The Death of Expertise

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance. It’s not just that people don’t know a lot about science or politics or geography; they don’t, but that’s an old problem.
• 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.
• All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.
• Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.
• 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.”
• Over time, I found that other specialists in various policy areas had the same experiences, with laypeople subjecting them to ill-informed disquisitions on taxes, budgets, immigration, the environment, and many other subjects. If you’re a policy expert, it goes with the job.
  • Connect to “I need someone to teach me about this” from the West Wing
• Instead of arguing, experts today are supposed to accept such disagreements as, at worst, an honest difference of opinion. We are supposed to “agree to disagree,” a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we’re just being jerks, apparently.
• There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has 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.” Isaac Asimov
• Put another way, people who thought Ukraine was located in Latin America or Australia were the most enthusiastic about the use of US military force.
• These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.
• 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 growth of this kind of stubborn ignorance in the midst of the Information Age cannot be explained away as merely the result of rank ignorance. Many of the people who campaign against established knowledge are otherwise adept and successful in their daily lives. In some ways, it is all worse than ignorance: it is unfounded arrogance, the outrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture that cannot endure even the slightest hint of inequality of any kind.
• The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.
• Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.
• And yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.
• And some of us, as indelicate as it might be to say it, are not intelligent enough to know when we’re wrong, no matter how good our intentions.
• When students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge; worse, they do not develop the habits of critical thinking that would allow them to continue to learn and to evaluate the kinds of complex issues on which they will have to deliberate and vote as citizens.
  • Connect to quote in Poor Charlie’s almanack about increasing their confidence while not increasing their performance
• Not only is the Internet making many of us dumber, it’s making us meaner: alone behind their keyboards, people argue rather than discuss, and insult rather than listen.
• Professional journalists, however, face new challenges in the Information Age. Not only is there, by comparison even to a half century ago, almost unlimited airtime and pages for news, but consumers expect all of that space to fill instantaneously and be updated continuously.
  • #Journalism
• Where public intellectuals (often in tandem with journalists) once strove to make important issues understandable to laypeople, educated elites now increasingly speak only to each other. Citizens, to be sure, reinforce this reticence by arguing rather than questioning—an important difference—but that does not relieve experts of their duty to serve society and to think of their fellow citizens as their clients rather than as annoyances.
• No matter what our aspirations, we are bound by the reality of time and the undeniable limits of our talent. We prosper because we specialize, and because we develop both formal and informal mechanisms and practices that allow us to trust each other in those specializations.
  • #[[Decentralized Brain]] - connect to the story with Pat Grady and the Latticework of memory. Also connect to Zach’s “Theory of Masters”
• Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer who noted in 1835 that the denizens of the new United States were not exactly enamored of experts or their smarts. “In most of the operations of the mind,” he wrote, “each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding.”
• In more modern times, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in 1930 decried the “revolt of the masses” and the unfounded intellectual arrogance that characterized it: Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified. I may be mistaken, but the present-day writer, when he takes his pen in hand to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never concerned himself with this subject, if he reads does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader carries in his head.
  • #[[Voice of the People]] - https://twitter.com/kwharrison13/status/1355568518679261188?s=21
• Hofstadter warned. “Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.”
• Somin wrote in 2015 that the “size and complexity of government” have made it “more difficult for voters with limited knowledge to monitor and evaluate the government’s many activities. The result is a polity in which the people often cannot exercise their sovereignty responsibly and effectively.”
  • Connect to the story Camden told me about Adam Grant on armchair expert and imposter syndrome. Why do we expect our politicians to have the answers to everything rather than being really good learners who we trust to do the work and figure things out? Connect to West Wing Clio about Mad Cow Disease
• While these mothers and fathers are not doctors, they are educated just enough to believe they have the background to challenge established medical science.
  • Connect to increasing your confidence without increasing your accuracy
• Political debate and the making of public policy are not science. They are rooted in conflict, sometimes conducted as respectful disagreement but more often as a hockey game with no referees and a standing invitation for spectators to rush onto the ice. In modern America, policy debates sound increasingly like fights between groups of ill-informed people who all manage to be wrong at the same time. Those political leaders who manage to be smarter than the public (and there seem to be fewer of those lately) wade into these donnybrooks and contradict their constituents at their own peril.
  • #Compromise
• Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult. And to refuse to acknowledge all views as worthy of consideration, no matter how fantastic or inane they are, is to be closed-minded.
