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… ( )

There are some gems in here, but the author commits the same errors in reasoning that he so vilifies in others. The chapter on higher ed demonstrates this well. I think this book will appeal the most to those who already agree with his opinions (I am referring to many, but not all, of his ideas as such because he is actually not an expert on many of the topics he writes about in this book). Oh, the irony. ( )

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. ( )

Tom Nichols was a working academic and 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 an 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.
His criticism of the Internet and internet projects like Wikipedia is not argued in detail. He relies on the meritocratic assumtion that a crowd of recognized experts has more knowlege than a random crowd of Americans, and it more likely to have a more accurate understanding of how the world works.
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 or should be "respected" by less educated citizens. ( )

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. ( )