The death of expertise
A cult of anti-expertise sentiment has coincided with anti-intellectualism, resulting in massively viral yet poorly informed debates ranging from the anti-vaccination movement to attacks on GMOs. As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, there are a number of reasons why this has occurred-ranging from easy access to Internet search engines to a customer satisfaction model within higher education. "Thanks to technological advances and increasing levels of education, we have access to more information than ever before. Yet rather than ushering in a new era of enlightenment, the information age has helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitananism 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. As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, 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.
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9recommend
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2015–2026years
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What Hacker News says
- >Um, why would you do that instead of waiting for someone more knowledgable to reply, and learn from? Replies are not mandatory, and experts/insiders participating is one of the best parts of the human Internet. Let them shine.
As Isaac Asimov pointed out[0]:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
This thread runs through many cultures and isn't just a problem on the Internet, although the Internet certainly has accelerated/worsened the problem. And it has created a distrust of experts which (as has been obvious for a long time) has made us, as a whole, dumber and less informed.
I recommend The Death of Expertise[1] by Tom Nichols for a sane and reasonable treatment of this issue. If books aren't your thing, Nichols did a book talk[2] which lays out the main points he makes in the book. During that talk, he also gives the best definition of disinformation I've heard yet.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84250-anti-intellectualism-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
[2] https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/the-death-of-expertis...
- You might want to check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
https://www.c-span.org/video/?426290-1/tom-nichols-discusses...
Unrelated, but the second link also provides the best definition of fake news I've ever heard.
- TFA quotes Lao Tzu:
I'd add the wisdom of Bokonon[0] to that sentiment:"The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool doesn’t know he doesn’t know."
I'd point out that "Hacker News Disease" as defined by the author is most certainly not limited to, nor did it begin with, tech discussion sites like HN."Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way. "It's becoming more widespread and the author wants to paint this as essentially the arrogance of the tech elites.
But that doesn't comport with all non-tech, non-elites who also engage in this sort of thing.
In fact, it's pretty much the same thing discussed by Tom Nichols in his 2017 book[1], The Death of Expertise. I recommend it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
Edit: Removed extraneous article.
- You are the perfect audience for The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols. He covers all of this.
- > Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell?
Good book by Tom Nichols:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
Not anything recent:
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
* “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, January 21, 1980, p. 19.
* PDF: https://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_...
'Special' thinking has been part of the American DNA since the beginning (Jamestown, Puritans/Pilgrims):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...
- If you're interested in a decent analysis of this phenomenon in modern societies, I can recommend a recent book "The Death of Expertise" by Tom Nichols. The author also explores some ideas for how to counter this trend.
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