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.

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

“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.

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.