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Loading... The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (edition 2018)by Tom Nichols (Author)Excellent book but one that came out very very late. Same as with Jill Japore's book on mind-messing spin-based companies this one came too late, at least for public to read. Experts knew about this but let it roll and that brings us to our current times. Book covers everything - failures in the society from general feeling-first approach to things (reason, dont need it because you need to be passionate about.... who cares, just deny everything else that you do not agree with), failure of education, mass media and web that became full circus that cannot be trusted at all any more (because everybody needs to be an activist - again that feeling-first approach) and utter breakage of society which does not know where the head or tail is, and of course does not know what equality and democracy are (last part of the book was especially on the point). One of the main failures of expertise is that experts decided to treat their fellow countryman/layman as children (which is something that mentioned countryman/layman so want to be - which is something that is completely mind numbing to me). As a result just look at last year - nobody from power even thinks twice about what they are saying to the people (WE will tell you what to do! YOU are guilty for all of this! Declamations and rhetoric that would make Stalin blush, not to mention [again] activism because hey these are our guys! Yeeee!), they do not think about when message is supposed to go out to public and when there is need to wait a bit (again, last year, all those MDs and experts - saying contradictory things every 2 weeks) and are more than ready to gas-light people for the sake of it (do-this-and-you-will-be safe followed by "even if you do this it will be years (years people) before we even go back if we ever do") to the now raising cults of personalities that puts North Korea to shame (populists unite). Providing drama to the populace that craves it (which is something that is sickening in itself) is one of the greatest sins of experts. It seems that people chose hippie/age-of-aquarius as a way of living loooong time ago. Fortunately reason and critical thinking that built up in last 300 years (lets just take most recent developments in sciences - technical, math and sociology - in general this was accumulation of thousands of years) took like 60 years to decompose in the currently existing mush. That is quite a result if you ask me, sense and sanity endured for a looong time. But I guess when you enter the period where adults want to be kids and behave like spoiled children in toy store, reason plays no role. And then power grab happens - technocrats took the opportunity and oh boy what additional mess they made (because, again, everybody needs to be an activist for a cause (whatever this might be), you need to be passionate (one of the most poisonous words today)). Good thing these periods will pass and humanity will come back to its senses. Hopefully not like in beginning of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey. Highly recommended. Tom Nichols was a working academic and taught international relations (and military history). He was affiliated with the American Republican party. His 2017 book, The Death of Expertise expands from his article in 2014 in the modern conservative online journal The Federalist. The book present an argument about the effects of the internet, social media and modern ideas about equality on the acquisition of knowledge. The author asserts that people who have earned advanced university degrees who are employed as university-level teachers have earned more respect that they get in debates in American institutions. His criticism of the Internet and internet projects like Wikipedia is not argued in detail. He relies on the meritocratic assumtion that a crowd of recognized experts has more knowlege than a random crowd of Americans, and it more likely to have a more accurate understanding of how the world works. The author does not explain the methods and the consensus of the political science of international relations, or explain how international relations or other humanities and social sciences can be compared with disciplines that are grounded in the physical facts of the real world or should be "respected" by less educated citizens. This is an important and worthwhile book about the decline in knowledge of much of the American populace, along with the accompanying decline in literacy and civic awareness, and the increase in wilful ignorance and its glorification. Taken together, all of these have led to the disconnect between much of the populace and the experts in many fields upon which our democratic republic depends. The value and necessity of experts is discussed and dissected, IMHO, very well. This book was great until the last chapter when the author's pessimism and cynicism got away from him. Much of what he does in the last chapter is rant and does not relate the content back to the premise of the book established in previous chapters. In the VERY last section, he seems to step back and attempt to redeem himself, but it was too little, too late. Nichols examines the rise in mistrust or outright dismissal of the "expert" in public, academic, and political life. Psychological and sociological reasons for suspicion of expertise, or perhaps more accurately, the elevation of all opinions as equally valuable, is explored. The ubiquity of information easily accessible on the internet is also convincingly argued to be quite different than true understanding of any given issue. Nichols provides numerous examples of how the dismissal of the role of expert is found within American society, and appeals