not just the province of scientists and scholars, but a basic set of skills a high school education should teach every graduate because of its importance in any number of jobs and careers. But why bother with all that tedious hoop-jumping when the screen in front of us already has the answers, generated by the millions in just seconds, and beautifully laid out in colorful, authoritative-looking websites?

The deeper issue here is that the Internet is actually changing the way we read, the way we reason, even the way we think, and all for the worse. We expect information instantly. We want it broken down, presented in a way that is pleasing to our eye—no more of those small-type, fragile textbooks, thank you—and we want it to say what we want it to say. People do not do “research” so much as they “search for pretty pages online to provide answers they like with the least amount of effort and in the shortest time.” The resulting flood of information, always of varying quality and sometimes of uncertain sanity, creates a veneer of knowledge that actually leaves people worse off than if they knew nothing at all. It’s an old saying, but it’s true: it ain’t what you don’t know that’ll hurt you, it’s what you do know that ain’t so.

Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, the Internet is making us meaner, shorter-fused, and incapable of conducting discussions where anyone learns anything. The major problem with instantaneous communication is that it’s instantaneous. While the Internet enables more people to talk to each other than ever before—a distinctly new historical condition—everyone talking immediately to everyone else might not always be such a good idea. Sometimes, human beings need to pause and to reflect, to give themselves time to absorb information and to digest it. Instead, the Internet is an arena in which people can react without thinking, and thus in turn they become invested in defe...

As Bruni pointed out, “The anti-vaccine agitators can always find a renegade researcher or random ‘study’ to back them up. This is erudition in the age of cyberspace: You surf until you reach the conclusion you’re after. You click your way to validation, confusing the presence of a website with the plausibility of an argument.”

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.

The way in which a lot of wrong guesses can be milled into one big right guess is a well-established phenomenon. Unfortunately, the way people think the Internet can serve as a way of crowd-sourcing knowledge conflates the perfectly reasonable idea of what the writer James Surowiecki has called “the wisdom of crowds” with the completely unreasonable idea that the crowds are wise because each member of the mob is also wise.

Unfortunately, things have not always worked out that way, and Wikipedia is a good lesson in the limits of the Internet-driven displacement of expertise. As it turns out, writing articles about any number of complicated subjects is a lot more difficult than guessing the weight of a bull. Although many well-intentioned people have contributed their time as Wikipedia editors, for example, some of them were also employed by companies and celebrity public relations firms that had an obvious interest in how things appeared in an encyclopedia for the masses. (Nine out of ten Wikipedia contributors are also male, which would likely raise flags among readers—if readers knew it.)

A hobby is not the same thing as a career. As a saying attributed to the British writer Alastair Cooke goes, “Professionals are people who can do their best work when they don’t feel like it.” The enthusiasm of interested amateurs is not a consistent substitute for the judgment of experts.

Crowds can be wise. Not everything, however, is amenable to the vote of a crowd. The Internet creates a false sense that the opinions of many people are tantamount to a “fact.” How a virus is transmitted from one human being to another is not the same thing as guessing how many jelly beans are in a glass barrel. As the comedian John Oliver has complained, you don’t need to gather opinions on a fact: “You might as well have a poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ or ‘Do owls exist?’ or ‘Are there hats?’ ”

Distance and anonymity remove patience and presumptions of goodwill. Rapid access to information and the ability to speak without having to listen, combined with the “keyboard courage” that allows people to say things to each other electronically they would never say in person, kill conversation. As the writer Andrew Sullivan has noted, this is in part because nothing on the Internet is dispositive, and so every participant in a debate demands to be taken as seriously as every other. And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant.20 Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other online sites can be outlets for intelligent discussion, but too often these and other venues become nothing more than a fusillade of assertions, certainties, poor information, and insults rather than actual exchanges.

Thus, when a layperson’s riposte to an expert consists of “I read it in the paper” or “I saw it on the news,” it may not mean very much. Indeed, the information may not have come from “the news” or “the paper” at all, but from something that only looks like a news source. More likely, such an answer means “I saw something from a source I happen to like and it told me something I wanted to hear.” At that point, the discussion has nowhere to go; the original issue is submerged or lost in the effort to untangle which piece of misinformation is driving the conversation in the first place.

Had Ailes not created Fox, someone would have, because the market, as talk radio proved, was already there. As the conservative author and Fox commentator Charles Krauthammer likes to quip, Ailes “discovered a niche audience: half the American people.”

The problem is not that all these networks and celebrities exist, but that viewers pick and choose among them and then believe they’re informed. The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they’re misinformed.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Bertrand Russell

A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. James Madison

I reserve the right to be ignorant. That’s the Western way of life. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

Expertise and government rely upon each other, especially in a democracy. The technological and economic progress that ensures the well-being of a population requires the division of labor, which in turn leads to the creation of professions. Professionalism encourages experts to do their best in serving their clients, to respect their own boundaries, and to demand their boundaries be respected by others, as part of an overall service to the ultimate client: society itself. Dictatorships, too, demand this same service of experts, but they extract it by threat and direct its use by command. This is why dictatorships are less efficient and less productive than democracies, despite the historical myths many Americans continue to believe about the putative efficiency of Nazi Germany and other such regimes.9 In a democracy, the expert’s service to the public is part of the social contract. Citizens delegate the power of decision on myriad issues to elected representatives and their expert advisers, while experts, for their part, ask that their efforts be received in good faith by a public that has informed itself enough to make reasoned judgments.

