Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
    The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
    The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
    Audiobook8 hours

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

    Written by Tom Nichols

    Narrated by Sean Pratt

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 23, 2017
    ISBN9781541474956
    The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

    More audiobooks from Tom Nichols

    Related to The Death of Expertise

    Related audiobooks

    Technology & Engineering For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Death of Expertise

    4/5

    239 ratings22 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be well written, easy to read, and thought-provoking. It offers a breakdown of current political and social struggles and raises important questions. The book is a clarion call to use our knowledge as citizens and provides insights into the flaws of the university education system. While some may find it pretentious, overall it is a fantastic work that will leave readers nodding in agreement.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Tom Nichols is an incredible thought provocateur and backs his insights. When he is unable he says so. Check out his other material.
    • 4/5
      Extremely accurate and thought provoking book they raises some questions that need to be answered.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic work. A clarion call to a good use of our knowledge as citizens in the USA.
    • 5/5
      Very actual also for Italy
    • 5/5
      Well written and easy to read. Definitely a must read. One of the best break downs of current political and social struggles.
    • 5/5
      I found this book to be exceptionally thought-provoking and quite an indictment of our current university education system in particular. The book will have you shaking your head yes, yes many times!!
    • 2/5
      At one point the author references the article that 'inspired' the book, and it all made sense. This was probably a fascinating article but it felt unnecessarily bloated as a book. The book spends a lot of time decrying the lack of respect for experts but not a lot of time looking critically at why its happening now or engaging with why people, of all classes and party affiliations may be skeptical of experts. I am sympathetic to his argument that expertise is real and deserves respect, but if I wasn't I doubt this book would have convinced me.
    • 1/5
      Wow, what pretentious drivel. Eight hours of Rodney Dangerfield impersonations: "I get no respect!"

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Democratic societies work by having responsible, informed citizens choosing political representatives whom we trust to take complicated decisions on our behalf. Those representatives take their decisions based on the best advice they can assemble from competent professional advisers — analysts, administrators, technicians — who are experts in the topic in question. At least that’s the theory…

      According to Nichols (who is a self-confessed foreign-policy expert as well as being a celebrated Jeopardy contestant), this model is breaking down in the USA because of a growing distrust of specialist professional knowledge. Lay-people have an exaggerated sense of our own expertise (we can Google it, after all, so we know as much as they do, don’t we?) and a tendency to resent anyone who tells us that they know better. We’re all too ready to suspect conspiracies and ulterior motives, we like to think that our opinion is (at least) as valuable as the next person’s, and we rarely bother to read anything written by people with a different point of view from our own. Nichols talks a lot about stupid, wilfully ignorant people, but he also makes the point — which I found rather more interesting — that this kind of thinking is also prevalent among people who are educated, experienced professionals in one field but dangerously willing to assume knowledge in other fields where they have no proper training and experience.

      Nichols reminds us that expertise is gained through an education that challenges us to step outside our comfort zone and defend our ideas in serious logical argument, and through a long process of gaining practical experience and making mistakes. Things which he argues are no longer easily available to most Americans, because of the way the education system has turned into a commercial service-industry where the customer is always right.

      There’s probably nothing new about any of these effects — I can remember a fellow-delegate at an important scientific conference forty years ago lecturing me over lunch about what he saw as the strong evidence for biblical-style creation. But they seem to have been accelerated by the effect of the internet, which allows stupid ideas and misinformation to spread around the world faster than ever before, and by developments in the way that news media work, serving us with the news they know their customers want to read, rather than the news they think it’s important for informed citizens to be aware of.

      Obviously a lot of what Nichols says can be dismissed as the gloom-and-doom of an older, conservative academic, who sees the world changing around him, or as the reaction of a mainstream Republican to the rise of Trumpery. I’ve been reading British versions of the same kind of thinking since the Brexit referendum (apart from the fact that British commentators have the additional advantage of being able to blame America, which always goes down well…). I found a lot of what Nichols said quite patronising — for example, he is dismissive of the independence of mind of the current generation of students in the US, an assumption that is belied by the current protests against the Israeli actions in Gaza; and he implies that only stupid people could possibly vote for Trump, which clearly can’t be true: in real life a large proportion of the people who voted for him must have been decent, intelligent people who somehow allowed themselves to be convinced that the alternative was worse. But he does make some good points, although he unfortunately doesn’t come up with a solution to the problem…
    • 5/5
      Excellent book but one that came out very very late. Same as with Jill Japore's book on mind-messing spin-based companies this one came too late, at least for public to read. Experts knew about this but let it roll and that brings us to our current times.