for the acceptance (and necessity) of expertise in order to have a functioning society. The rejection of expertise is especially a danger, believes Nichols, to (American) democratic society, where the public have become unable to discern how little they really know about issues that affect them a great deal. This is an engaging read (or in this case, listen, since I used the audiobook). The illustrations served to enforce the main argument that expertise has an important role to play in society, and we simply need to accept that some people know much more about and are better at some things than we are. This doesn't make the expert infallible, but usually a far more reliable resource than popular opinion and gut intuition. This book, however, will likely resonate far more with professionals trained in a particular field than those suspicious of the expert, and so will likely not change many minds. I think this book is so prescient and correct in so many ways, and really off track in others. We live in a world where people don't trust doctors to give medical advice, yet will take their plumber's recommendation that they take a horse de-worming pill to ward off infection from a deadly virus. As I was reading this book and listening to the mid 2010s examples of anti-expert-ism, I thought "oh, isn't that cute." Would that people were only as misinformed as they were 10 years ago! I found the author's description of higher education to be very similar to my experiences, where students have a sense of entitlement about receiving a passing grade for merely showing up and "trying hard." While that is frustrating to me beyond belief (especially as an engineering professor), as I have only been a professor for 7 years, I cannot say for sure that it was any better or worse in the 60s / 70s / 80s / 90s. I do know that the corporatization of administration in higher ed is one of the problems, as many experts in education have already pointed out. The author did not blame the gaggle of $250,000/year deans and provosts with MBAs and EdDs, but students. I disagree when the author scoffs at students wishing not to see racist Halloween costumes or swastikas in public. (Which has nothing to do with disrespect of expertise, that's just straight up calling out people for bigotry.) The author comes across as a typical entitled white man who doesn't like to have the younger generation calling out transphobic, racist, antisemitic, etc., bullsh*t from older folks who think it's OK just because they've never been held accountable or suffered consequences of being bigots before. I also found it annoying and exhausting, but not surprising, to hear the author complain about getting 'splained things by non-experts, as if women don't deal with this all the time. I have had non-pilots tell me how to land an airplane (I'm a licensed pilot, so I know how to land an airplane and, furthermore, HAVE DONE IT HUNDREDS OF TIMES). I have had men tell me how quantum physics works (not that I'm an expert, but I know a lot more about it than my massage therapist, and I did take graduate classes on quantum mech and quantum optics while getting my PhD). I have had men explain to me how electricity works, as if I don't have three degrees in electrical engineering. Not that it justifies any 'splaining, but WELCOME TO HOW ALL WOMEN FEEL ALL THE TIME, WHITE GUY AUTHOR! Without having the time or desire to look up every study cited by the author, I wondered about selection bias and lack of expertise of the author in some of the fields he cited. How many times is an extremely technical medical paper showing kind of a low stakes result (x has shown to be correlated with y, and we know that y leads to disease z) spun by the media to be X CAUSES Z! The author goes on about how scientists told people to stop eating eggs and that caused people to get fat. Which strikes me as disingenuous at best. I'm not sure what the initial study says, but wonder how much of the hype was caused by journalists and folks like him who don't know how to interpret scientific study results. And the fatphobia was unnecessary. Body size does not correlate with intelligence, nor is there a causal relationship between the two variables. It's not news that the journalism field has been pretty much redefined and completely decimated as a serious profession over the past 20-30 years. When clickbait reigns supreme, and with the massive reduction in local newspapers and journals, news media organizations don't want to spend money on actual reporting. The author discusses this peripherally, and sort of blames the journalists. He doesn't blame the system that we have that has lead to this dearth of expertise in the journalism field. (Let's blame entitled millennials who cried their way to unearned college diplomas at small schools that shouldn't exist because they aren't ivy league instead!) Finally, I was disturbed on how little flak the author gives to one of the HUGEST causes of the spread of misinformation: social media CEOs. What, so Facebook and Google get off the hook? They haven't lead to the proliferation of conspiracy theories, misinformation, anti-science, racism, and worse, through their algorithms? Nothing? No, the author says nothing about this at all. It's a shame, because this problem cannot be corrected until the root causes are identified. I had read this book after just having completed Off the Edge, and I think the two books paired well together. Still, with all its flaws, I think it raises some important topics. I wish it held up to the expert level of scrutiny called for in the text itself. We'd probably have a very civil disagreement about Noam Chomsky and the transformation of one's realm of expertise—and I'm trying to think through how even the best informed citizen engagement can get past well-funded villainy (voter suppression, gerrymandering, etc.,) but this is a really engaging, and needed, book. The Death of Expertise is the best curmudgeonly, "get off my lawn" argument for returning to better norms I've ever read. The author makes his case as reasoned and articulate as possible but you can practically hear the resignation in his voice because it's as if he knows he's trying to stem an unstoppable tide. There's plenty of understated humor in the book which helps to offset its pervasive pessimism. Take this quote for example, "Imagine what the 1920s would've sounded like if every crank in every small town had his own radio station. Maybe it's not that people are any dumber or any less willing to listen to experts than they were 100 years ago, it's just that we can hear them all now." I think the death of expertise is mostly the result of timing. Given the rise of globalism and our increasing interconnectedness of the past half century, it's not that experts are making more wrong calls but rather their occasional stumbles are now affecting more people. And those same people, a much larger group than ever before, will only see the stumbles and not the greater number of correct decisions. It's human nature, really, but this time there's weight in numbers to swing the pendulum further the other way. Nichols book hits the mark dead on and hits it hard. So why am I tempted to say what is the good of it? And why do I think Nichols might grudgingly acknowledge this sentiment? Maybe because Nichols struggles mightily down the home stretch when attempting to discover some reasons for optimism while his pessimism flows like honey in the promised land. Nichols clearly understands the catch-22 woven into the scenario of a professor writing a book on expertise: those who need to read Nichols' book most likely will not; those who already ascribe to the thesis offered up in the title, are much more likely to be found reading it and nodding along in affirmation. Or put another way, a public intellectual expounding on expertise will be heard by his primary target audience--the one he wishes he could reach--as a braying, pompous ass. This outcome cannot be dodged no matter how gingerly Nichols proceeds. It will always sound like someone pulling rank--an elite looking down the barrel of a very long nose. I share Nichols pessimism. I don't have a thought worth a dime about about how to right the train, because the issue is both educational and cultural and runs deep. Moreover, my metaphor is wrong: we are not dealing with a train that can be righted but a boat that has sailed. It seems to me fixing things is going to be a matter of just hanging on, biding time with a cold-war-like mentality to keep the Republic going until one wakes up one day to find the problem is no longer a problem, the wall toppled, our heirs interest having shifted to deal with other, more pressing problems. I once told my son when he was young that there is no glory in ignorance. I know this because my son, now in his twenties, recently told me I said this. Nichols says this much more elegantly, making it clear that we too often get confused about who should be embarrassed when someone serves up something nonsensical or ignorant with perfect equanimity and confidence. Calling this out is sane. It is honest. One thing it is not is elitist, so long as we are sensible enough to have our own ravings called out by those who know better. First off: this was really too short of a book to be more than a one-dimensional lookthru of the issue at hand. Secondly: the arrogance and hypocrisy of the author to assume that he had any real meaningful expertise on the subject of the lack of expertise in the modern era is astonishing. Read social psychologists, or practicing statisticians if you want the perspective of an actual expert Tom Nichols’ Death of Expertise reminds us of a time when we took expert opinion seriously. Not that we followed blindly because the expert had a PhD, but because we were more thoughtful. We realized a PhD and twenty years’ experience in a scientific field probably indicates greater knowledge in that field than I possess from my Google searches. That has changed. More and more people, apparently almost everyone, deems their Google-search education equal to or greater than the expert’s knowledge. Nichols observes, “the Internet has politically and intellectually mired millions of Americans in their own biases. Social media outlets such as Facebook amplify this echo chamber.” Even if we don’t intentionally block what we disagree with, Facebook feeds us what we “like” as part of its service. By replacing social life with social media, we reduce or remove exposure to differing views. Another “knowledge crisis” that Nichols addresses is the collapse of standards and discipline at American universities. The twofold issues are 1. grade inflation 2. reduced requirements These two facts of the decline of college education in America are conclusively proven in several studies beyond Tom Nichols’ book. But Nichols, himself a professor, gets to the heart of it, and obviously has firsthand knowledge of the decline. As Nichols observes, “Less is demanded of students now than even a few decades ago. There is less homework, shorter trimester and quarter systems, and technological innovations that make going to college more fun but less rigorous. When college is a business, you can’t flunk the customers.” Nichols noted, “In the worst cases, degrees affirm neither education nor training, but attendance. At the barest minimum, they certify only the timely payment of tuition,” and adds that “students now graduate believing they know a lot more than they actually do,” while “Intellectual discipline and maturation have fallen by the wayside.” Nichols points out the disservice to students: “Colleges and