I recently finished reading the book “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters” by Tom Nichols. If you’re an expert, or a layperson, this book helps provide context into how we have gotten into a situation, exacerbated by technology, where expertise is devalued and the general pubic is disinterested. It provides an interesting – if not perennially oft-repeated – concern for our ability to rationally think about our world.
tl:dr; Refine your ability of metacognition. As Nichols puts it, “the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong.”
I’m a little surprised I enjoyed this book as much as I did. I disagreed with parts of it, but on the whole found it to be a rather level-headed approach to the presented concerns. The book reiterates other sources going back decades – dare I say centuries – of shared concerns over the disinterest and disaffection toward expertise. Nothing exceptionally novel, but I enjoyed having it summarized and presented in a single tome. I appreciated that the author (a self-professed expert) didn’t decry any one corner of society at fault for our diminishing interest and respect for expertise – he even provides advice for experts and laypeople alike. Which is good. Civilization is a team sport after all. No one part alone can solve the problems of the whole.
The original essay that prompted the book (in itself a pseudo-too-long-didn’t-read) is worth reading if the prospect of a full-length book bores you. The essay was originally published in the conservative-leaning Federalist website. Admittedly not a source of information I would normally frequent, which I hope speaks a little to my own ability to consider knowing what I don’t know. This humbly makes me a little hopeful that I’m not falling head first into the very concerns the book lays out. Maybe. 🙂
I wanted to share some notes I kept as I read. May they whet your whistle. I recommend the book.
p55, on conspiracy theories, “Conspiracy theorists manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as an even stronger confirmation.” Which I think is an interesting and obvious explanation that buttresses with the axiom from George Carlin, “Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
p58, continuing on the kind of personalizes that attract conspiracy theories (or maybe it’s the other way around), “More important and more relevant to the death of expertise, however, is that conspiracy theories are deeply attractive to people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated world and who have no patience for less dramatic explanations. Such theories also appeal to a strong streak of narcissism: there are people who would choose to believe in complicated nonsense rather than accept that their own circumstances are incomprehensible, the result of issues beyond their intellectual capacity to understand, or even their own fault.”
p64, on the difficulties of conversation between experts and the general public, “That’s why one of the most important characteristics of an expert is the ability to remain dispassionate, even on the most controversial issues. Experts must treat everything from cancer to nuclear war as problems to be solved with detachment and objectivity. That their distance from the subject enables open debate and consideration of alternatives, in ways meant to defeat emotional temptations, inducing fear, that lead to bias. This is a tall order, but otherwise conversation is not only arduous but sometimes explosive.”
p99-100, on the difficulties universities have in providing a physically safe space, while allowing for intellectually challenging discourse, “…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. Emotion is an unassailable defense against expertise, a moat of anger and resentment in which reason and knowledge quickly drown. And when students learn that emotion trumps everything else, it is a lesson they will take with them for the rest of their lives.”
P109, on the Internet and its impact on expertise and dissemination of non-expertise, “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.”
p124, of course, no book about knowledge would be complete with out a mention of Wikipedia an prime example of non-experts coming together to share expertise on every topic. From Nichols, “Even with the best of intentions, crowd-sourced projects like Wikipedia suffer from an important but often unremarked distinction between laypeople and professionals: volunteers do what interests them at any given time, while professionals employ their expertise every day. 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.”
p132, on the difficulty of having an equal and civil conversation on the internet, “The anonymity of social media tempts users into arguing as though every participant is the same, a group of peers starting from the same level of background and education. This is a rule very few people would use in real life, but on the Internet, the intellectual narcissism of the random commenter displaces the norms that usually govern face-to-face interactions.”
p145, on journalism, modern media, and the decline of trust, “This doesn’t explain, however, why Americans erroneously end up thinking they’re better informed than the experts on the myriad issues flooding across their screens. For this, we have to look a little more closely at how the public’s relationship with the media developed after the 1970s. The decade of Watergate, “stagflation,” and defeat in Vietnam is the benchmark not only because it was on the cusp of the addition of new technologies like cable, but also because those developments coincided with an accelerating collapse of trust in government and other institutions in American life. The growth of new kinds of media and the decline of trust are both intimately related to the death of expertise.”
p159, journalism continued. I don’t 100% agree with this, perhaps because I’m skeptical of anything posted on the internet, but many folks are not and I think this is at least a little thought provoking, “This shallowness is not because journalism attracts unintelligent people, but because in an age when everything is journalism, and everyone is a journalist, standards inevitably fall. A profession that once had at least some barriers to entry is now wide open, with the same results we might expect if medicine, law enforcement, aviation, or archaeology were suddenly do-it-yourself projects.”
