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The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters 1st Edition
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Tom Nichols' 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, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24 hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.
- ISBN-100190865970
- ISBN-13978-0190865979
- Edition1st
- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication dateOctober 1, 2018
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions8.2 x 0.7 x 5.5 inches
- Print length280 pages
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What's it about?
This book is about how the internet and education have fueled a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism, and how this has crippled informed debates on any number of issues.Popular highlight
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.2,188 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.2,166 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.1,778 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Nichols expands his 2014 article published by The Federalist with a highly researched and impassioned book that's well timed for this post-election period. Strongly researched textbook for laymen will have many political and news junkies nodding their heads in agreement." - Publishers Weekly
"Tom Nichols is fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of those dangerous people who actually know what they are talking about. In a compelling, and often witty, polemic, he explores why experts are routinely disregarded and what might be done to get authoritative knowledge taken more seriously." - Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King's College London, and author of Strategy
"We live in a post-fact age, one that's dangerous for a whole host of reasons. Here is a book that not only acknowledges this reality, but takes it head on. Persuasive and well-written, The Death of Expertise is exactly the book needed for our times." - Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group
"Americans are indifferent to real journalism in forming their opinions, hoaxes prove harder to kill than a slasher-flick monster, and the word 'academic' is often hurled like a nasty epithet. Tom Nichols has put his finger on what binds these trends together: positive hostility to established knowledge. The Death of Expertise is trying to turn back this tide." - Dan Murphy, former Middle East and Southeast Asia Bureau Chief, The Christian Science Monitor
"Tom Nichols has written a brilliant, timely, and very original book. He shows how the digital revolution, social media, and the internet has helped to foster a cult of ignorance. Nichols makes a compelling case for reason and rationality in our public and political discourse." - Robert J. Lieber, Georgetown University, and author of Retreat and Its Consequences
"Tom Nichols does a breathtakingly detailed job in scrutinizing the American consumer's refutation of traditional expertise. In the era of escapism and denial, he offers a refreshing and timely book on how we balance our skepticism with trust going forward." - Salena Zito, national political reporter for The Washington Examiner, CNN, The New York Post, and RealClearPolitics
"Timely useful in providing an overview of just how we arrived at this distressing state of affairs." - New York Times
"This may sound like a rant you have heard before, but Nichols has a sense of humour and chooses his examples well. His anger is a lot more attractive than the standard condescension." - Financial Times
"A genial guide through the wilderness of ignorance." - Kirkus Reviews
"Nichols is a forceful and sometimes mordant commentator, with an eye for the apt analogy." - Inside Higher Education
"Americans are indifferent to real journalism in forming their opinions, hoaxes prove harder to kill than a slasher-flick monster, and the word 'academic' is often hurled like a nasty epithet. Tom Nichols has put his finger on what binds these trends together: positive hostility to established knowledge. The Death of Expertise is trying to turn back this tide." - Dan Murphy, former Middle East and Southeast Asia Bureau Chief, The Christian Science Monitor
"Excellent"- The Washington Post
"Nichols' perspective is an essential one if we are to begin digging ourselves out of the hole we find ourselves in."- National Public Radio
"A sweeping indictment of the deliberate, widespread and ultimately self-destructive devaluing of knowledge in America."- Politico
"Buy this book. And read it. Regularly."- Physics World
Amazon Best Nonfiction of 2017
Book Description
About the Author
He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, and as one of the all-time top players of the game, he was invited back to play in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions. Nichols' website is tomnichols.net and he can be found on Twitter at @RadioFreeTom.
Product details
- Publisher : Oxford University Press; 1st edition (October 1, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 280 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0190865970
- ISBN-13 : 978-0190865979
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.2 x 0.7 x 5.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #74,853 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #20 in Epistemology Philosophy
- #96 in Democracy (Books)
- #144 in Communication & Media Studies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He was a professor of national security affairs for 25 years at the U.S. Naval War College, and is the author of The Death of Expertise (Oxford 2017) as well as books on Russia, the Cold War, nuclear weapons, and the future of armed conflict. He is also an instructor at the Harvard Extension School and an adjunct professor at the US Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies. He is a former aide in the U.S. Senate and has been a Fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
He is also a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City, a Fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University, and a Senior Fellow of the Graham Center for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto. Previously he was a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
In 2017 Tom was named one of POLITICO Magazine's "POLITICO 50," the thinkers whose ideas are shaking up American politics and public life.