• Legislation is complicated, and it is perhaps unreasonable to ask Americans to grasp the details of a bill their own representatives seemed unable to understand. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wilting under a barrage of perfectly reasonable questions in 2011, clearly didn’t know what was in the ACA either, and she blurted out her widely quoted admission that the Congress would have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.
• People who claim to be experts are sometimes only about as self-aware as people who think they’re good kissers.
• One reason claims of expertise grate on people in a democracy is that specialization is necessarily exclusive.
• These people may have cleared the wickets of entry to a profession, but they’re not very good at it, and their expertise will likely never exceed the natural limitation of their own abilities.
  • “Whatever you are, be a good one.”
• Every field has its trials by fire, and not everyone survives them, which is why experience and longevity in a particular area or profession are reasonable markers of expertise.
  • This is an important part of why we have to allow for failure. Teacher tenure or other systems for keeping people in jobs regardless of how good they are seems damaging.
• Another mark of true experts is their acceptance of evaluation and correction by other experts.
  • #[[Spirit of Humility]]
• Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.
• He had no such background, he admitted, and then said, “But after all, you can become an expert reading a book a month, right?” Wrong.
• Years of better education, increased access to data, the explosion of social media, and lowered barriers to entry into the public arena were supposed to improve our abilities to deliberate and decide. Instead, these advances seem to have made all of this worse rather than better.
• the people who are the most certain about being right tend to be the people with the least reason to have such self-confidence.
• No amount of education can teach someone the name of their member of Congress if they don’t care in the first place.
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.
• As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong.
• We are gripped by irrational fear rather than irrational optimism because confirmation bias is, in a way, a kind of survival mechanism. Good things come and go, but dying is forever.
• Unlike superstitions, which are simple, conspiracy theories are horrendously complicated.
• After all, what better sign of a really effective conspiracy is there than a complete lack of any trace that the conspiracy exists? Facts, the absence of facts, contradictory facts: everything is proof. Nothing can ever challenge the underlying belief.
• When two people were involved in repeated discussions and decision making—and establishing a bond between the participants was a key part of the study—researchers found that the less capable people advocated for their views more than might have been expected, and that the more competent member of the conversation deferred to those points of view even when they were demonstrably wrong.
• In a similar vein, few of us want to admit to being lost in a conversation, especially when so much information is now so easily accessible. Social pressure has always tempted even intelligent, well-informed people to pretend to know more than they do, but this impulse is magnified in the Information Age.
• Karl Taro Greenfeld, a novelist and writer, described this kind of anxiety in a meditation on why people attempt to “fake cultural literacy.” What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette, a cocktail party, so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened. What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists—and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.
  • The knowledge we have lost in information. - More important to be a deep expert than a shallow generalist. We can trust other people to know what they’re doing with other facets of life.
• Political beliefs among both laypeople and experts work in much the same way as confirmation bias. The difference is that beliefs about politics and other subjective matters are harder to shake, because our political views are deeply rooted in our self-image and our most cherished beliefs about who we are as people.
  • Connect to righteous mind
• Laypeople want a definitive answer from the experts, but none can be had because there is not one answer but many, depending on circumstances.
• The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt summed it up neatly when he observed that when facts conflict with our values, “almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.”
• A 2015 study, for example, tested the reactions of both liberals and conservatives to certain kinds of news stories, and it found that “just as conservatives discount the scientific theories that run counter to their worldview, liberals will do exactly the same.”16
• Those persons whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens. Thomas Jefferson
• College is no longer a time devoted to learning and personal maturation; instead, the stampede of young Americans into college and the consequent competition for their tuition dollars have produced a consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right.
  • #[[Spirit of Humility]]
• 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.
• Schools and colleges cause this degree inflation the same way governments cause monetary inflation: by printing more paper.
• College is supposed to be an uncomfortable experience. It is where a person leaves behind the rote learning of childhood and accepts the anxiety, discomfort, and challenge of complexity that leads to the acquisition of deeper knowledge—hopefully, for a lifetime.
• As Robert Hughes wrote in 1995, America is a culture in which “children are coddled not to think they’re dumb.”
• College students may not be dumber than they were thirty years ago, but their sense of entitlement and their unfounded self-confidence have grown considerably.
