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“No, the bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing things. 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.”
“Of course, there’s also the basic problem that some people just aren’t very bright. And as we’ll see, the people who are the most certain about being right tend to be the people with the least reason to have such self-confidence.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“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”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“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. The fact of the matter is that experts are more often right than wrong, especially on essential matters of fact. And yet the public constantly searches for the loopholes in expert knowledge that will allow them to disregard all expert advice they don’t like.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“If college graduates can no longer be counted on to lead reasoned debate and discussion in American life, and to know the difference between knowledge and feeling, then we’re indeed in the kind of deep trouble no expert can fix.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise. Emotion”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“We are supposed to “agree to disagree,” a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we’re just being jerks, apparently. It”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.” This is 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.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“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.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“Anti-intellectualism is itself a means of short-circuiting democracy, because a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“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.”
― The Death Of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“Instead, the threat to democracy now in America and elsewhere comes from the working and middle classes—the people among whom I was born and raised—whose rage comes overwhelmingly from cultural insecurity, inflated expectations, tribal partisan alliances, obsessions about ethnicity and identity, blunted ambition, and a childlike understanding of the limits of government.”
― Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy“The relationship between experts and citizens is not “democratic.” All people are not, and can never be, equally talented or intelligent. Democratic societies, however, are always tempted to this resentful insistence on equality, which becomes oppressive ignorance if given its head.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“We no longer have those principled and informed arguments. 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.” People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“I was a straight-A student at a university” does not mean what it did in 1960 or even 1980. A study of two hundred colleges and universities up through 2009 found that A was the most commonly given grade, an increase of nearly 30 percent since 1960 and over 10 percent just since 1988. 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.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“Worse, what I find so striking today is not that people dismiss expertise, but that they do so with such frequency, on so many issues, and with such anger. Again, it may be that attacks on expertise are more obvious due to the ubiquity of the Internet, the undisciplined nature of conversation on social media, or the demands of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. But there is a self-righteousness and fury to this new rejection of expertise that suggest, at least to me, that this isn’t just mistrust or questioning or the pursuit of alternatives: it is narcissism, coupled to a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in self-actualization. This”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“The growth of this kind of stubborn ignorance in the midst of the Information Age cannot be explained away as merely the result of rank ignorance. Many of the people who campaign against established knowledge are otherwise adept and successful in their daily lives. In some ways, 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.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they’re misinformed.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“Too often, those who denigrate the liberal arts are in reality advocating for nothing less than turning colleges into trade schools. Art history majors always take the cheap shots here, even though many people don’t realize that a lot of art history majors go on to some pretty lucrative careers. In any case, I don’t want to live in a civilization where there are no art history majors or, for that matter, film studies, philosophy, or sociology majors.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“People do not come to the Internet so that their bad information can be corrected or their cherished theories disproven. Rather, they ask the electronic oracle to confirm them in their ignorance. In 2015 a Washington Post writer, Caitlin Dewey, worried that fact-checking could never defeat myths and hoaxes because “no one has the time or cognitive capacity to reason all the apparent nuances and discrepancies out.” In the end, she sighed, “debunking them doesn’t do a darn thing.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“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”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult. And to refuse to acknowledge all views as worthy of consideration, no matter how fantastic or inane they are, is to be closed-minded. The”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“Most causes of ignorance can be overcome, if people are willing to learn. Nothing, however, can overcome the toxic confluence of arrogance, narcissism, and cynicism that Americans now wear like full suit of armor against the efforts of experts and professionals.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“Accessing the Internet can actually make people dumber than if they had never engaged a subject at all. The very act of searching for information makes people think they’ve learned something, when in fact they’re more likely to be immersed in yet more data they do not understand. This happens because after enough time surfing, people no longer can distinguish between things that may have flashed before their eyes and things they actually know. Seeing words on a screen is not the same as reading or understanding them.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“What used to be a jocular and usually benign ridicule of intellect and formal training has turned into a malign resentment of the intellectual in his capacity as expert,” Hofstadter warned. “Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.” Fifty”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“There is no way around the reality that students are too often wasting their money and obtaining the illusion of an education by gravitating toward courses or majors that either shouldn’t exist or whose enrollments should be restricted to the small number of students who intend to pursue them seriously and with rigor. This, too, is one of the many things faculty are not supposed to say out loud, because to resentful parents and hopeful students, it sounds like baseless elitism.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters“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.” People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs. I was not alive in the Middle Ages, so I cannot say it is unprecedented, but within my living memory I’ve never seen anything like it.”
― The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
Thursday, May 26, 2022
Tom M Nichols
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