Death Of Expertise

Book by Tom Nichols: The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters ISBN:978-0190469412

Feb17'2017: What does “The Death of Expertise” mean for fact-checkers?

Tom Nichols is professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an (unashamed) expert. In his new book, “The Death of Expertise,” he argues that low levels of foundational knowledge have mixed with an epidemic of narcissism to make Americans resentful of expertise. Systemic changes in the way colleges and media outlets operate have compounded the problem.

One of the problems here is that expertise itself has become something a pejorative, when in fact we used to call it the division of labor. Advanced societies rely on — and thrive on — a division of labor.

people don’t like to use the term expert because it is an exclusive term.

It is tribalism wedded to a really sullen narcissism.

What will likely shake people out of this is something extremely negative: a war, an economic crash, a pandemic.

This, by the way, is a malady of affluence. People have the time and leisure and the multiple sources of information to pick and choose from to argue against experts

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

Fake News is propaganda made out of whole cloth. A lie that is known to be a lie, that is constructed as a lie. It’s not bias.

I’m going to put a stake in the ground and say that too much information is a bad thing. I liken it to junk food.

There may be a Whole Foods in every town but there are also a hundred fast food outlets. When presented with lots of choices, people choose what is shiny and fun. I mention in the book that there is a form of intellectual Gresham’s law, where bad information drives out the good.

people were better informed before cable news.

People have also become addicted to this constant flow of news because it feeds their notion of being important, it feeds into their narcissistic streak.

The media is definitely prone to groupthink about politics and does have a tendency to use fact-checking as a political weapon sometimes.

But fact-checking is also, let me make sure to add, indispensable.

I don’t know how fact-checkers compete with talk radio and cable news. You can fact-check all day long, but if people aren’t listening, what’s the point?

Snopes should get out of the political fact-checking business. There needs to be a better division of labor among fact-checkers