Death of Expertise Lessons
Lesson One
One. What forces make culture in love with its own ignorance at the expense of expertise?
Narcissism gives us “fragile egos” that don’t want us to be told we’re wrong. We are a self-coddling culture.
Our narcissism is so virulent that we are proud of our ignorance that compels us to never be challenged by facts that contradict our positions.
A second force is the false moral equivalence that says all opinions are alike. You can believe what you want.
Related to this moral equivalence is a third factor, moral relativism, which says you can believe what you want to believe. All opinions are equally valid. Quoting Isaac Asimov, Nichols writes we live in a “Cult of Ignorance” in which “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
A fourth reason: We no longer value “principled, informed” arguments, which are vital to a healthy democracy. We dismiss such informed arguments as “authoritarian” and “elitist.” We’d rather believe the crackpot’s conspiracy theory.
A fifth reason: More and more people dismiss expertise with anger, as if they are entitled to do so. For example, patients will contradict their doctors because these patients feel emboldened by their online sources, however dubious they might be.
Yet another reason is that scandals, such as Watergate, the Iraq War debacle based on “good intel” and other government lies, fiascoes, and incompetencies have made us cynical of so-called authority figures who make a claim of expertise. We see the world, as Henry James wrote, led by “morons and madmen.” We should have “healthy skepticism” toward experts, Tom Nichols writes, but not knee-jerk resentment.
A seventh reason is that there is no dialogue between experts and the general public. The experts too often live in their cocoons while the public gets their intel from the Internet and distinguish between credible evidence and bogus misinformation. Fewer and fewer people read books. Nichols writes that is book is about how the relationship between experts and the general public is collapsing.
An eighth reason is that coddled narcissists don’t want the truth however unpleasant it may be. Rather, narcissists want fake intel that reinforces their ego, promises them the good news that they are right, and promises them easy solutions to complex problems. Feel-good “folk wisdom,” not dispassionate truth and objective reality, is the guiding force.
A ninth reason is confirmation bias, which is our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our pre-existing biases.
Two. How is rejecting expertise for fake news or fake intel dangerous?
Nichols gives the example of crackpot Cal Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, an AIDs denialist, who rejected HIV as a cause of AIDs. His false intel was believed by South African president Thabo Mbeki who rejected AIDs drugs resulting in over 300,000 deaths. Mbeki still believes in the false intel today.
In this age of Internet access, more people than ever are rejecting fundamental rules of evidence and throwing away accumulated knowledge; worse, they are then making decisions, like supporting a war or an invasion, based on their lack of knowledge, like not knowing where Ukraine is on a map.
With people satisfied by their Internet browsing, the line that separates experts from amateurs and crackpots has dissolved.
Our danger is twofold:
One, we can simply be wrong through sheer incompetence and disdain for principles of gathering evidence. He writes people can be determined to avoid gluten and not even know what gluten is.
Nichols points out that stupidity is not the problem. A lot of people who embrace fake news and fake intel are smart enough. The problem is narcissism, an emotional maladaptation defined by people having a grandiose self-image that repels criticism, opposing ideas, and objective reality as a counterbalance to the narcissist’s misguided conclusions.
Two, we can be manipulated by propaganda, people who use the cynical tactics described in George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language.”
Three. Nichols asks the question: Haven’t grumpy intellectuals always shaken their fists at the masses to deplore how wrong they are? What’s different about the current situation?
One, fake news can pick up steam faster than ever in Internet Age.
Two, we’ve confused healthy skepticism against authorities with using baseless opinions as a worthy rebuttal.
Three. America fosters a cult of “individual understanding” as part of our democratic ideal. Trusting authorities is simply un-American. There is nothing wrong with not trusting authorities as long as we understand how to examine credible evidence from the bogus.
Four. Privileged people think it’s “hip” to disdain authority and embrace their own pseudo-knowledge. They go on crackpot diets, drink dangerous raw milk, and shun vaccines, thinking their “above it all.”
Four. If the medical establishment was wrong about eggs, should be forever disbelieve them?
No. It’s a faulty equivalent to say an establishment that relies on science and credible evidence is as prone to error as a person or organization that discards rules of science and credible evidence.
We must be careful to not fall into the trap of whataboutism. This fallacy is explained in the Washington Post.
Five. How have our political opinions deteriorated into a tribalist gang mentality?
Nichols observes that disagreement, which should be welcomed as part of a mind-expanding debate, is looked at as a threat, looked at as disrespect, and looked at as an insult: “You simply want me to join your tribe.”
Disturbingly, these passions come with little knowledge on any subject and belong to what Nichols calls the “low-information voter.”
Such voters believe fake news like Obama Care entailing “death panels,” a rumor that was spread by anti-Obama operatives.
Only 5% of Americans know that their taxes for foreign aid are less than 1%. A huge number of Americans, in contrast, think that 20% of their taxes go to foreign aid. This ignorance shows how arrogant people are to have such a strong tribal identity with no information to back it up.
Six. What is an expert?
Experts are those we turn to when we need knowledge. We rely on them for our wellbeing, safety, and protection.
Experts are specialists in their field.
They are people of distinction in their field and belong to an exclusive group.
They possess these characteristics:
Education
Talent
Experience
Peer affirmation
They come from distinguished institutions such as MIT and Georgia Tech.
They are current in their field.
They continue to grow in their field.
They are not complacent in their field. Nichols quotes a Chinese proverb: Beware the craftsman who claims 20 years of experience when in reality he’s only had one year of experience 20 times.
Experts make mistakes but far less so than a layperson (nonspecialist).
Seven. What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
The dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not dumb. In contrast, I feel dumb all the time, so paradoxically, I’m less dumb than a person who thinks he’s not dumb.
When we suffer the DKE, we are prone to overestimating ourselves.
When we suffer the DKE, we think we’re above average, even though our collective delusion contradicts statistics.
The DKE thrives in an absence of metacognition, the ability to put distance on yourself and assess your behavior with dispassionate analysis.
People who suffer from the DKE cannot recognize expertise so when engaging in a disagreement with an expert they double down and assert their ignorance, and this frustrates the expert. The gap between the DKE person and the expert widens and widens. It’s a vicious cycle.
A DKE person resists education. “I already know what I need to know, so get the hell out.”
A DKE person is more interested in not having his feelings hurt than finding the truth.
Eight. What is confirmation bias?
Confirmation bias is our tendency to cherry-pick intel that confuses what we already believe. We can counter this type of ignorance through critical thinking: learning how to look at statistics, numbers, risk, and probability, and not relying on anecdotes to come to hasty generalizations.
My fear of flying is not supported by the facts. I should fear driving a car more.
Whether it’s trickle-down economics or the optimum minimum wage, one usually finds studies that conform to one’s pre-existing biases and beliefs.
People exercise confirmation bias to uphold conspiracy theories, such as the 9/11 truthers whose conspiracy theories were debunked by Popular Mechanics, a topic you can use for your essay.
Lesson Two
One. How are colleges failing to make students better critical thinkers?
Colleges have dumbed-down by becoming the following:
Consumer products offering commodities to their clients rather than tough work and STEM courses as a foundation.
Students are treated like customers, not students, because colleges, which are businesses, are competing for an increased customer base. This results in grade inflation and more “joke courses,” easy classes and fads.
Professors are encouraged to pander to students and coddle them so the professors will get good ratings.
Because there is an “insatiable demand for degrees,” all young people are expected to go to college, so there is a glut of instructors and students, and this glut lowers the quality of education.
Colleges perpetuate the myth that there are no experts, that we are all basically the same intelligence.
College is supposed to be uncomfortable and challenging to students to make them stronger, but colleges are too geared to making students feel accommodated and therefore they weaken students by giving students “unfounded self-confidence.”
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