universities also mislead their students about their own competence through grade inflation. Collapsing standards so that schoolwork doesn’t interfere with the fun of going to college is one way to ensure a happy student body and relieve the faculty of the pressure of actually failing anyone.” He warns, “the protective, swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students and thus dissolves their ability to conduct a logical and informed argument. When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.” This is a powerful book and a beautifully written story of a terrible trend that is deteriorating and degrading public discourse in our society. It’s a great read, as well as an important message. The author observes that "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." Interestingly, the American penchant to disregard expertise is baked into our national psychology. Alexis de Tocqueville noted the same tendency in 1835, and with the rise of the Internet, with which everyone can give the air of authority to ignorant viewpoints, has only made it worse. Ignorance, Nichols notes, has become "hip." This is the inevitable result of a stew of influences: the belief that democracy means that one opinion, based on nothing but preconceived and unreflective assumptions, is as good as the conclusion from someone who has spent years studying the question; the tendency of education today to cater to adolescent narcissism that takes "correction as an insult", paired with a reliance on student evaluations to reward teachers. I didn't agree with every part of his argument: He is too dismissive of students who "explode over imagined slights." Since he is never likely to have been the target of such rhetoric, his tolerance of "pranks" is probably higher than the minorities having their right to exist questioned and challenged. But he does write for the Federalist (a low quality internet tabloid), so perhaps this is to have been expected. In a sense, he is at times his own best evidence for the hard-headed insistence on adhering to bad ideas merely because, as he says, they agree with his values, and everyone will ignore evidence if it allows them to retain their presumptions. For that reason, while the individual pieces of his argument are worth considering, they do not necessarily result in the world the author personally advocates. As we've seen in the Trump world, facts are irrelevant in pursuing the political ends advocated by the Federalist. It's just odd to see someone committed to the very kind of anti-intellectualism advanced by his publisher also writing a book to criticize it in other people. When I was in college, some dimwit in a class tried to argue with my professor. She eventually said, "Well, that's my opinion." "That may be your opinion," my professor replied, "but opinions are matters of knowledge." I said nothing but thought That was the best comeback in the history of the world. This happened over twenty years ago and things have gotten worse. Nichols explains how and why. The chapter on college is perfectly depressing. Recommended. “These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.” This is a depressing, timely, and important book, although one that I fear will not be read by those who most need to read it. In this age of people diagnosing medical conditions through Google, getting their news from Facebook and deriding anyone who bothers to read a book as an egghead, it’s hard for experts to defend their expertise without being branded as “elitists”. I agreed with most of the author’s arguments and spent a good chunk of the book shaking my head sadly in agreement. However, I bristled a bit when university students were presented as coddled and entitled. I don’t dispute that grade inflation is rampant, and that some students are entitled whiners who consider themselves customers rather than learners. I do dispute the idea that having to share a room with a stranger without knowing anything about them beforehand somehow builds character and is “better” than the modern approach, which could involve matching roommates based on their sleeping habits or their programs, and enabling them to meet on social media in advance of the school year. For an introvert especially, the thought of rooming with an unknown person is terrifying. Allowing roommates to meet beforehand gives them an opportunity to get to know each other, perhaps divvy up buying shared things for the room, and maybe even discuss some areas of potential conflict so that they can figure out a plan before the conflict arises. Apart from this admittedly highly specific gripe (I speak from experience in terms of benefitting from roommate compatibility surveys), I would certainly recommend that everyone read it—and then go and read more about the wider world. That is one thing this book does well: remind the reader of how vital it is to be well informed about current affairs. Because if you disengage, you’re letting others do your thinking for you. I'd heard about this book on tv and, of course, the idea is pertinent to politics today especially in the US and the UK. It has some great quotes, but was quite a disappointment in that Nichols seems to denigrate everyone. He emphasizes that this is a republic meaning that we elect people who then make governmental decisions for us. And of course, he emphasizes the need to have expert information before making those decisions. Then it seems to me he says, while it is imperative that citizens stay informed from a variety of truthful resources, lay people shouldn't be expressing their opinions. Opinions should be expressed by experts who have advanced degrees in those specific topics, and their degrees should have come from "good," i.e. Ivy League universities. He decries the term "elitist" then he proceeds to be just