Tom is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion. He played in the 1994 Tournament of Champions, is listed in the Jeopardy! Hall of Fame, and as one of the game's top players was invited to participate in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, where he played his final match.
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Nichols is sounding an alarm that expertise is no longer being heeded. There are many factors that contribute to this. Some of us will be quick to say "The internet" and be partially right. The internet is not the sole contributor to this, though it definitely plays a part in all that we're seeing.
The first chapter is on the relationship of citizens and experts. Citizens no longer seem to care about what experts say. They will say one thing that experts were wrong on and then take some medicine for a headache that is the result of expert analysis. Our society has become one that rightly decries elitism, but then sees any idea that someone knows more than someone else on a subject as elitism. We are a society where all truth claims are to be treated as equal. Even worse, to disagree with a truth claim is to attack the person.
When the people do not heed the words of experts, every man becomes an island unto himself. Each person is in it for their own good. This also works with the narcissism of our age. We have become so individualistic, that it is tempting to think that we're the center of the story.
This gets us into how it is hard to converse today. The #1 response to a question today has become something along the lines of "Let me Google that for you." If we used this properly, it wouldn't be a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with using Google to look up a basic fact that isn't controversial, such as when did the Battle of Bunker Hill take place? Just recently I was at an event where a speaker said that Moses Maimonides was forced to do a debate by King James of Aragon I. Okay. Why not look that up? I quickly saw that Maimonides was dead before King James was even born. This is a proper use of Google if we do it right.
The improper use is thinking that the first website you come across is the one that you should listen to. There will be more on this later, but in this case, it becomes harder and harder to talk to people. Everyone thinks they're an expert because they can look something up on Google. Having my chief area of expertise be in the New Testament, I can say at this two words come to mind immediately. Jesus Mythicism. I still remember someone on a news page discussing a story telling me that scholars aren't even sure that Jesus existed. This was news to me seeing as I actually do read the scholars in the field and know that this is a minority position. When I was on the Atheist Analysis show, there was a lot of shock in the crowd when I said how few of scholars are mythicists. I was offered the number of 8% and said to go lower. 3 wasn't enough either. I think I said somewhere around .0001%.
Of course, the solution to this is to get an education. Well, maybe not. Sadly, our educational institutions are often just participating in groupthink. Many students today just walk away thinking what their professors think. In my study of the Bible and New Testament, both major schools I have personally attended, I have fundamentally disagreed with on some issues of NT interpretation. When some people would tell me I'm just arguing what my professors taught me, I would reply that in many cases, I disagreed with some central claims. That's okay.
Sadly, many colleges have become day care facilities with students being shown what is the most entertaining aspect of their stay. Too many students are going to go to college and just party and sleep around and think they're getting the college life. At my own Bible College where I graduated from, I have often gone back and talked with the professors who always thoroughly enjoy the reunion. One told me about seeing a student on campus during the summer and asked, "What are you reading now?" Reply? "Nothing." I find this stunning as the kids are seeing learning as the punishment and fun as the goal.
This is not to bash entertainment of course. We all must have some leisure times. You can often find my wife and I watching one of our recorded programs and when we do, it's not uncommon for me to have a Nintendo 2DS out at the same time. Gaming has always been a part of my life, but it's not the reason why I live either.
One example of what's going wrong on our campuses is the concept of safe places. We have seen lately colleges wanting to ban someone of a more conservative leaning and having to have places where their views are not challenged. What are they thinking? College is about challenging your views. You come there to learn, not just stay entrenched in your own opinion.
The result is someone could leave college without being educated but instead being indoctrinated. They will get their degree and never do any more reading or serious work. For my part, I find this bizarre. Even with the degree I have, I have never stopped looking into the field I study so much so that when I have scholars on my own show, it's quite easy to converse with them.
Well, what about the internet? Here we come to a real kicker. The problem with the internet is while it was meant to share our knowledge, more often, we are sharing our ignorance. Anyone can set up a website and be seen as an authority. We also now with self-publishing have it that anyone can get a book out there. Of course, there's good material out there (I happen to think my own website and Ebooks are good material), but one has to learn to discern. The problem is anyone with a website can look like an expert.
This is especially prevalent with conspiracy theories. I have already mentioned Jesus Mythicism as a conspiracy theory for atheists. You can find rumors about the Illuminati and about Reptilians and everything else online. The problem is that many people don't possess the basic tools to know how to analyze this information and see if it stands up or not.