• The campus visit is a good example of the shopping ritual that teaches children to choose colleges for any number of reasons besides an education. Each spring and summer, the highways fill with children and their parents on road trips to visit schools not to which the young clients have been accepted, but to which they are considering applying. These are not just rich kids touring the Ivy League; friends with teenage children regularly tell me about hitting the road to visit small colleges and state schools I’ve never even heard of. Every year, these parents ask me for my advice, and every year, I tell them it’s a bad idea. Every year, they thank me for my input and do it anyway. By the end of the process, the entire family is cranky and exhausted, and the question of what the schools actually teach seems almost an afterthought.
• A group of Yale students in 2016, for example, demanded that the English department abolish its Major English Poets course because it was too larded with white European males: “We have spoken,” they said in a petition. “We are speaking. Pay attention.”
• The renowned astrophysicist Robert Jastrow gave a lecture on President Ronald Reagan’s plan to develop space-based missile defenses, which he strongly supported. An undergraduate challenged Jastrow during the question-and-answer period, and by all accounts Jastrow was patient but held to his belief that such a program was possible and necessary. The student, realizing that a scientist at a major university was not going to change his mind after a few minutes of arguing with a sophomore, finally shrugged and gave up. “Well,” the student said, “your guess is as good as mine.” Jastrow stopped the young man short. “No, no, no,” he said emphatically. “My guesses are much, much better than yours.”
  • Connect to Ricky Gervais video about opinions vs facts
• respecting a person’s opinion does not mean granting equal respect to that person’s knowledge.
• Unearned praise and hollow successes build a fragile arrogance in students that can lead them to lash out at the first teacher or employer who dispels that illusion, a habit that proves hard to break in adulthood.
• The solution to this reversal of roles in the classroom is for teachers to reassert their authority. To do so, however, would first require overturning the entire notion of education as client service. Tuition-conscious administrators would hardly welcome such a counterrevolution in the classroom, but in any case, it would likely be deeply unpopular with the clients.
• Father James Schall at Georgetown University would shock his political philosophy students at the very first class meeting by handing out an essay he’d written called “What a Student Owes His Teacher.”
• One can only imagine the howls of outrage it would provoke now on most campuses to tell students they need to work harder, have more perspective about their own talents, and trust their teachers.
  • Teaching, No Greater Responsibility
• As the social psychologist David Dunning has noted, “The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance—as an absence of knowledge—leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education, even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence.”
  • Increasing your confidence without increasing your performance
• There is no way around the reality that students are too often wasting their money and obtaining the illusion of an education by gravitating toward courses or majors that either shouldn’t exist or whose enrollments should be restricted to the small number of students who intend to pursue them seriously and with rigor.
• But students who choose majors with little thought about where their school stands, what academic resources it can offer in that program, or where it places graduates from those programs will risk leaving campus (whenever they finally finish) with less knowledge than they’ve been led to believe, a problem at the core of a lot of needless arguments with people who are deeply mistaken about the quality of their own education.
  • #[[Getting a Job]]
• A lousy student who attended a good school is still a lousy student; a diligent student from a small institution is no less intelligent for the lack of a famous pedigree. The fact remains, however, that taking a course at a regional college with an overworked adjunct is usually a lot different than studying at a top university with an accomplished scholar. It might be true, but saying so immediately generates huffy cries of snobbery, and everyone walks away angry.
• Professors marvel at the way students now shamelessly demand to be given good grades, regardless of their work ethic, but that’s exactly what you would expect if the student views themselves as a consumer, and the product as a credential, rather than an education.
• When college is a business, you can’t flunk the customers.
• Forty-five percent of students reported that in the prior semester they did not have a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing over the entire semester; 32 percent did not have even one class that assigned more than forty pages of reading per week. Unsurprisingly, many college students today decide to invest time in other activities in college.
• The two most important facts about grade inflation, however, are that it exists and that it suffuses students with unwarranted confidence in their abilities.
  • Make a section in the summary about increasing confidence without increasing performance
• In the midst of it all, the students are learning that emotion and volume can always defeat reason and substance, thus building about themselves fortresses that no future teacher, expert, or intellectual will ever be able to breach.
