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The Death of Expertise

The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. 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: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: 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, among other reasons. 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. 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. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 12, 2016
      Nichols (Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War) expands his 2014 article published by The Federalist with a highly researched and impassioned book that’s well timed for this post-election period. The crux of the book’s argument is that people—specifically in the American public—have grown increasingly hostile to expertise. Nichols explores the sources of this hostility (“some of which are rooted in human nature, others that are unique to America and some that are unavoidable product of modernity and affluence”), discusses the notion of “expert,” and considers the devastating consequences of the loss of trust on democratic institutions. He blames changes in higher education, the explosion and fracturing of media outlets, and confirmation bias and other psychological effects of an oversaturated media environment. Generally, Nichols displays strong reasoning, but at times he goes off the rails. It takes some time in the sections on education and Google, for instance, for him to make his point. Otherwise, this strongly researched textbook for laymen will have many political and news junkies nodding their heads in agreement.

    • Kirkus

      January 1, 2017
      Some fresh twists on a familiar theme: the dumbing down of America amid the defiant distrust of expertise.As a veteran governmental adviser and think-tank participant, Nichols (National Security Affairs/U.S. Naval War Coll.; No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security, 2013, etc.) has experienced firsthand the decline of respect accorded specialists in many disciplines, as the internet has leveled the playing field to the point where all opinions are more or less considered equal, and a Google search substitutes for decades of research. "These are dangerous times," he writes. "Never have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and yet been so resistant to learning anything," However, the author sounds less like an alarmist than like a genial guide through the wilderness of ignorance. There are no startling revelations. Media in general and social media in particular tend to function as echo chambers, reinforcing biases. Some of those whose conclusions are the shakiest tend to shout the loudest, basing their arguments on spurious evidence. Credentials are suspect in an age when university degrees are everywhere, grade inflation runs rampant, and colleges woo prospective students as customers and clients. Little wonder, then, that "if in a previous era too much deference was paid to experts, today there is little deference paid to anyone at all." Students challenge teachers, patients challenge doctors, and so-called experts argue with other so-called experts (often in territory beyond the expertise of either). "People who claim they are 'experts' are sometimes only about as self-aware as people who think they're good kissers," he writes. Not that Nichols lets the experts off the hook--some hide behind the impenetrability of academic jargon; others have even faked the data or cooked the books. The answer to this pervasive problem lies in greater media literary and in citizens having a better idea as to what they can trust from whom. A sharp analysis of an increasingly pressing problem, but Nichols falls short of proposing a satisfying solution.

      COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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