      Book covers everything - failures in the society from general feeling-first approach to things (reason, dont need it because you need to be passionate about.... who cares, just deny everything else that you do not agree with), failure of education, mass media and web that became full circus that cannot be trusted at all any more (because everybody needs to be an activist - again that feeling-first approach) and utter breakage of society which does not know where the head or tail is, and of course does not know what equality and democracy are (last part of the book was especially on the point).

      One of the main failures of expertise is that experts decided to treat their fellow countryman/layman as children (which is something that mentioned countryman/layman so want to be - which is something that is completely mind numbing to me). As a result just look at last year - nobody from power even thinks twice about what they are saying to the people (WE will tell you what to do! YOU are guilty for all of this! Declamations and rhetoric that would make Stalin blush, not to mention [again] activism because hey these are our guys! Yeeee!), they do not think about when message is supposed to go out to public and when there is need to wait a bit (again, last year, all those MDs and experts - saying contradictory things every 2 weeks) and are more than ready to gas-light people for the sake of it (do-this-and-you-will-be safe followed by "even if you do this it will be years (years people) before we even go back if we ever do") to the now raising cults of personalities that puts North Korea to shame (populists unite).

      Providing drama to the populace that craves it (which is something that is sickening in itself) is one of the greatest sins of experts.

      It seems that people chose hippie/age-of-aquarius as a way of living loooong time ago. Fortunately reason and critical thinking that built up in last 300 years (lets just take most recent developments in sciences - technical, math and sociology - in general this was accumulation of thousands of years) took like 60 years to decompose in the currently existing mush. That is quite a result if you ask me, sense and sanity endured for a looong time. But I guess when you enter the period where adults want to be kids and behave like spoiled children in toy store, reason plays no role.

      And then power grab happens - technocrats took the opportunity and oh boy what additional mess they made (because, again, everybody needs to be an activist for a cause (whatever this might be), you need to be passionate (one of the most poisonous words today)).

      Good thing these periods will pass and humanity will come back to its senses. Hopefully not like in beginning of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey.

      Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Tom Nichols was a working academic who taught international relations (and military history). He was affiliated with the American Republican party. His 2017 book, The Death of Expertise expands from his article in 2014 in the modern conservative online journal The Federalist.
      The book present a short, well-organized and articulate argument about the effects of the internet, social media and modern ideas about equality on the acquisition of knowledge. The author asserts that people who have earned advanced university degrees who are employed as university-level teachers have earned more respect that they get in debates in American institutions.
      The author does not explain the methods and the consensus of the political science of international relations, or explain how international relations or other humanities and social sciences can be compared with disciplines that are grounded in the physical facts of the real world.
    • 4/5
      This is an important and worthwhile book about the decline in knowledge of much of the American populace, along with the accompanying decline in literacy and civic awareness, and the increase in wilful ignorance and its glorification. Taken together, all of these have led to the disconnect between much of the populace and the experts in many fields upon which our democratic republic depends. The value and necessity of experts is discussed and dissected, IMHO, very well.
    • 4/5
      An important read that is also terrifying in many ways for the future of our republic and our children.
    • 5/5
      Tom Nichols’ Death of Expertise reminds us of a time when we took expert opinion seriously. Not that we followed blindly because the expert had a PhD, but because we were more thoughtful. We realized a PhD and twenty years’ experience in a scientific field probably indicates greater knowledge in that field than I possess from my Google searches. That has changed. More and more people, apparently almost everyone, deems their Google-search education equal to or greater than the expert’s knowledge.

      Nichols observes, “the Internet has politically and intellectually mired millions of Americans in their own biases. Social media outlets such as Facebook amplify this echo chamber.” Even if we don’t intentionally block what we disagree with, Facebook feeds us what we “like” as part of its service. By replacing social life with social media, we reduce or remove exposure to differing views.

      Another “knowledge crisis” that Nichols addresses is the collapse of standards and discipline at American universities. The twofold issues are
      1. grade inflation
      2. reduced requirements

      These two facts of the decline of college education in America are conclusively proven in several studies beyond Tom Nichols’ book. But Nichols, himself a professor, gets to the heart of it, and obviously has firsthand knowledge of the decline.

      As Nichols observes, “Less is demanded of students now than even a few decades ago. There is less homework, shorter trimester and quarter systems, and technological innovations that make going to college more fun but less rigorous. When college is a business, you can’t flunk the customers.”

      Nichols noted, “In the worst cases, degrees affirm neither education nor training, but attendance. At the barest minimum, they certify only the timely payment of tuition,” and adds that “students now graduate believing they know a lot more than they actually do,” while “Intellectual discipline and maturation have fallen by the wayside.”

