## Metadata - Author: [[Tom Nichols]] - Full Title: The Death of Expertise - Category: #books ## Highlights - Our cultural and literary life is full of premature burials of everything: shame, common sense, manliness, femininity, childhood, good taste, literacy, the Oxford comma, and so on. ([Location 58](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=58)) - The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance. It’s not just that people don’t know a lot about science or politics or geography; they don’t, but that’s an old problem. And really, it’s not even a problem, insofar as we live in a society that works because of a division of labor, a system designed to relieve each of us of having to know about everything. Pilots fly airplanes, lawyers file lawsuits, doctors prescribe medication. None of us is a Da Vinci, painting the Mona Lisa in the morning and designing helicopters at night. ([Location 61](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=61)) - the bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing things. ([Location 66](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=66)) - Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. ([Location 66](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=66)) - 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. ([Location 67](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=67)) - This isn’t the same thing as the traditional American distaste for intellectuals and know-it-alls. ([Location 70](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=70)) - 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.” Isaac Asimov ([Location 145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=145)) - it is all worse than ignorance: it is unfounded arrogance, the outrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture that cannot endure even the slightest hint of inequality of any kind. ([Location 187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=187)) - Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. ([Location 212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=212)) - Unfortunately, the modern American university, and the way students and their parents treat it as a generic commodity, is now part of the problem. ([Location 258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=258)) - When students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge; worse, they do not develop the habits of critical thinking that would allow them to continue to learn and to evaluate the kinds of complex issues on which they will have to deliberate and vote as citizens. ([Location 261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=261)) - Experts are often reduced to sound bites or “pull quotes,” if they are consulted at all. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=278)) - WASHINGTON, DC—Citing years of frustration over their advice being misunderstood, misrepresented or simply ignored, America’s foremost experts in every field collectively tendered their resignation Monday. The Onion ([Location 309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=309)) - The public space is increasingly dominated by a loose assortment of poorly informed people, many of them autodidacts who are disdainful of formal education and dismissive of experience. ([Location 322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=322)) - intellectual Gresham’s Law ([Location 326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=326)) - where once the rule was “bad money drives out good,” we now live in an age where misinformation pushes aside knowledge. ([Location 326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=326)) - Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified. ([Location 372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=372)) - I may be mistaken, but the present-day writer, when he takes his pen in hand to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never concerned himself with this subject, if he reads does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader carries in his head. ([Location 374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=374)) - In the original American populistic dream, the omnicompetence of the common man was fundamental and indispensable. It was believed that he could, without much special preparation, pursue the professions and run the government. Today, he knows that he cannot even make his breakfast without using devices, more or less mysterious to him, which expertise has put at his disposal; and when he sits down to breakfast and looks at his morning newspaper, he reads about a whole range of issues and acknowledges, if he is candid with himself, that he has not acquired competence to judge most of them.2 Hofstadter ([Location 386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=386)) - The parents more likely to resist vaccines, as it turns out, are found among educated San Francisco suburbanites in Marin County. While these mothers and fathers are not doctors, they are educated just enough to believe they have the background to challenge established medical science. ([Location 427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=427)) - Thus, in a counterintuitive irony, educated parents are actually making worse decisions than those with far less schooling, and they are putting everyone’s children at risk. ([Location 429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=429)) - At the root of all this is an inability among laypeople to understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything. ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=462)) - In modern America, policy debates sound increasingly like fights between groups of ill-informed people who all manage to be wrong at the same time. ([Location 491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=491)) - (As Ernest Hemingway once said about writing, “Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.”) ([Location 596](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=596)) - As the renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg once put it, an expert “is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.” ([Location 661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=661)) - “An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”) ([Location 663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=663)) - Both of these points should help us to understand why the pernicious idea that “everyone can be an expert” is so dangerous. ([Location 664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=664)) - 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. ([Location 669](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=669)) - people who think they can become singers never think they can become voice coaches.) ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=673)) - expertise is difficult to define, and experts are sometimes hard to tell from dilettantes. ([Location 697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=697)) - No one likes to be called stupid: it’s a judgmental, harsh word that implies not only a lack of intelligence, but a willful ignorance almost to the point of moral failure. ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=745)) - The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb. Dunning and Kruger more gently label such people as “unskilled” or “incompetent.” But that doesn’t change their central finding: “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” ([Location 763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=763)) - people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.” ([Location 781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=781)) - This makes it tough to argue with these “incompetent individuals,” because when compared with the experts, “they were less able to spot competence when they saw it.” ([Location 798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=798)) - This is also called the “law of parsimony,” meaning that the most likely explanation is the one that requires the fewest number of logical leaps or shaky assumptions. ([Location 952](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=952)) - In modern American politics, conspiracy theories abound. President Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Africa. President Bush was part of the plot to attack America on 9/11. The Queen of England is a drug dealer. The US government is spraying mind-controlling chemicals in the air through the exhaust ports of jet aircraft. The Jews control everything—except when the Saudis or Swiss bankers are controlling everything. ([Location 974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=974)) - 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. ([Location 983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=983)) - our troubles are the fault of powerful people who had it within their power to avert such misery. In such a world, a loved one’s incurable disease is not a natural event: it is the result of some larger malfeasance by industry or government. ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=992)) - Whatever it is, somebody is at fault, because otherwise we’re left blaming only God, pure chance, or ourselves. ([Location 996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=996)) - nearly 30 percent of Americans, for example, think “a secretive elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world,” and 15 percent think media or government add secret “mind-controlling” technology to TV broadcasts. ([Location 1005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1005)) - Generalizations are probabilistic statements, based in observable facts. They are not, however, explanations in themselves—another important difference from stereotypes. They’re measurable and verifiable. ([Location 1037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1037)) - The key to a stereotype is that it is impervious to factual testing. A stereotype brooks no annoying interference with reality, and it relies on the clever use of confirmation bias to dismiss all exceptions as irrelevant. (Racists have mastered this mode of argument: “All Romanians are thieves except this one lady I work with, but she’s different.”) ([Location 1051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1051)) - Stereotypes are not predictions, they’re conclusions. That’s why it’s called “prejudice”: it relies on pre-judging. ([Location 1053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1053)) - 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. Their distance from the subject enables open debate and consideration of alternatives, in ways meant to defeat emotional temptations, including fear, that lead to bias. ([Location 1074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1074)) - people will go to great lengths to give each other a fair hearing and to weigh all opinions equally, even when everyone involved in the conversation knows there are substantial differences in competence between them. The authors of the study (which included people from China, Iran, and Denmark) suggest that this is an “equality bias” built into us based on a human need to be accepted as part of a group. ([Location 1084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1084)) - The reality is that social insecurity trips up both the smart and the dumb. We all want to be liked. ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1100)) - Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs—narratives about the self, ideas about the social order—that essentially cannot be violated: To contradict them would call into question our very self-worth. As such, these views demand fealty from other opinions. ([Location 1119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1119)) - both liberals and conservatives reacted by doubting the science, rather than themselves. “Just reading about these polarizing topics,” one of the authors noted, “is having a negative effect on how people feel about science.” ([Location 1152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1152)) - Higher education is supposed to cure us of the false belief that everyone is as smart as everyone else. ([Location 1167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1167)) - the stampede of young Americans into college and the consequent competition for their tuition dollars have produced a consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right. ([Location 1170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1170)) - This is because attendance at a postsecondary institution no longer guarantees a “college education.” Instead, colleges and universities now provide a full-service experience of “going to college.” These are not remotely the same thing, and students now graduate believing they know a lot more than they actually do. ([Location 1192](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1192)) - Instead, for many people college has become, in the words of a graduate of a well-known party school in California, “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.” College is no longer a passage to educated maturity and instead is only a delaying tactic against the onset of adulthood—in some cases, for the faculty as well as for the students. ([Location 1215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1215)) - College as a client-centered experience caters to adolescents instead of escorting them away from adolescence. Rather than disabusing students of their intellectual solipsism, the modern university ends up reinforcing it. ([Location 1261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1261)) - People eager to misinform their fellow citizens will often say that they have graduate education and that they are therefore to be taken seriously. The only thing more disheartening than finding out these folks are lying about possessing multiple degrees is to find out that they’re telling the truth. ([Location 1458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1458)) - You see the results most visibly in the lazy rivers and rock-climbing walls and increasingly luxurious dorms that colleges use to compete for students, but such a shift does not limit itself to extraneous amenities. Professors marvel at the way students now shamelessly demand to be given good grades, regardless of their work ethic, but that’s exactly what you would expect if the student views themselves as a consumer, and the product as a credential, rather than an education. ([Location 1514](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1514)) - “students pay more in tuition, and expect more in return—better service, better facilities and better grades.”15 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. ([Location 1519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1519)) - Grades in the A and B range together now account for more than 80 percent of all grades in all subjects, a trend that continues unabated.17 ([Location 1534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1534)) - Students now build majestic Everests from the smallest molehills, ([Location 1620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1620)) - “Then why the [expletive] did you accept the position?! Who the [expletive] hired you?! You should step down! If that is what you think about being a master you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here. You are not doing that!” ([Location 1627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1627)) - My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. Nicholas Carr ([Location 1677](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1677)) - Pommer’s Law, in which the Internet can only change a person’s mind from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion. ([Location 1706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1706)) - Skitt’s Law: “Any Internet message correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself.” When it comes to the death of expertise, however, the law to bear in mind is an observation coined long before the advent of the personal computer: Sturgeon’s Law, named ([Location 1707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1707)) - “Ninety percent of everything,” Sturgeon decreed, “is crap.” ([Location 1713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1713)) - Some of the smartest people on earth have a significant presence on the Internet. Some of the stupidest people on the same planet, however, reside just one click away on the next page or hyperlink. ([Location 1722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1722)) - “The anti-vaccine agitators can always find a renegade researcher or random ‘study’ to back them up. This is erudition in the age of cyberspace: You surf until you reach the conclusion you’re after. You click your way to validation, confusing the presence of a website with the plausibility of an argument.” ([Location 1868](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1868)) - This kind of Internet grazing—mistakenly called “research” by laypeople—makes interactions between experts and professionals arduous. ([Location 1870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1870)) - Internet users tend to gravitate toward, and to believe, whichever results of a search come up first in the rankings, ([Location 1924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1924)) - Surowiecki recounted the story, for example, of an English county fair in 1906, when the public was asked to guess the weight of an ox. The average of the guesses was better than any one person’s guess and ended up almost exactly on the mark.15 Likewise, ([Location 1946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=1946)) - In the age of social media, people using the Internet assume that everyone is equally intelligent or informed merely by virtue of being online. ([Location 2049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=2049)) - Teachers, especially, know that the same material delivered at a distance or on a screen has a different impact than personal interaction with a student who can ask questions, furrow a brow, or show an expression of sudden understanding. Distance and anonymity remove patience and presumptions of goodwill. ([Location 2061](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=2061)) - 2011 University of Chicago study found that America’s college graduates “failed to make significant gains in critical thinking and complex reasoning during their four years of college,” but more worrisome, they “also failed to develop dispositions associated with civic engagement.”5 Like their parents, these young people were not only less informed than we might have expected, but they were also less interested in applying what little they might have learned to their responsibilities as citizens. ([Location 2169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MYCDVHH&location=2169))