Nothing's Worse that a Know-Nothing Know-it-All, Right?

The Death of Expertise - Tom Nichols

If the statisticians are right – and there’s a good chance that they are – half the people out there are of below-average intelligence. So why is it that everyone thinks he or she knows everything? Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise, says it’s because of the Dunning-Kroger effect: the dumber you are, the less likely you are to know how dumb you are. Makes sense to me…

Nichols’ book is a hard look at our modern society; where half the people claim to have graduated from “the University of Google” and the other half believe everything the first half said. Perhaps that’s why medical doctors are routinely lectured about possible treatment regimens by patients who’ve been watching TV drug commercials. The author, who lectures on national security at the Naval War College and is also on the faculty of Harvard, has a few fingers to point on the topic of expertise and the people who killed it.

For one, Nichols thinks that experts have committed a form of suicide: they talk only among themselves and pretty much only in jargon. He allows as to how that might be a defense mechanism, since whenever an expert does express an opinion, he or she is likely to be “corrected” by someone with a fast wireless connection.

For another, Nichols has little or no use for the “new journalism,” in which careful research and in-depth study of topics has been replaced by retweeting suspect information and passing along rumors. He’s no fan of either InfoWars or of TheOnion, since both perpetuate the bubble mentality that has made ignorance the currency of conversation.

Nichols upbraids self-appointed experts – especially celebrities who are blindly respected by people who "respect" them because of professional work unrelated to their pronouncements. He holds Gwyneth Paltrow and Jenny McCarthy in especially low esteem, though he has naught to say about Ted Nugent or Charlton Heston…

He reserves his strongest criticism, however, for the American educational system, in particular colleges and universities (noting that many universities have inflated themselves from colleges in recent years). Since everyone is now “expected” to go to college, he says, admission standards are reduced and academic rigor has given way to trying to make a school “popular” instead of a “quality education.” Students, especially memebrs of the blue-ribbon-for-everyone generation, squabble with professors for higher grades instead of working harder. Professors are “graded” by students who expect a buddy instead of an educator. As a result, many a college graduate is little better-educated than a high-school graduate of their grandparent’s generation. This is especially true, Nichols says, of those getting “communications” and “liberal studies” degrees.

Almost everyone is an “expert” in some field, whether it’s high-energy physics, plumbing, farming, or oncology. And almost every expert has had the experience of having his or her life’s work “explained” by a layperson who learned everything he needed to know about it on some blog – I know I have.

The Death of Expertise is a sobering look at a society that’s rapidly fragmenting, a society in which sociopolitical “bubbles” have replaced both learning and civil discourse. That’s the real reason, for instance, that Americans are ten times as likely as Europeans to deny climate science: they’ve all become “experts” by cherry-picking the occasional fact that agrees with them: confirmation bias.

And that stuff has got to stop…

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