• Meanwhile, a libertarian columnist and University of Tennessee law professor, Glenn Reynolds, suggested a more dramatic solution. To be a voter, one must be able to participate in adult political discussions. It’s necessary to be able to listen to opposing arguments and even—as I’m doing right here in this column—to change your mind in response to new evidence. So maybe we should raise the voting age to 25, an age at which, one fervently hopes, some degree of maturity will have set in. It’s bad enough to have to treat college students like children. But it’s intolerable to be governed by spoiled children. People who can’t discuss Halloween costumes rationally don’t deserve to play a role in running a great nation.
• I hold my students to clear standards. I expect them to learn how to formulate their views and to argue them, calmly and logically. I grade them on their responses to the questions I ask on their exams and on the quality of their written work, not on their political views. I demand that they treat other students with respect and that they engage the ideas and beliefs of others in the classroom without emotionalism or personal attacks.
• Although the Internet could be making all of us smarter, it makes many of us stupider, because it’s not just a magnet for the curious. It’s a sinkhole for the gullible. It renders everyone an instant expert. You have a degree? Well, I did a Google search! Frank Bruni
• The deeply entrenched and usually immutable views of Internet users are the foundation of Pommer’s Law, in which the Internet can only change a person’s mind from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.
• Sturgeon’s Law, named for the legendary science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. In the early 1950s, highbrow critics derided the quality of popular literature, particularly American science fiction. They considered sci-fi and fantasy writing a literary ghetto, and almost all of it, they sniffed, was worthless. Sturgeon angrily responded by noting that the critics were setting too high a bar. Most products in most fields, he argued, are of low quality, including what was then considered serious writing. “Ninety percent of everything,” Sturgeon decreed, “is crap.”
• Some of the smartest people on earth have a significant presence on the Internet. Some of the stupidest people on the same planet, however, reside just one click away on the next page or hyperlink.
• The Internet is without doubt a great achievement that continues to change our lives for the better by allowing more people more access to information—and to each other—than ever before in history. But it also has a dark side that is exerting important and deeply negative effects on the ways people gain knowledge and respond to expertise.
• In addition to enabling torrents of misinformation, the Internet is weakening the ability of laypeople and scholars alike to do basic research, a skill that would help everyone to navigate this wilderness of bad data.
• Actual research is hard, and for people raised in an environment of constant electronic stimulation, it’s also boring. Research requires the ability to find authentic information, summarize it, analyze it, write it up, and present it to other people. It is not just the province of scientists and scholars, but a basic set of skills a high school education should teach every graduate because of its importance in any number of jobs and careers.
• The deeper issue here is that the Internet is actually changing the way we read, the way we reason, even the way we think, and all for the worse.
• People do not do “research” so much as they “search for pretty pages online to provide answers they like with the least amount of effort and in the shortest time.”
• the Internet is making us meaner, shorter-fused, and incapable of conducting discussions where anyone learns anything.
• Sometimes, human beings need to pause and to reflect, to give themselves time to absorb information and to digest it. Instead, the Internet is an arena in which people can react without thinking, and thus in turn they become invested in defending their gut reactions rather than accepting new information or admitting a mistake—especially if it’s a mistake pointed out by people with greater learning or experience.
  • #[[Spirit of Humility]]
• In 2015 a Washington Post writer, Caitlin Dewey, worried that fact-checking could never defeat myths and hoaxes because “no one has the time or cognitive capacity to reason all the apparent nuances and discrepancies out.”3 In the end, she sighed, “debunking them doesn’t do a darn thing.”
  • #Misinformation
• Worse, bad information can stay online for years. Unlike yesterday’s newspaper, online information is persistent and will pop up in subsequent searches after appearing just once.
  • Websites never die. Online information is pervasive. Compare to books that are dead when published. #[[Open Source Knowledge]]
• This is erudition in the age of cyberspace: You surf until you reach the conclusion you’re after. You click your way to validation, confusing the presence of a website with the plausibility of an argument.”
• As the writer Tom Jacobs observed, searching “appears to trigger an utterly unjustified belief in one’s own knowledge—which, given the increasingly popular habit of instinctively looking online to answer virtually any question, is a bit terrifying.”
• How can exposure to so much information fail to produce at least some kind of increased baseline of knowledge, if only by electronic osmosis? How can people read so much yet retain so little? The answer is simple: few people are actually reading what they find.
• The UCL study suggested that this is because they “have unsophisticated mental maps of what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that it is a collection of networked resources from different providers,” and so they spend little time actually “evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority.”