With our narcissism, someone who can Google thinks they can disprove easily someone who reads the scholarly material. They end up thinking they're brilliant arguers when anyone who reads the material is just shaking their head in disbelief. Those who are ignorant are able to find others who are just as ignorant and join together and build up one another. Getting a lot of likes on their posts doesn't really help matters out.
Search engines will also tend to go where you have gone before as well. In other words, you get in an echo chamber. They use your past history of looking in order to determine sites that will be relevant to you. Rarely do people look and see if these are really authoritative sites. Think for instance of the people who often diagnose themselves entirely based on the internet and then argue with their doctor about it. Sure, the layman can be right sometimes, but all things being equal, go with the doctor.
Also, Nichols has a long section on Wikipedia. He points out that most Wikipedia editors are also male which limits our perspective. Wikipedia will have plenty of information on the Kardashians, but not information on political strife in some African countries for instance. It is a fine example of our compound ignorance coming together.
At least we have the press to set matters straight, or do we? The press is nowadays often just as gullible and part of the problem is we have so much information coming out at once that everyone is in a rush to be the first to get the news out. This means a lack of fact-checking. From my own perspective, I am a conservative in politics, but I have seen many conservative news sites royally butcher claims and many of them I consider just outright unreliable.
I have reached the point of letting my own family know when they send me something false, and in the past that often involved having to send out a group email. Many of our media outlets are doing the same kind of thing with sharing something just because it agrees with them. Fact-checking is not going on as much as it could be.
But alas, sometimes experts are wrong. What do we do then? A layman can indeed demonstrate an expert is wrong, but an expert being wrong once doesn't mean all expert opinion is to be denied. Experts are humans like everyone else and they will make mistakes. Fortunately, other experts will often be there to help point out those mistakes.
It's also necessary to point out that expertise in one area doesn't equal expertise in all. Richard Dawkins is a fine source I'm sure to quote on evolution. He is not fine on New Testament or philosophy. Gary Habermas is just fine on history, but he is not fine on discussing evolution.
In the end, Nichols's book is a call to return to learning. Hopefully it will be heeded as our society has more access to knowledge than ever before, but we are quite likely dumber than ever before. All the learning in the world doesn't matter if it is not approached properly. An attitude of humility would go a long way towards helping people learn.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
Deeper Waters Apologetics
“The Death of Expertise” is an intellectually stimulating book that looks at how a movement of ignorance has threatened our ability to rely on expertise. Professor Tom Nichols takes the reader on a journey that shows that not only have we dismissed expertise we are now proud of our own ignorance. This interesting 272-page book includes the following six chapters: 1. Experts and Citizens, 2. How Conversation Became Exhausting, 3. Higher Education: The Customer Is Always Right, 4. Let Me Google That for You: How Unlimited Information Is Making Us Dumber, 5. The “New” New Journalism, and Lots of It, and 6. When the Experts Are Wrong.
Positives:
1. A well written, and engaging book.
2. An interesting and timely topic, the campaign against established knowledge in the hands of a perceptive author. He’s also fair and even handed.
3. The book flows nicely. It has a good rhythm and it’s fun to read. Each chapter begins with a chapter-appropriate quote. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”” by Isaac Asimov.
4. Doesn’t waste time in getting to the main point. “The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance.” “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.”
5. Provides many examples of ignorance throughout the book. “The antics of clownish antivaccine crusaders like actors Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy undeniably make for great television or for a fun afternoon of reading on Twitter. But when they and other uninformed celebrities and public figures seize on myths and misinformation about the dangers of vaccines, millions of people could once again be in serious danger from preventable afflictions like measles and whooping cough.”
6. Many factoids spruced throughout the book. “The CDC issued a report in 2012 that noted that raw dairy products were 150 times more likely than pasteurized products to cause food-borne illness.”
7. In defense of experts. “Put another way, experts are the people who know considerably more on a subject than the rest of us, and are those to whom we turn when we need advice, education, or solutions in a particular area of human knowledge.”
8. Explains a prevailing phenomenon, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. “This phenomenon is called “the Dunning-Kruger Effect,” named for David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the research psychologists at Cornell University who identified it in a landmark 1999 study. The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.”
9. Explains the appeal of conspiracies. “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.”
10. Learn something every day. “Stereotypes are not predictions, they’re conclusions. That’s why it’s called “prejudice”: it relies on pre-judging.”