that. Oh, and another thing he denigrates are the 24 hour news sites. He gives an example of news as entertainment citing the Clarence Thomas hearing that garnered an audience only because of its salacious content. He seems to have no faith that people, in general, can or will seek accurate information when it is available. I believe that we live in a "dumbed down" country. So Nichols's book just reinforces my current thinking. Politicians, business executives and just about every facet of our culture are steeped in ignorance, exaggerations, spins and lies. There was a period of time were most people would be shocked by lies or exaggerations spouted publicly. Not anymore! If one reads the comments sections from news blogs or social media sites, one questions the rationality of many of the writers. It seems that many Americans have lost the ability to filter truth from bull shit. There are some good insights in this book – – not sure people will find them surprising--- definitely worth a read. Listed below are some insights from the book that attracted my attention: "Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self evident, we hold all truths to be self evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other." "Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge." "The most important of these intellectual capabilities, and the one most under attack in American universities, is critical thinking: the ability to examine new information and competing ideas dispassionately, logically, and without emotional or personal preconceptions." Let me start by saying "I'm never going to search online seeking health advice; I'll take a doctor's advice instead." We have to limit our internet usage and devote more time reading books written by experts because, by and large, it takes lot more authority to write a book than a blog. The book talks about the repercussions of layman's rejection of an expert's comment. This ignorance seems to have cost us quite a lot. The last couple of chapters help us turn things around, to some degree at least. I agree with some points the author talks about our education system - how it has become business and as such a student is a customer - always right. This has invariably led to students thinking that they're right just about everything - a scary thought obviously. The Death of Expertise addresses one of the most dangerous trends in modern America, one that threatens to swamp our democracy and our future. The United States has always had an anti-elitist tradition, a distrust of authority, and a reverence for the common man. There is a malignant difference today. People are not just ignorant and wary of expertise, they are belligerently ignorant and actively hostile to expertise. Tom Nichols takes a look at this dangerous trend to describe how it manifests, what might be making it worse, and what could be done to fight back on behalf of knowledge itself. The author, Tom Nichols, is a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. In addition, he is a contributor to The Federalist, the magazine of the conservative Federalist Society. He’s also a Jeopardy champion so he is probably well-versed in general knowledge outside his area of expertise–a fox, not a hedgehog. The book is often amusing as Nichols excels at snark. He appeals to that mean streak we like to pretend we don’t have. He’s not going to protect the tender ears of the ignorant. It’s safe to assume they won’t read his book in the first place, so why mince words? This means he won’t be persuading anyone to his opinion, but he will cheer and perhaps invigorate those who already agree. I think his assessment is correct. People who think headlines tell the entire story, who can’t be bothered to read to the end, who assume they know as much as climate scientists about climate change and as doctors about vaccines will not be reading a book about the war on expertise unless they thought the book was to cheer the war on. Nichols does a good job of identifying the symptoms and the disease. He does sound like a crotchety old uncle ruining Thanksgiving dinner when he talks about KIDS NOWADAYS. He is highly critical of the devaluation and debasement of higher education. I agree, higher education produces less competent citizens, but then the reason people go to college has changed from getting an education to qualifying for a job. Education is not pursued for its own sake, it’s now a checkmark you need on a application. This is manifest in the widespread contempt for liberal arts. I think he misidentifies the root cause, though. Conservatives are inclined to blame individuals while liberals like me are inclined to look systemically. He blames it on parents and students who feel entitled to A’s and a luxury spa education. I look back to when the big push to save education was to RUN IT LIKE A BUSINESS and the appointment of more business executives to be university regents that resulted in MBAs displacing academics in administration and governance. This resulted in devaluing labor, of course, with the growth of adjunct professors and the weakening of faculty senates. Money that should go to teaching goes to infrastructure that can be marketed, like fancy dorms and natatoriums (To be fair, Macalester’s Natatorium was called that back in my day, too.) I enjoyed Nichols’The Death of Expertise. There were times I think he went awry. He is spectacularly wrong in writing about what happened at Missouri University–the protests that resulted in the university president’s resignation. Nichols describes students drawing a swastika on the wall in feces as a “juvenile incident” and says, “Exactly what Missouri’s flagship university was supposed to do, other than wash the wall, was unclear but the campus erupted anyway.” First, the University had a better sense of what to do than