      Nichols points out the disservice to students: “Colleges and universities also mislead their students about their own competence through grade inflation. Collapsing standards so that schoolwork doesn’t interfere with the fun of going to college is one way to ensure a happy student body and relieve the faculty of the pressure of actually failing anyone.”

      He warns, “the protective, swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students and thus dissolves their ability to conduct a logical and informed argument. When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.”

      This is a powerful book and a beautifully written story of a terrible trend that is deteriorating and degrading public discourse in our society. It’s a great read, as well as an important message.
    • 5/5
      This book is very relevant in the age of Donald Trump.
    • 5/5
      The Death of Expertise is the best curmudgeonly, "get off my lawn" argument for returning to better norms I've ever read. The author makes his case as reasoned and articulate as possible but you can practically hear the resignation in his voice because it's as if he knows he's trying to stem an unstoppable tide.

      There's plenty of understated humor in the book which helps to offset its pervasive pessimism. Take this quote for example, "Imagine what the 1920s would've sounded like if every crank in every small town had his own radio station. Maybe it's not that people are any dumber or any less willing to listen to experts than they were 100 years ago, it's just that we can hear them all now."

      I think the death of expertise partially stems from timing. Given the rise of globalism and interconnectedness of the past half century, it's not that experts are calling it wrong more but rather their occasional stumbles are now affecting more people. And those same people, a much larger good than before, will only see the stumbles and not the greater number of correct actions. It's human nature, really, but this time there's weight in numbers to swing the pendulum further the other way.
    • 3/5
      The author observes that "The foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of "uninformed," passed "misinformed" on the way down, and is now plummeting to "aggressively wrong." Interestingly, the American penchant to disregard expertise is baked into our national psychology. Alexis de Tocqueville noted the same tendency in 1835, and with the rise of the Internet, with which everyone can give the air of authority to ignorant viewpoints, has only made it worse. Ignorance, Nichols notes, has become "hip."

      This is the inevitable result of a stew of influences: the belief that democracy means that one opinion, based on nothing but preconceived and unreflective assumptions, is as good as the conclusion from someone who has spent years studying the question; the tendency of education today to cater to adolescent narcissism that takes "correction as an insult", paired with a reliance on student evaluations to reward teachers.

      I didn't agree with every part of his argument: He is too dismissive of students who "explode over imagined slights." Since he is never likely to have been the target of such rhetoric, his tolerance of "pranks" is probably higher than the minorities having their right to exist questioned and challenged. But he does write for the Federalist (a low quality internet tabloid), so perhaps this is to have been expected. In a sense, he is at times his own best evidence for the hard-headed insistence on adhering to bad ideas merely because, as he says, they agree with his values, and everyone will ignore evidence if it allows them to retain their presumptions.

      For that reason, while the individual pieces of his argument are worth considering, they do not necessarily result in the world the author personally advocates. As we've seen in the Trump world, facts are irrelevant in pursuing the political ends advocated by the Federalist. It's just odd to see someone committed to the very kind of anti-intellectualism advanced by his publisher also writing a book to criticize it in other people.
    • 3/5
      I'd heard about this book on tv and, of course, the idea is pertinent to politics today especially in the US and the UK. It has some great quotes, but was quite a disappointment in that Nichols seems to denigrate everyone. He emphasizes that this is a republic meaning that we elect people who then make governmental decisions for us. And of course, he emphasizes the need to have expert information before making those decisions. Then it seems to me he says, while it is imperative that citizens stay informed from a variety of truthful resources, lay people shouldn't be expressing their opinions. Opinions should be expressed by experts who have advanced degrees in those specific topics, and their degrees should have come from "good," i.e. Ivy League universities. He decries the term "elitist" then he proceeds to be just that. Oh, and another thing he denigrates are the 24 hour news sites. He gives an example of news as entertainment citing the Clarence Thomas hearing that garnered an audience only because of its salacious content. He seems to have no faith that people, in general, can or will seek accurate information when it is available.
    • 5/5
      I believe that we live in a "dumbed down" country. So Nichols's book just reinforces my current thinking. Politicians, business executives and just about every facet of our culture are steeped in ignorance, exaggerations, spins and lies. There was a period of time were most people would be shocked by lies or exaggerations spouted publicly. Not anymore! If one reads the comments sections from news blogs or social media sites, one questions the rationality of many of the writers. It seems that many Americans have lost the ability to filter truth from bull shit. There are some good insights in this book – – not sure people will find them surprising--- definitely worth a read.

      Listed below are some insights from the book that attracted my attention:

      "Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self evident, we hold all truths to be self evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every
      opinion on any subject is as good as any other."

      "Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge."