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. The abysmal literacy, both political and general, of the American public is the foundation for all of these problems. It is the soil in which all of the other dysfunctions have take...

As the writer Susan Jacoby put it in 2008, the most disturbing aspect of the American march toward ignorance is “not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge.” The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place… . The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.11

Ordinary Americans might never have liked the educated or professional classes very much, but until recently they did not widely disdain their actual learning as a bad thing in itself. It might even be too kind to call this merely “anti-rational”; it is almost reverse evolution, away from tested knowledge and backward toward folk wisdom and myths passed by word of mouth—except with all of it now sent along at the speed of electrons. This plummeting literacy and growth of willful ignorance is part of a vicious circle of disengagement between citizens and public policy. People know little and care less about how they are governed, or how their economic, scientific, or political structures actually function. Yet, as all of these processes thus become more incomprehensible, citizens feel more alienated. Overwhelmed, they turn away from education and civic involvement, and withdraw into other pursuits. This, in turn, makes them into less capable citizens, and the cycle continues and strengthens, especially when the public appetite for escape is easily fed by any number of leisure industries.

Awash in gadgets and conveniences that were once unimaginable even within their own lifetimes, Americans (and many other Westerners, if we are to be fair about it) have become almost childlike in their refusal to learn enough to govern themselves or to guide the policies that affect their lives. This is a collapse of functional citizenship, and it enables a cascade of other baleful consequences.

Meanwhile, Americans have increasingly unrealistic expectations of what their political and economic system can provide. This sense of entitlement is one reason they are continually angry at “experts” and especially at “elitists,” a word that in modern American usage can mean almost anyone with any education who refuses to coddle the public’s mistaken beliefs. When told that ending poverty or preventing terrorism is a lot harder than it looks, Americans roll their eyes. Unable to comprehend all of the complexity around them, they choose instead to comprehend almost none of it and then sullenly blame experts, politicians, and bureaucrats for seizing control of their lives.

This underscores another problem motivating the death spiral in which democracy and expertise are caught: citizens do not understand, or do not choose to understand, the difference between experts and elected policymakers. For many Americans, all elites are now just an undifferentiated mass of educated, rich, and powerful people. This is patent silliness. Not all rich people are powerful, and not all powerful people are rich. Intellectuals and policy experts are seldom rich or powerful. (Trust me on that one.)

This is the worst of all worlds, in which both democracy and expertise are corrupted because neither democratic leaders nor their expert advisers want to tangle with an ignorant electorate. At that point, expertise no longer serves the public interest, but the interest of whatever political clique is taking the temperature of the public at any given moment. We are already perilously close to this outcome in modern America.

The challenges of expert accountability are compounded by the fact that most Americans do not seem to understand their own system of government. The United States is a republic, not a democracy. One hardly ever hears the word “republic” anymore, which reveals, in a small way, the degree to which modern Americans confuse “democracy” as a general political philosophy with a “republic” as its expression in a form of government. In 1787, Benjamin Franklin was supposedly asked what would emerge from the Constitutional Convention being held in Philadelphia. “A republic,” Franklin answered, “if you can keep it.” Today, the bigger challenge is to find anyone who knows what a republic actually is. This is crucial because laypeople too easily forget that the republican form of government under which they live was not designed for mass decisions about complicated issues. Neither, of course, was it designed for rule by a tiny group of technocrats or experts. Rather, it was meant to be the vehicle by which an informed electorate—informed being the key word here—could choose other people to represent them and to make decisions on their behalf.

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked radio listeners to go and purchase maps so they could follow along as he narrated the progress of World War II. Maps quickly sold out across the country. In 2006, fewer than sixty-five years later, a national study found that nearly half of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four—that is, those most likely to have to fight in a war—did not think it was necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news was being made.22 A decade later, during the 2016 election, Donald Trump raised cheers when he summed up his approach to terrorists in the Middle East: “I would bomb the shit out of them. I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.” A republic, if you can keep it. Or if you can find it on a map.

Finally, and most disturbing, citizens of the Western democracies, and Americans in particular, no longer understand the concept of democracy itself. This, perhaps more than anything, has corroded the relationship between experts and citizens. The relationship between experts and citizens is not “democratic.” All people are not, and can never be, equally talented or intelligent. Democratic societies, however, are always tempted to this resentful insistence on equality, which becomes oppressive ignorance if given its head. And this, sadly, is the state of modern America. Citizens no longer understand democracy to mean a condition of political equality, in which one person gets one vote, and every individual is no more and no less equal in the eyes of the law. Rather, Americans now think of democracy as a state of actual equality, in which every opinion is as good as any other on almost any subject under the sun. Feelings are more important than facts: if people think vaccines are harmful, or if they believe that half of the US budget is going to foreign aid, then it is “undemocratic” and “elitist” to contradict them.

Traditional solutions no longer work. Education, instead of breaking down barriers to continued learning, is teaching young people that their feelings are more important than anything else. “Going to college” is, for many students, just one more exercise in personal self-affirmation. The media, mired in competition at every level, now asks consumers what they’d like to know instead of telling them what’s important. The Internet is a mixed blessing, a well of information poisoned by the equivalent of intellectual sabotage.