Nichols, because they called the police. Contrary to being the sole cause of the controversy, the feces incident was just the straw breaking a very burdened camel’s back. There had been a series of incidents that seemed to be escalating. University President Wolfe could not be bothered to meet with students which incited their anger. Is it confirmation bias when I note that he was never an educator, but a businessman in the computer industry before Mizzou hired him to “run it like a business.” But besides mischaracterizing the totality of what happened at Mizzou, Nichols obviously hopes people will not remember the pernicious lying articles published by The Federalist, that alleged that there was no such incident and that the entire thing was a hoax. That is something easily disproven if the “journalists” writing those Federalist lies had actually asked someone. After all, there was a police report. Nichols wrote a chapter about junk reporting and how false information gets left up on the internet and spread all over, but failed to point out the lies from The Federalist. He would have been wise to leave out the entire Mizzou incident, because his presentation of the controversy while omitting The Federalist shameful demagoguery undercuts his credibility. Besides, including the controversy while excluding the malpractice of the magazine where he writes is just bad form. Nichols does not let his political affiliation keep him from pointing out the toxic effects of talk radio such as practiced by Rush Limbaugh or the collapse of journalistic standards by cable television, including FOX News, or the conspiracist dangers of demagogues like Alex Jones. This is a good thing and I appreciate it. When it comes to people distrusting science, treating it as though it were as optional and unsupported as religion, he focuses on GMOs and vaccines. These are serious issues that have profound implications for all of us. Just this week, there is news of a spate of measles cases in Minneapolis which is getting too darn close to home. Of course, the convenient thing about vaccines and GMOs is that he can focus on liberal propagators of bunkum and hoodoo like Robert Kennedy, Jr. and give the impression that it’s a liberal problem, though that particular brand of anti-science hoodoo is actually bipartisan. What is surprising is that he gives such short shrift to the far more consequential, well-funded, deliberate, and dubious anti-science crusade against acknowledging climate change. Nichols is not so silly as to leave it out completely, but it gets a paragraph or two–hardly enough for an issue that already costs lives, causes wars, and endangers life on earth. It is, however, a partisan issue and his folks are on the wrong side of science. I find it puzzling how so many people who are anti-science expect technology to save us…as though technology is divorced completely from science. He does not mention evolution either, not even in passing, which is just sad. That would be a great example of the longitudinal war on expertise and the shifting strategies and growing sophistication of the grifters who spread false “science”. I care about this war on science. I will be at the March For Science tomorrow. I would not be surprised if Nichols also went to one near him. He’s no fan of the avatar of belligerent ignorance occupying the White House. I think this is a good book, the level of snark delights me, though I realize it will not persuade anyone who is anti-knowledge. It brings together serious issues that I care about a lot and I agree with a lot of what Nichols argues, particularly in not ceding ground. People calling anti-vaxxer garbage the garbage that it is seems to be turning the tide. It would be great, too, if we could get reporters to understand that when an expert gets it wrong, they still probably got it less wrong than Joe Plumber would have. Also sometimes when reporters say experts got it wrong, they really didn’t. For example, polling on the election is widely panned as completely wrong, but was it? The results are well within the margin of error. Analysts read too much certainty into trends but were the polls actually wrong? For the most part, no, but most people do not understand probability which is why casinos make the big bucks. Aside from just leaving out his wildly off base section on Missouri University, the other thing I wish Nichols would do is consider the deleterious effect of treating mission-based sectors "like a business." It is not just people changing, it is not just technology. It is the MBA cancer spreading into academia and journalism. Great news organizations became great because there was a sense of mission. Great universities became great because there was a mission. Did the clerics and educators who founded Oxford University so long ago the date is lost to history chart their Return on Investment before welcoming Emo of Friesland? I googled that by the way. Mission-based enterprises need to run away from the MBAs who want to run it like Acme Magnets. I hope Nichols will take that factor into consideration in the future even though it is antithetical to his ideology. After all, I am perfectly happy to agree with him that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a numpty. The Death of Expertise will be released May 1st. I was provided a e-galley by the publisher through NetGalley. ★★★★ Yes, liberals can like books by conservatives. http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/9780190469412/ This expert gets no respect. This is why. Tom Nichols is very upset with the level of discourse. Everyone knows his field better than he does, and everyone seems to be more expert in everything than the actual experts are. The internet is wealth of wrong. Schools don’t teach learning – they have become customer service centers