      "The most important of these intellectual capabilities, and the one most under attack in American universities, is critical thinking: the ability to examine new information and competing ideas dispassionately, logically, and without emotional or personal preconceptions."
    • 5/5
      Let me start by saying "I'm never going to search online seeking health advice; I'll take a doctor's advice instead." We have to limit our internet usage and devote more time reading books written by experts because, by and large, it takes lot more authority to write a book than a blog.

      The book talks about the repercussions of layman's rejection of an expert's comment. This ignorance seems to have cost us quite a lot. The last couple of chapters help us turn things around, to some degree at least.

      I agree with some points the author talks about our education system - how it has become business and as such a student is a customer - always right. This has invariably led to students thinking that they're right just about everything - a scary thought obviously.
    • 2/5
      This expert gets no respect. This is why.

      Tom Nichols is very upset with the level of discourse. Everyone knows his field better than he does, and everyone seems to be more expert in everything than the actual experts are. The internet is wealth of wrong. Schools don’t teach learning – they have become customer service centers for their clients - the students. There is nowhere to hide from brute ignorance. And it continues to worsen. In his The Death Of Expertise, experts like Nichols can’t have a decent conversation with anyone any more.

      He begins rationally enough pointing that Americans are unparalleled in their own universal expertise. “Each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding, ” Alexis de Tocqueville found. In 1835. More recently, the OECD has been testing students in nearly two dozen of the wealthiest countries. American students fare quite poorly, though they do come in first in one category: self-esteem. Nichols also cites the Dunning-Kruger Effect – the dumber you are the more confident you are to show you are not dumb.

      By chapter three – Education – the gloves really come off, as higher education has become a customer service function by teachers. Students choose universities for their facilities, not their specialties, and far too many kids who never should have entered at all, are there for 4-7 years. The administration will back the students over the faculty every time. It is also that degrees have suffered from inflation. A Masters is now the equivalent of a prewar high school graduation – the barest minimum to get ahead. Everyone in university is above average; most grades have an A in them. This is by far the best chapter, if only because it’s where Nichols works and he knows it all so well. The next chapters get increasingly bizarre until they become annoying.

      Nichols goes too far, way too far. He slams Noam Chomsky because he is an expert in linguistics – his day job. He has no business writing (dozens of important) books on politics and history. His 70 years analyzing society apparently have amounted to his remaining a rank amateur, not worth reading, let alone debating. That is too much. It seems one is entitled to only one expertise, one that is certified and paid for by some third party employer. The elitism and the snobbishness of Tom Nichols are all too much.

      He refers to everyone else as the laypeople, and repeats endlessly his mantra that the laypeople need to listen to the experts and the elite – and not argue with them. And this despite a late chapter where he catalogues how experts are so often wrong. His 30 page conclusion is jampacked with laypeople forget and laypeople don’t know and laypeople complain and laypeople have no idea. He bashes Donald Trump, of course, in terms that reveal the whole reason Trump was elected was because of Tom Nichols. I read another book like this 23 years ago, called In Defense of Elitism. Perhaps if Nichols had read it he might not have written this. But according to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, there was no hope of that.

      David Wineberg
    • 4/5
      As Nichols would be quick to point out, I was likely to enjoy this book about “the death of expertise” (more accurately, “the death of the acknowledgment of and respect for expertise”) due to the fact that it fits with my existing beliefs. Tom Nichols' book, based on his astonishingly prescient 2014 article in “The Federalist,” is a jeremiad on the loss of respect for the opinions of experts and for facts themselves. He discusses at length the issues of confirmation bias, anti-intellectualism, prioritization of feelings over facts at universities, the internet's creation of “instant experts,” the explosion of talk radio and cable news and growth of splinter “news” sources such as Alex Jones's “Infowars” to satisfy Americans' appetite for fantasy masquerading as fact, etc. He decries the tendency for the poorly informed to insist that their opinions, on everything from American foreign policy to childhood vaccinations, are as equally deserving of respect as those of experts in the various fields, and harkens back to a simpler time when “ordinary” citizens knew their place and listened respectfully to the wisdom of the well-credentialed. As you might expect, this aspect is where his book can become rather grating. He is quick to admit that “experts” do sometimes err, and points out that citizens have a duty to inform themselves (as best their often feeble abilities will allow), but reminds readers that experts' opinions are far more likely to be correct than those of the less well-trained. And he's right, but that doesn't save his repeated complaints about the failure of ordinary folks to respect experts from becoming irritating. To a large extent I think this is a function of a short magazine article being stretched into a full-length book when what it would have been better served by expansion into a long magazine piece. Despite its repetitiveness, his criticisms of a culture in which the belligerently ignorant insist that their views be treated as just as valid as those of the well-informed who base their ideas on actual facts are indisputable and timely. Three and a half stars.