The Death of Expertise
Ignorance often plays host to intolerance and they can sit together at a granite bar with a fine Merlot, just as easily as they can motor down the aisles of Walmart. I think Mr. Nichols would agree with this. My uncertainty here stems from the problem that arises when the enlightened intellectual writes on the dangers of anti-intellectualism. It stirs mistrust. It can cause the very thing it rails against. I confess, I struggled with skepticism, initially. But this is a good book.
Mr. Nichols gets major points for bravery. This was published in 2017 at the peak of many mostly-unpeaceful protests, from sea to shining sea. Writing a book about the dangerous prospects of tuning out expertise, is a thankless enterprise and perhaps even more so in the midst of so much civil unrest. Yet, Mr. Nichols steps into the ring and delivers a solidly good message. A message over which experts of every kind (self-professed and world renowned) will fist-pump, while the skeptics, the unconvinced, and all the lesser gods, might feel slightly provoked.
Medicine, engineering, science, education, construction, law, technology …. all of these disciplines and many more are populated with trained individuals who are daily challenged by dunderheads equipped with little more than google links wanting to dismiss hard-won expertise. The Death of Expertise speaks directly to these much-abused experts.
Nichols walks the reader through all of the digital-age malefactors and makes several good points about the challenges to expertise arising from the fact that there is just too, too much information out there. All of the culprits are addressed: confirmation bias, entertainment bubbles, and erroneous polls and market research. He also includes the very significant mistakes experts have made in the past, and the unshakeable belief many people now hold — that their own guesses are as good as the expert’s.
The author does not say that experts are infallible. Rather, he explains (in so many words) that if 1 out of 10 expert directives turn out to be wrong, the human brain holds onto that one error more than it clings to the other 9 truths.
I devoured this book, but a few questions nagged me.
In our ideologically bifurcated culture — supported by our beloved technologies — aren’t all of our new experts and future experts thoroughly drenched in some bias, some world view, some bubble-driven philosophy? Or have they acquired a super-human power enabling them, as they studied and worked, to embrace objectivity all throughout? Do they graduate from Brown and intern at Alphabet, and shuffle around at WeWork with their Shih Tzu while simultaneously maintaining a healthy respect for the non-organic farmer from Topeka? Or is the non-organic farmer from Topeka not “a real expert” to be respected? Who decides?
Also, if a hypothetical Mr. Smith has witnessed the experts getting it wrong (in their wars, their medicines, their school systems, their chemicals, their investments, and, yes, their technologies) and if these mistakes-of-expertise seriously derailed Mr. Smith’s life … then how does this mere mortal separate his sad, expertise-driven setbacks from a permanent, enervating cynicism?
I do not think that one person’s ignorance is better than another person’s knowledge and share the same goals as Mr. Nichols: a vibrant intellectual and scientific culture in which citizens trust their experts, their leaders, and policymakers. Since he published this book, only 4 years ago, we are further from this than we ever imagined possible.
The expert’s dismissal of the layperson is institutionalized. It is stable and in the wood. It exists, it always has existed, and it always will exist. However, the layperson’s disrespect and sometimes disregard of the expert grows more unstable every year. Fueled by recent Draconian censorships, laypeople are more cynical than ever before. The mutual resentment between these two groups can no longer be remediated with mutual respect, because the act of censorship itself — sinister, indefensible and unjust — permanently terminates any effort to “hear the other side out”. The discourse, inconvenient though it be at times, has been asphyxiated. Post-censorship, the uncomfortable path to mutual understanding has been thoroughly obliterated.
The real death of expertise has just occurred. The inconvenience of having someone disagree or present another view has been replaced by an interminable, never-changing repudiation of all but one view — the view that is promoted in the digital world.
NOTE: Even as I type these words, I am advised by my four young adult kids that the recent censorships have driven millions of readers and listeners directly to the censored. They point out to me that as soon as someone, anyone, is censored, young people desperately want to hear what that person has to say and they find a way. (The theory here is that it must be important, or it wouldn’t have been censored.) They argue that censorship backfires entirely. I guess time will tell.
Mr. Nichols points out in his book that “…a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices.” This is how we learn. But if half the conversation between experts and laypeople has been silenced on one side, what can ever be learned?
Mr. Nichols’ book is a worthy read. It has a valuable perspective. Even if you consider yourself the world’s greatest skeptic, you will come away with the basic understanding that experts are far more frequently right than they are wrong. It was meant to be a comfort, and mostly it is. Yet, reading this in the middle of the menacing oppression of censorship does not inspire confidence. The real source of the new scourge on intellectualism, expertise, and understanding, is this assault — the 2021 acts of censorship that have effectively greyed-out all meaningful discourse and that can lead to a more complete death of expertise and understanding.