• Unfortunately, the way people think the Internet can serve as a way of crowd-sourcing knowledge conflates the perfectly reasonable idea of what the writer James Surowiecki has called “the wisdom of crowds” with the completely unreasonable idea that the crowds are wise because each member of the mob is also wise.
  • #[[Voice of the People]]
• Enthusiasts of the online reference site Wikipedia, among others, have argued that the future rests with this kind of collective knowledge rather than with the expert vetting of references and information. In theory, with a public and open encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, the sheer number of people watching over each entry should root out error and bias.
  • #[[Open Source Knowledge]]
• Unfortunately, things have not always worked out that way, and Wikipedia is a good lesson in the limits of the Internet-driven displacement of expertise. As it turns out, writing articles about any number of complicated subjects is a lot more difficult than guessing the weight of a bull. Although many well-intentioned people have contributed their time as Wikipedia editors, for example, some of them were also employed by companies and celebrity public relations firms that had an obvious interest in how things appeared in an encyclopedia for the masses. (Nine out of ten Wikipedia contributors are also male, which would likely raise flags among readers—if readers knew it.)
• Even with the best of intentions, crowd-sourced projects like Wikipedia suffer from an important but often unremarked distinction between laypeople and professionals: volunteers do what interests them at any given time, while professionals employ their expertise every day.
• The enthusiasm of interested amateurs is not a consistent substitute for the judgment of experts.
• Wikipedia’s initial efforts fell prey to inconsistency and a lack of oversight, which is exactly what might have been expected from a group homework project.
  • #[[Open Source Knowledge]]
• As a 2013 article in the MIT Technology Review noted, the size of the volunteer force that built Wikipedia and “must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation” has “shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking.”
• Peer review is a difficult beast to manage even in optimal conditions, with editors trying to assign oversight to the best in each field while avoiding professional rivalries and other conflicts of interest. Translating this process into a project for millions of people with minimal supervision was an unreasonable goal. For something like Wikipedia to work, practically every subject-matter expert in the world would have to be willing to babysit every entry.
• What people misunderstand about Wikipedia and other online resources, and about the wisdom of crowds in general, is that knowledge is about a lot more than assembling a box of factoids or making coin-toss predictions. Facts do not speak for themselves. Sources like Wikipedia are valuable for basic data as a kind of perpetually updating almanac, but they’re not much help on more complex matters.
• Crowds can be wise. Not everything, however, is amenable to the vote of a crowd. The Internet creates a false sense that the opinions of many people are tantamount to a “fact.”
  • #[[Voice of the People]]
• The writer Bill Bishop called this “the big sort” in a 2008 book, noting that Americans now choose to live, work, and socialize more with people like themselves in every way. The same thing happens on the Internet.
• When we are incapable of sustaining a chain of reasoning past a few mouse clicks, we cannot tolerate even the smallest challenge to our beliefs or ideas.
• As the writer Andrew Sullivan has noted,
• And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant.
  • #[[Voice of the People]]
• In a world of constant information, delivered at high speed and available twenty-four hours a day, journalism is now sometimes as much a contributor to the death of expertise as it is a defense against it.
• This was a distinct change in American civic culture, as the Pew study noted: Over most of the past five decades younger members of the public have been at least as well informed as older people. In 1990, that is no longer the case… . Those under 30 know less than younger people once did. And, they are less interested in what’s happening in the larger world around them. Social scientists and pollsters have long recognized that younger people have usually been somewhat less attuned to politics and serious issues. But the difference has been greatly sharpened.
  • I think there is an argument to be made that the world is progressively more complicated to the point of near incomprehension. But people feel even more confident in their understanding regardless of how less understandable the world is
• A 2011 University of Chicago study found that America’s college graduates “failed to make significant gains in critical thinking and complex reasoning during their four years of college,” but more worrisome, they “also failed to develop dispositions associated with civic engagement.”
• So why do people remain resolutely ignorant and uninformed, and reject news, along with expert opinion and advice, even when it’s all delivered to them almost without effort? Because there’s too much of it, and it is too closely fused with entertainment.
• But more of everything does not mean more quality in everything. (Sturgeon’s Law is inescapable everywhere.)
• Just as clicking through endless Internet pages makes people think they’re learning new things, watching countless hours of television and scrolling through hundreds of headlines is producing laypeople who believe—erroneously—that they understand the news.