p162, on hoaxes and exploiting laziness in journalism, “Sometimes the errors are trivial and amusing. In the great “chocolate helps you lose weight” hoax, for example, the hoaxers never thought they’d get as far as they did; they assumed that “reporters who don’t have science chops” would discover the whole faked study was “laughably flimsy” once they reached out to a real scientist. They were wrong: nobody actually tried to vet the story with actual scientists. “The key,” as the hoaxers later said, “is to exploit journalists’ incredible laziness. If you lay out the information just right, you can shape the story that emerges in the media almost like you were writing those stories yourself. In fact, that’s literally what you’re doing, since many reporters just copied and pasted our text.”
Oof.
p167, on admonishing experts and giving advice, “To experts, I will say, know when to say no. Some of the worst mistakes I ever made were when I was young and I could not resist giving an opinion. Most of the time, I was right to think I knew more than the reporter or the readers, but that’s not the point: I also found myself out on a few limbs I should have avoided. In fairness to journalists, I have found that they will respect and report your views accurately—only on a few occasions did I ever feel ambushed or misquoted—but they will also respect your principled refusal to go too far out of your lane. It is your obligation, not theirs, to identify that moment.”
This was quickly followed by four recommendations for consumers of news which I’m denoting here for future reference and import as a whole.
“Be humble. That is, at least begin by assuming that the people writing the story, whatever their shortcomings, know more about the subject than you do. At the least, try to remember that in most cases, the person writing the story has spent more time with the issue than you have. If you approach any story in the media, or any source of information already assuming you know as much as anyone else on the subject, the entire exercise of following the news is going to be a waste of your time.”
“Be ecumenical. Vary your diet. You wouldn’t eat the same thing all day, so don’t consume the same sources of media all day. When I worked in national politics, I subscribed to a half-dozen journals at any given time, across the political spectrum. Don’t be provincial: try media from other countries, as they often report stories or have a view of which Americans are completely unaware. And don’t say you “don’t have the time.” You do.”
“Be less cynical—or don’t be so cynical. It’s extremely rare that anyone is setting out intentionally to lie to you. Yes, the people writing the stories often have an agenda, and there will always be another Sabrina Erdeley out there. And yes, the journalists you’re reading or watching will get some things wrong, often with an astonishing lack of self-awareness. None of them have a monopoly on the truth, but they’re not all liars. They’re doing the best they can, by their lights, and most of them would be glad to know you’re keeping tabs by reading other sources of news and information.”
“Be more discriminating. If you see something in a major media outlet that doesn’t seem right to you, finding some half-baked website isn’t the answer. Websites that are outlets for political movements, or other, even worse enterprises that cater specifically to zealots or fools, will do more harm than good in the search for accurate information. Instead, ask yourself questions when consuming media. Who are these writers? Do they have editors? Is this a journal or newspaper that stands by its reporting, or is it part of a political operation? Are their claims checkable, or have other media tried to verify or disprove their stories?”
“Conspiracy theorists and adherents of quack medicine will never believe anything that challenges their views, but most of us can do better. And remember: reading and following the news is a skill like any other at which we get better by repetition. The best way to become a good consumer of news is to be a regular consumer of news.”
p200, on experts and predicting the future. I won’t quote this entire section, but I liked that the author admitted the difficulties of experts in not offering predictions of the future as that is one thing people do refer to experts for – advice on what to do based upon knowledge of the past. The foxes and hedgehog metaphor is one I have heard before and find to reoccur in life.
p205, There is some great advice on how experts can work to repair the relationship with the general public. Encouraged reading.
p207, the author complains that we have too many sources as a cause of our problems, but I’m reminded of Shirky’s writing that it’s not “information overload” (there’s always been more books/movies/news than single person could digest) but “filter failure” (the access to so much with little effort causes a sense of overwhelming urgency) that is our biggest struggle as individuals. Quick advice: Turn off your notifications friend.
p222, on advice to experts and giving advice, “Experts need to own their advice and to hold each other accountable. For any number of reasons—the glut of academic degrees, the lack of interest on the part of the public, the inability to keep up with the production of knowledge in the Information Age—they have not lived up to this duty as conscientiously as their privileged position in society requires. They can do better, even if those efforts might, in the main, go unnoticed.”
p226, Americans, remember we are a republic not a democracy. An interesting take I had not considered as important in the context of expertise, but I can see that if individuals lack a basic understanding of how our government work (like this delineation), then we are speaking from ignorance – which is an equal part of the death of expertise.
Some better written reviews of the book:
