The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters

Abstract

Communicating with non-experts is one of the most important activities in my occupation. While performing the same job for many years, my communication style has changed considerably, and lately I have felt the need to adapt more and more rapidly. It is difficult to consider this change entirely intentional. Rather, it is a response to changes in the questions and attitudes of the people who visit me. They already come equipped with more knowledge and want to use that knowledge to engage me in genuine discussion, or to verify, rather than ask, my opinion. This trend has been accompanied by an increase in the proportion of their knowledge that has no clear source or origin. Moreover, starting with “Anarchy” [1], there have been numerous cult-like phenomena that overtly demonstrate the everyday crises faced by experts where false information misleads a large portion of society. Examples include the anti-vaccine movement based on the belief that vaccines cause autism, attempts to invalidate medical diagnoses, such as the previously popular book claiming that “There is no attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” [2], and countless trends for alternative medicine or treatments lacking evidence in pediatric psychiatric disease. These matters indicate how people define experts, how they decide whom to trust, and what information to process and put into action. Medicine is fundamentally a branch of science, and these phenomena demonstrate how society interprets data and logic through a subjective, distorted lens. “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters”, by Nichols T [3], shows that these concerns are not only present in specific fields, such as public healthcare, medicine, and psychiatry. The author is an expert on the issue of Russia and began writing about the crisis of expertise due to an interest and disappointment in the way that, concerning policy issues, the media and policy non-experts conveyed false information to the public, and used this to influence politics and elections. At first, he wrote in a personal blog, followed by a column in “The Federalist” [4] Eventually this content was collated and published as a book. In this book, the author discusses the following as reasons why people no longer respect the opinions of experts and why debate is dominated by ‘fake experts’: the universal illogicality of humans, who are susceptible to confirmation bias, and believe fictions, superstitions, and conspiracies; the deterioration of education at US colleges, which have become like for-profit groups that only cater to the demands of students and overprotective parents; the resulting reality where “the emotions of the demand-group have become more important than facts or reason”; the lack of discrimination regarding the wealth of information available through the internet; problems with journalism that have given birth to fake experts; issues of mistrust in the media; and experiences of various past incidents in which experts voiced incorrect opinions. In the final chapter, the author suggests somewhat of a solution to how experts and the general public should form relationships. The author attributes much to the societal changes experienced by the media and college education as the US transitioned from a modern to a contemporary society. This is noticeable because, rather than simply discussing facts, the author also focused on the changes in value systems and group psychology experienced by society. The author criticizes simply listing information from the Internet as “the cheapened sense of equality it provides, is corroding trust and This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters By Tom Nichols. New York: Oxford University Press;2017