• Worse, their daily interaction with so much media makes them resistant to learning anything more that takes too long or isn’t entertaining enough.
• The decade of Watergate, “stagflation,” and defeat in Vietnam is the benchmark not only because it was on the cusp of the addition of new technologies like cable, but also because those developments coincided with an accelerating collapse of trust in government and other institutions in American life.
• Limbaugh and his talk-radio imitators did not create middle America’s resentment and distrust of the media, as Agnew’s famous attack on the press showed. Radio talkers, however, fueled that distrust with renewed energy.
• “Armed with a bit of information,” Metz concludes, such people “opined on an ever-expanding array of issues.”
• The bigger problem, on all of the major networks, is that the transition from news to entertainment is almost seamless and largely invisible:
• The Internet and the proliferation of news media were already problems for experts, but the synergy created by the combination of news and the Internet is a problem of Gibraltarian proportions for experts trying to communicate with laypeople who already believe that staring at their phone while sitting on the subway is the equivalent of keeping up with the world’s events.
• The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they’re misinformed.
• Not only do these people “fill the gaps in their knowledge base by using their existing belief systems,” but over time those beliefs become “indistinguishable from hard data.” And, of course, the most misinformed citizens “tend to be the most confident in their views and are also the strongest partisans.”
• Too many people approach the news with an underlying assumption that they are already well versed in the issues. They do not seek information so much as confirmation, and when they receive information they do not like, they will gravitate to sources they prefer because they believe others are mistaken or even lying.
  • #[[Spirit of Humility]]
• In a democracy, this level of cynicism about the media is poisonous. All citizens, including experts, need news. Journalists relay events and developments in the world around us, providing a reservoir of facts we use as the raw material for many of our own opinions, views, and beliefs.
• This shallowness is not because journalism attracts unintelligent people, but because in an age when everything is journalism, and everyone is a journalist, standards inevitably fall. A profession that once had at least some barriers to entry is now wide open, with the same results we might expect if medicine, law enforcement, aviation, or archaeology were suddenly do-it-yourself projects.
• Without any foundational knowledge, young writers have nothing to fall back on but a college education in journalism, which, in the words of Joel Engel, is a “homogenizing process” that “ensures conformity” and produces young journalists who come out of college “seeing what they believe.”
• And remember: reading and following the news is a skill like any other at which we get better by repetition. The best way to become a good consumer of news is to be a regular consumer of news.
• Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Bertrand Russell
  • #[[Group Think]]
• to say that we trust our doctors to write us the correct prescription is not the same thing as saying we trust all medical professionals about whether America should have a system of national health care.
• Education and credentials in one area do not guarantee expertise in all areas.
• Retractions from scientific journals have reached record proportions.
  • This would be a really interesting data point to try and track over time. Does it correlate to an increase in research topics? Papers published?
• There is a myth among many Americans that it is impossible to fire researchers and university teachers. This is not entirely a baseless belief, because firing a tenured professor is in fact quite difficult.
  • Connect to story from Cambridge about tenure.
• Academic freedom guarantees the right to express unpopular or unconventional ideas, but it is not a license to produce sloppy or intentionally misleading research.
• There can be no doubt that Churchill’s record got a close look only because of his political views. Churchill appealed his dismissal on those very grounds, arguing that his plagiarism consisted of innocent mistakes that were only discovered when he took a controversial view.
• To claim that plagiarism was discovered only because the professor managed to draw enough attention to himself with his odious comments is not much of a defense.
• The scientific and medical journals with the highest impact on their fields—the New England Journal of Medicine, for example—tend to have higher rates of retractions. No one, however, is quite sure why.10 It could be due to more people checking the results, which would be a heartening trend. It could also happen because more people cut corners to get into top journals, which would be a depressing reality. It could also be an effect of publishing in a prestigious journal: with more readers, someone is more likely to try to use the research in their own work and thus catch the misconduct further down the line.
• The gold standard of any scientific study is whether it can be replicated or at least reconstructed. This is why scientists and scholars use footnotes: not as insurance against plagiarism—although there’s that, too—but so that their peers can follow in their footsteps to see if they would reach the same conclusions.
• It is possible to fake one study. To fake hundreds and thus produce a completely fraudulent or dangerous result is another matter entirely.
• “Benjamin Franklin,” the humorist Alexandra Petri once wrote, “was one of the last men up to whom you could go and say, ‘You invented a stove. What do you think we should do about these taxes?’ and get a coherent answer.”