11. Insightful observations. “The social psychologist 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.””
12. Explains how colleges and universities have become an important part of the problem. “Still, the fact of the matter is that many of those American higher educational institutions are failing to provide to their students the basic knowledge and skills that form expertise. More important, they are failing to provide the ability to recognize expertise and to engage productively with experts and other professionals in daily life.” “When college is a business, you can’t flunk the customers.”
13. Provides some compelling and constructive criticism of campuses. “When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.”
14. The deceiving power of the Internet. “Unfortunately, people thinking they’re smart because they searched the Internet is like thinking they’re good swimmers because they got wet walking through a rainstorm.”
15. The challenges of Wiki-pedia and similar crowd-sourced projects. “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.”
16. Describes the rise of Rush Limbaugh. “In 2011, Limbaugh referred to “government, academia, science, and the media” as the “four corners of deceit,” which pretty much covered everyone except Limbaugh.”
17. Recommendations on how to be a better consumer of news. “The consumers of news have some important obligations here as well. I have four recommendations for you, the readers, when approaching the news: be humbler, be ecumenical, be less cynical, and be a lot more discriminating.”
18. Provides many examples of when experts get it wrong. “In the 1970s, America’s top nutritional scientists told the United States government that eggs, among many other foods, might be lethal.”
19. Explains the value of science. “But science is a process, not a conclusion. Science subjects itself to constant testing by a set of careful rules under which theories can only be displaced by better theories. Laypeople cannot expect experts never to be wrong; if they were capable of such accuracy, they wouldn’t need to do research and run experiments in the first place. If policy experts were clairvoyant or omniscient, governments would never run deficits and wars would only break out at the instigation of madmen.” “the purpose of science is to explain, not to predict.”
20. The final chapter does a good job of describing the role of experts in democracy. The five misconceptions about experts and policymakers. “First, experts are not puppeteers. They cannot control when leaders take their advice.”
21. The lack of balance. “A talk show, for example, with one scientist who says genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are safe and one activist who says they are dangerous looks “balanced,” but in reality that is ridiculously skewed, because nearly nine out of ten scientists think GMOs are safe for consumption.”
Negatives:
1. I was disappointed that climate change science didn’t play a bigger role in this book.
2. Lacked supplementary material that could have complemented the excellent narrative.
3. Some repetition.
In summary, this is a fun social study book about the relationship between experts and citizens in the democracy, and why that relationship is weakening. Tom Nichols does an excellent job of capturing the key elements to the collapse of our expertise and describes what we can do as citizens to put a stop to it. A very solid read, my only disappointment besides the lack of supplementary material is the fact that climate change played a miniscule role. That said, I recommend it!
Further suggestions: “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” by Richard Hofstadter, “The War on Science” by Shawn Lawrence Otto, “Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent and Mangle Science” by Dave Levitan, “Denying to the Grave” by Sara E. and Jack M. Gorman, “Everybody Lies” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes, “No, Is Not Enough” by Naomi Klein, and “The Republican War on Science” by Chris Mooney.
Top reviews from other countries
Wie kam es zu diesem gesellschaftlichen Wandel? Als Treiber dieser Entwicklung sieht Nichols den Niedergang der Universitäten, die Leichtigkeit, mit wenigen Klicks unvollständige oder gar irreführende Informationen abzurufen sowie den Untergang des verantwortungsvollen Journalismus’.
Der Begriff Demokratie wird missverstanden als absolute Gleichheit jeglicher Meinung, wobei nicht Fakten sondern Gefühle dominieren. Wer falsche Behauptungen richtigstellt, wird als undemokratisch und elitär angefeindet.
Das Buch ist flüssig geschrieben und mit teils amüsanten Beispielen gespickt. Es entstand noch vor der Corona-Pandemie. Die irrationalen Reaktionsweisen auf die weltweite Herausforderung, die Verleugnung der Realität, die Verschwörungstheorien und Demonstrationen gegen begründete Präventionsmaßnahmen sind eine weitere Bestätigung dieser bedenklichen Entwicklung.
I generally agree with the author, we have lost our way. My deep feeling - this story is not going to end well for us all - is mentioned at the end of the book. This is frightening, because I can see what would come of the fall of the society we live in. It's an uncertain future, one which nobody would like to live. Normal people should be aware of this and totally re-think their attitude, their preferences, their phylosophy.
In conclusion, it is the warning I thought the book would be. The problem is real and the book makes a good job at trying to characterize some aspects of it. Definitely worth a reading. Or even more than one.