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

Tom Nichols, “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters,” Oxford University Press, 2017, 238 pp.

Charles Sykes, a conservative columnist I follow on Twitter, recommended this book—so here I am.

The author, Tom Nichols, believes that information technology, along with increasing levels of education, has led too many citizens to believe their conclusions and opinions are on equal footing with Doctors regarding medical issues (especially vaccines) and diplomats regarding world conflicts and scientist when discussing climate change.  The present-day rejection of experts and everyone’s expectation to be treated seriously is alarming; failure to treat these self-appointed gurus is characterized as undemocratic elitism.  It's like spending time listening attentively to Cliff in Cheers.

The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education (think “students rating teachers’), and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, with little or no resources devoted to investigative reporting and minimal fact-checking (think Fox News).  We have created ill-informed and angry citizens who suspect and denounce intellectual achievement.  We now have a president who seeks out advisers with little or no government experience and sometimes cabinet members who often express outright hostility to the agencies they oversee.  This trend meshes with many voters scorn for experience and a tendency to place emotion over reason.

Trump won the 2016 election, Nichols writes, because “he connected with a particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things like America’s nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy-headed claptrap.” Worse”, he goes on, some of these voters “not only didn’t care that Trump is ignorant or wrong, but they likely were also unable to recognize his ignorance or errors,” thanks to their own lack of knowledge.  People can increasingly live in their own news media bubbles with views only similar to their own.  However, I believe the author is missing other important points about voters that are indicated by the 52% of Catholics and 82% of Evangelicals who voted for him, a fact I found in Jill Lepore's book "These Truths" which I will be reporting on soon.

My Notes:

Pg. x:  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. (Today’s disparagement of liberal arts degrees and the loss of the associated critical thinking skills is not helping).

Pg. 5:  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.  We have come full circle from a pre-modern age, in which folk wisdom-filled unavoidable gaps in human knowledge, through a period of rapid development based heavily on specialization and expertise, and now to a postindustrial, information-oriented world where all citizens believe themselves to be experts on everything.

 Pg. 8:  Confirmation bias:  the natural tendency to only accept evidence that confirms what we already believe.  We all have personal experiences, prejudices, fears, and even phobias that prevent us from accepting expert advice (if it conflicts with what we already believe).  

Pg. 10:  Experts are not infallible.  They are responsible for a litany of disasters and errors: thalidomide, Vietnam, the Challenger, the dire warnings about the dietary hazards of eggs, (the unfounded accusations against daycare workers in the 80s). 

Pg. 20:  The death of expertise is not because of indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge and the insistence that every opinion on any matter is as good as every other.  In the case of vaccines, for example, low rates of participation in child vaccination programs is not a problem among small-town mothers with little schooling.  Those mothers have to accept vaccinations for their kids because of the requirements in public schools.  It is the Mothers educated just enough to believe they have the background to challenge established medical science.  It is educated parents that are putting everyone’s children at risk wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of cultural sophistication.  (Consuming raw milk is another trendy area.  I also bet that the advocates trying to remove fluoride from communities water supply are also the moderately educated, the culturally sophisticated—so to speak).

Pg. 27:  Foreign aid.  Americans routinely believe, on average, that more than 25 percent of the national budget is given away as largesse in the form of foreign aid.  In actuality, the true figure is less than three-quarters of 1 percent of the total expenditures of the US.  Only 5 percent of Americans know the true figure.

Pg. 39:  No one’s knowledge is complete, and experts realize this better than anyone.  But education, training, practice, experience, and acknowledgment by others in the same field should provide us with at least a rough guide to dividing experts from the rest of society.

(The U.S. State Department budget request for 2017 is about $50 billion, including $8.5 billion for health programs and $5.8 billion in military assistance. The total U.S. budget is about $4.15 trillion. Source:  Office of Management and Budget)

Pg. 43f:  The Dunning-Kruger Effect:  Research psychologist Dunning and Kruger at Cornell University in 1999 established 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’ when describing these types of people that reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, and their incompetence which robs them of the ability to realize it.

Pg. 66f:  Political beliefs among both laypeople and experts work in much the same way as confirmation bias.  The difference is that beliefs about politics and other subjective matters are harder to shake because our political views are deeply rooted in our self-image and our most cherished beliefs about who we are as people.  Jonathan Haidt summed it up neatly when he observed that when facts conflict with our values, ‘almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.’

Pg. 73:  At its best, college should aim to produce graduates with a reasonable background in a subject, a willingness to continue learning for the rest of their lives, and an ability to assume roles as capable citizens.  Instead, college has become only a delaying tactic against the onset of adulthood—in some cases, for the faculty as well as for the students.  Part of the problem is that there are too many students, a fair number of whom simply don’t belong in college.  Students shamelessly demand to be given good grades, regardless of their work ethic, but that’s exactly what you would expect if the students view themselves as consumers, and the product as a credential, rather than an education (p. 93).  The most frequently given grade at Harvard in 2012 was a straight A.  At Yale, more than 60 percent of all grades are either A or A- (p. 95).  College’s reliance on student evaluations forces weaker or less secure teachers to become dancing bears, striving to be loved, creating a vicious circle of pandering and grade inflation.

Pg. 110:  In some ways, the convenience of the Internet is a tremendous boon, but mostly for people already trained in research and who have some idea what they’re looking for.  But this is no help for a student who has never been taught how to judge the provenance of information or the reputation of a writer. 

Pg. 123:  Dan Rather lost his job at CBS over using a false document claiming George W. Bush had ditched his required National Guard unit and never finished his required service.  A later investigation discovered that the document closely matched those generated by Microsoft’s Word software.  Obviously, in 1971 the Air Force used typewriters.  Microsoft and its programs didn’t exist then.  The documents had to be faked.

Pg. 140:  The average American home in 1960 had three television stations available along with eight radio stations, one newspaper, and three or four magazines.  By 2014, the average home had 189 television channels.  Add to that the mobile devices and the equivalent delivery of nine DVD’s worth of data per person per day, which, if all viewed, would consume 15 hours).

Pg. 210:  The Brexit vote, in June 2016, carried by just 52 % of the voters.  This was the result of a successful attack on the experts and a play on voters distaste for the immigration from EU countries.  After the vote, the Brexiteers admitted that people that thought their vote would end immigration were going to be sorely disappointed.

Pg. 211:  Trump was one of the original ‘birthers’ who demanded that Obama prove his American citizenship.  He quoted the National Enquirer approvingly as a source of news.   He sided with antivaccine activism.  He admitted that he gets most of his information on foreign policy from ‘the shows’ on Sunday morning television.  He suggested that Supreme Court Justice Scalia may have been murdered. It was a one-man campaign against established knowledge.

Pg. 216:  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 US today.  Today’s general public's illiteracy regarding politics and science is almost reverse evolution, a movement 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.  For instance, how many people know we live in a Republic, not a Democracy?