• Laypeople often feel at a disadvantage challenging traditional science or socially dominant ideas, and they will rally to outspoken figures whose views carry a patina of expert assurance.
  • #[[Bernie Sanders]]
• Prediction is a problem for experts. It’s what the public wants, but experts usually aren’t very good at it. This is because they’re not supposed to be good at it; the purpose of science is to explain, not to predict.
• As the late science-fiction writer (and professor of biochemistry) Isaac Asimov said, the words that have spurred the greatest scientific breakthroughs are probably not “Eureka,” but “Gee, that’s funny.”
• Organizations with a great deal at stake—lives, money, or both—inevitably embark on voracious searches for information before taking risks. An expert who says he or she can peek into the future will always be more in demand than one who offers more limited advice.
• In a widely read study on “black swan” events—the unforeseeable moments that can change history—Nassim Nicholas Taleb decried the “epistemic arrogance” of the whole enterprise of prediction. But we act as though we are able to predict historical events, or, even worse, as if we are able to change the course of history. We produce 30-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming.
• Or as James Surowiecki (the “wisdom of crowds” writer) pointed out, saying that “cognitive diversity” is important—meaning that many views can be better than one—it does not mean that if “you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert’s.”
  • #[[The Voice of the People]]
• Tetlock used the British thinker Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “hedgehogs” and “foxes” to distinguish between experts whose knowledge was wide and inclusive (“the fox knows many things”) from those whose expertise is narrow and deep (“the hedgehog knows but one”). Tetlock’s study is one of the most important works ever written on how experts think, and it deserves a full reading. In general, however, one of his more intriguing findings can be summarized by noting that while experts ran into trouble when trying to move from explanation to prediction, the “foxes” generally outperformed the “hedgehogs,” for many reasons.
  • Hedgehogs and foxes
• Hedgehogs, for example, tended to be overly focused on generalizing their specific knowledge to situations that were outside of their competence, while foxes were better able to integrate more information and to change their minds when presented with new or better data.
• There’s an old joke about a British civil servant who retired after a long career in the Foreign Office spanning most of the twentieth century. “Every morning,” the experienced diplomatic hand said, “I went to the Prime Minister and assured him there would be no world war today. And I am pleased to note that in a career of 40 years, I was only wrong twice.” Judged purely on the number of hits and misses, the old man had a pretty good record.
• An uninformed judgment, even when right, is often less useful than a reasoned view, even when wrong, that can then be dissected, examined, and corrected.
  • Venture investing. If we don’t track out thinking and revisit out reasoning then we can’t improve
• The average person is not going to read a medical journal or a statistical analysis of an article in sociology. To be honest, I suspect that most experts and scholars would probably prefer that laypeople avoid doing so, because they would not understand most of what they were reading and their attempt to follow the professional debate would likely produce more public confusion than enlightenment.
• This is where public intellectuals, the people who can bridge the gap between experts and laypeople, might shoulder more responsibility. The public is poorly served if the only people talking about a new medical treatment are doctors who have a hard time translating their knowledge into basic English (and who may be invested in a position), or journalists who have no scientific background cannot evaluate complicated scientific claims. This leaves a wide open space—usually on the Internet—for amateurs, hucksters, charlatans, and conspiracy theorists.
  • Connect to David Perell tweet about the opportunity to translate [[Academic Research]] for every day people.
• But if the gulf between the public and the experts gets too wide, the experts will talk only to each other, and the public will end up excluded from decisions that will later affect their lives.
• Laypeople must take more responsibility for their own knowledge, or lack of it: it is no excuse to claim that the world is too complicated and there are too many sources of information, and then to lament that policy is in the hands of faceless experts who disdain the public’s views.
• As the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in a 1928 essay, laypeople must evaluate expert claims by exercising their own careful logic as well. The skepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.
• If laypeople refuse to take their duties as citizens seriously, and do not educate themselves about issues important to them, democracy will mutate into technocracy. The rule of experts, so feared by laypeople, will grow by default.
• Democracy cannot function when every citizen is an expert.
• A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. James Madison
• A leader in the Brexit movement, Michael Gove, argued that facts were not as important as the feelings of the British voter. “I think people in this country,” he sniffed, “have had enough of experts.”
  • Connect to Newt Gingrich: “I’ll go with how people feel.”
