The Death of Expertise

The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters

By: Tom Nichols

Narrated by: Sean Pratt

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues.

Today, everyone knows everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols shows this rejection of experts has occurred for many reasons, including 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.

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.

Nichols notes that 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.

©2017 Oxford University Press (P)2017 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A sharp analysis of an increasingly pressing problem." ( Kirkus)

An extremely important book for our time

This book is more important than ever! It covers how expertise is dying at the hands of too much information and the laziness of the average American to get the real facts. The author covers the domains of higher education, journalism, politics, and our democracy as a whole and discusses how people's need for quick snippets rather than delving deeper is costing us a great deal. A scary tome for our future, but understanding the problem is the first step to fixing it. READ THIS BOOK!!

Lamentations without solutions

Most lamentation genre books describe the problem in great detail and slap dash solutions in the last chapter. Here there's only a weak hopefulness in the last paragraphs. We get it, now use your expertise (and your limited pages) to blueprint a path to a better future. Narrator did a good job with what he had to work with.

Scary

We let this happen. We need to step up and fix it. Take a listen and re-sign the social contract.

What’s sad is that I did everything wrong in this book. I let this happen just as much as everyone else did. I hope this can be corrected before the author’s fears are made real.

“Get off my quadrangle, you damned ingrates!”

I very much enjoyed all of the observations of this wise and grumpy member of the elite, although he’s wrong about the continued existence of true autodidacts like me!

LOL

PS - The spoken performance was trying, at times. I found the best way to erase the sardonic tone and odd intonation choices was to listen at 1.5 speed.

not as much useful info as I had hoped

I appreciate that the author didn't use this as an opportunity to rail against a political party, and I think he made a concerted effort not to do so.

His assessment of the evolution of higher learning establishments was thought provoking, but he didn't offer any solutions to the problem which seems kind of lazy. I would have even been happy with a list of proposed ideas and why they won't work, but to not say anything on it gave me the impression that he didn't even bother brainstorming.

It also seems like he discredits the ability of any uncredentialed person to learn and know things within a specific field without formal training, and that's just not true. If you are smart enough to know your own limitations, are willing to challenge your world view and think critically about things, you can generally distinguish fact from fiction. That's how I can trust in medical science that vaccines are good, but also recognize when a doctor tells me some BS, like, 'wait and see if that cat bite gets infected, and THEN I'll prescribe antibiotics.'

This guy even throws shade on Chomsky for not staying in his lane.

Overall, there's some good info here, but I felt it was lacking something

Really enjoyable discomfort

I don’t think this book “leans left” or “leans right”. The book is really well thought out about all the ways in which arrogance is affecting our daily lives and the upcoming future. Great insights

It's good. 👍

It's a good book on a topic of great concern to me: the spurning of expert consensus / expert opinion from a public that is grossly unqualified to pontificate a contrary opinion in the subject.

I have no regrets listening to it; I just feel I really got the nitty gritty of Tom's book in his editorial piece titled, 'The Death of Expertise', which isn't to say the book is of no value, but that I maybe could have better used my Audible credit on a book that could expand my knowledge domain; feed my recent appetite for knowledge domination in topics of importance in my time.

I don't think I could ever become an expert in something, but I should at least try to become a brilliant moron.

Brilliant

A superb analysis. Beautifully written and compelling. Also more than a little depressing. A must-read book.

Comprehensive Analysis of a Critical Problem

Democracy in 2018 has become a resentful, angry business. Rejection of the opinions of elites has become a First Principle. In the name of Equality, Democracy and Fairness, populist resentment demands that all opinions, regardless of their source, be considered to be of equal value, resulting in the acceptance of the Least Common Denominator.

These are the basic premises of Nichols’ book and I found them to paint a convincing picture of the current state of American Public Discourse. He goes on to analyze the factors that have brought us to this state.

All the usual suspects are here: the overwhelming amount of information, easy access through the Internet, confirmation bias, news as a profit center causing its degeneration into entertainment, proliferation of Experts and the Education System particularly Higher Education.

His analysis is incisive and wide-ranging but two areas really caught my eye: the Academizing of Journalism and the Devolution of the Professor-Student Relationship at the College Level.

Partly due to the incredible growth of the market for information spawned by Google and the Internet, “news” outlets have sprung up in all fields and at all levels creating an inordinate demand for “journalists”. The Academy has responded by creating “journalism programs” to churn out 27 year old correspondents, pundits and other “experts” to purvey this “information”. Where we once had three networks and fifteen veteran correspondents as our sources of news, we now have hundreds opining about complicated issues in fields of study and countries they have almost no firsthand knowledge of.

The second area he discusses is related. To meet the growing demand for higher education Colleges have mutated into aggressively competing entities vying to claim as much of the tuition market as they can to survive. Like any other business, they have learned that to attract customers they must give them what they want. Students are transformed into clients who must be catered to with easy courses, better food, nicer accommodations, etc. Colleges must keep their clients comfortable for four to six years to keep the dollars rolling in rather than providing what once was considered Education in specific fields of study. The idea of Education has thus become cheapened.

These two examples, combined with the others mentioned above, help the society create “Experts” of dubious credentials who can disseminate “information” to a poorly educated society eager to grab on to any idea or opinion that sounds attractive. Mix this with a populace with little time or inclination for deep analysis and more cynicism about the “Elites” and we have created a volatile atmosphere for half-baked opinions to be taken as gospel truth and implemented to the detriment of Society as a whole.

Nichols’ solution is for Experts to be better trained and more respectful of the limits of their expertise and for laymen to be more cautious and discriminating about their sources of information and the range of opinions they consume.

His arguments are well made and thought-provoking and his subject is vital to the survival of Democracy in America. Reasons enough to read this book.

A timely and important book.

Tom Nichols’ book should be read by all. This book tackles a variety of issues that shape our perception of the world and how the barrage of poorly or uniformed options have drowned out many experts.