for their clients - the students. There is nowhere to hide from brute ignorance. And it continues to worsen. In his The Death Of Expertise, experts like Nichols can’t have a decent conversation with anyone any more. He begins rationally enough pointing that Americans are unparalleled in their own universal expertise. “Each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding, ” Alexis de Tocqueville found. In 1835. More recently, the OECD has been testing students in nearly two dozen of the wealthiest countries. American students fare quite poorly, though they do come in first in one category: self-esteem. Nichols also cites the Dunning-Kruger Effect – the dumber you are the more confident you are to show you are not dumb. By chapter three – Education – the gloves really come off, as higher education has become a customer service function by teachers. Students choose universities for their facilities, not their specialties, and far too many kids who never should have entered at all, are there for 4-7 years. The administration will back the students over the faculty every time. It is also that degrees have suffered from inflation. A Masters is now the equivalent of a prewar high school graduation – the barest minimum to get ahead. Everyone in university is above average; most grades have an A in them. This is by far the best chapter, if only because it’s where Nichols works and he knows it all so well. The next chapters get increasingly bizarre until they become annoying. Nichols goes too far, way too far. He slams Noam Chomsky because he is an expert in linguistics – his day job. He has no business writing (dozens of important) books on politics and history. His 70 years analyzing society apparently have amounted to his remaining a rank amateur, not worth reading, let alone debating. That is too much. It seems one is entitled to only one expertise, one that is certified and paid for by some third party employer. The elitism and the snobbishness of Tom Nichols are all too much. He refers to everyone else as the laypeople, and repeats endlessly his mantra that the laypeople need to listen to the experts and the elite – and not argue with them. And this despite a late chapter where he catalogues how experts are so often wrong. His 30 page conclusion is jampacked with laypeople forget and laypeople don’t know and laypeople complain and laypeople have no idea. He bashes Donald Trump, of course, in terms that reveal the whole reason Trump was elected was because of Tom Nichols. I read another book like this 23 years ago, called In Defense of Elitism. Perhaps if Nichols had read it he might not have written this. But according to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, there was no hope of that. David Wineberg As Nichols would be quick to point out, I was likely to enjoy this book about “the death of expertise” (more accurately, “the death of the acknowledgment of and respect for expertise”) due to the fact that it fits with my existing beliefs. Tom Nichols' book, based on his astonishingly prescient 2014 article in “The Federalist,” is a jeremiad on the loss of respect for the opinions of experts and for facts themselves. He discusses at length the issues of confirmation bias, anti-intellectualism, prioritization of feelings over facts at universities, the internet's creation of “instant experts,” the explosion of talk radio and cable news and growth of splinter “news” sources such as Alex Jones's “Infowars” to satisfy Americans' appetite for fantasy masquerading as fact, etc. He decries the tendency for the poorly informed to insist that their opinions, on everything from American foreign policy to childhood vaccinations, are as equally deserving of respect as those of experts in the various fields, and harkens back to a simpler time when “ordinary” citizens knew their place and listened respectfully to the wisdom of the well-credentialed. As you might expect, this aspect is where his book can become rather grating. He is quick to admit that “experts” do sometimes err, and points out that citizens have a duty to inform themselves (as best their often feeble abilities will allow), but reminds readers that experts' opinions are far more likely to be correct than those of the less well-trained. And he's right, but that doesn't save his repeated complaints about the failure of ordinary folks to respect experts from becoming irritating. To a large extent I think this is a function of a short magazine article being stretched into a full-length book when what it would have been better served by expansion into a long magazine piece. Despite its repetitiveness, his criticisms of a culture in which the belligerently ignorant insist that their views be treated as just as valid as those of the well-informed who base their ideas on actual facts are indisputable and timely. Three and a half stars. |
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There's plenty of understated humor in the book which helps to offset its pervasive pessimism. Take this quote for example, "Imagine what the 1920s would've sounded like if every crank in every small town had his own radio station. Maybe it's not that people are any dumber or any less willing to listen to experts than they were 100 years ago, it's just that we can hear them all now."
I think the death of expertise is mostly the result of timing. Given the rise of globalism and our increasing interconnectedness of the past half century, it's not that experts are making more wrong calls but rather their occasional stumbles are now affecting more people. And those same people, a much larger group than ever before, will only see the stumbles and not the greater number of correct decisions. It's human nature, really, but this time there's weight in numbers to swing the pendulum further the other way. ( )