• But as an American writer and foreign policy expert, James Traub, later noted about Gove’s sniping, The word “expert” is, of course, the pejorative term for someone who knows what he or she is talking about—like Gove, I imagine, who graduated from Oxford and spent years as a minister in Conservative Party governments. What Gove was actually saying was that people should be free to build gratifying fantasies free from unpleasant facts.
• The psychologist David Dunning—who along with his colleague Justin Kruger discovered the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which uninformed or incompetent people are unlikely to recognize their own lack of knowledge or incompetence—believes that the dynamic they describe was at work among the electorate and perhaps even central to understanding the bizarre nature of the 2016 election:
• “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes said. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
• In a democracy, the expert’s service to the public is part of the social contract. Citizens delegate the power of decision on myriad issues to elected representatives and their expert advisers, while experts, for their part, ask that their efforts be received in good faith by a public that has informed itself enough to make reasoned judgments.
  • Social contract; educated electorate
• The relationship between experts and citizens, like almost all relationships in a democracy, is built on trust. When that trust collapses, experts and laypeople become warring factions. And when that happens, democracy itself can enter a death spiral that presents an immediate danger of decay either into rule by the mob or toward elitist technocracy. Both are authoritarian outcomes, and both threaten the United States today.
  • #[[Voice of the People]]
• The abysmal literacy, both political and general, of the American public is the foundation for all of these problems.
  • Educated electorate
• As the writer Susan Jacoby put it in 2008, the most disturbing aspect of the American march toward ignorance is “not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge.” The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place… . The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.
• In the absence of informed citizens, for example, more knowledgeable administrative and intellectual elites do in fact take over the daily direction of the state and society. In a passage often cited by Western conservatives and especially loved by American libertarians, the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek wrote in 1960: “The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.”
• Americans tend to think about issues like macroeconomic policy or foreign affairs only when things go wrong. The rest of the time, they remain happily unaware of the policies and processes that function well everyday while the nation goes about its business.
• In his seminal work on expertise, however, Philip Tetlock suggests other ways in which experts might be held more accountable without merely trashing the entire relationship between experts and the public. There are many possibilities, including more transparency and competition, in which experts in any field have to maintain a record of their work, come clean about how often they were right or wrong, and actually have journals, universities, and other gatekeepers hold their peers responsible more often for mistakes.
  • Accountability loops
• Experts can tell the voters what is likely to happen, but voters must engage those issues and decide what they value most, and therefore what they want done.
  • We have to want the consequences of what we want
• To ignore expert advice is simply not a realistic option, not only due to the complexity of policymaking, but because to do so is to absolve citizens of their responsibilities to learn about issues that matter directly to their own well-being.
  • Our personal identities and are areas of expertise are not interchangeable - https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeTJt3Bv/
• The United States is a republic, not a democracy. One hardly ever hears the word “republic” anymore, which reveals, in a small way, the degree to which modern Americans confuse “democracy” as a general political philosophy with a “republic” as its expression in a form of government. In 1787, Benjamin Franklin was supposedly asked what would emerge from the Constitutional Convention being held in Philadelphia. “A republic,” Franklin answered, “if you can keep it.” Today, the bigger challenge is to find anyone who knows what a republic actually is.
• This is crucial because laypeople too easily forget that the republican form of government under which they live was not designed for mass decisions about complicated issues. Neither, of course, was it designed for rule by a tiny group of technocrats or experts. Rather, it was meant to be the vehicle by which an informed electorate—informed being the key word here—could choose other people to represent them and to make decisions on their behalf.
  • Importance of an informed electorate. Nuance between knowing everything (e.g. but life is too complicated) vs knowing enough to pick who represents you (e.g. endorsed experts and representatives) #[[Voice of the People]]
• As the writer Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in 2010, large organizations do not make decisions by polling everyone in them, no matter how “democratic” it might seem. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?
  • Think about this in relation to [[David Vargas]] discussion about a [[Decentralized Community]] with [[Roam Research]].
• The interviewees, however, did not know that Kimmel had switched the details of each plan. As The Hill newspaper later reported, the answers depended on whom people thought they were supporting:
• As it turns out, Kimmel’s hijinks actually illustrated a truth long known to pollsters and campaign experts: voters are often more interested in candidates and their personalities than in their ideas or policies.
• Put another way, when the public claims it has been misled or kept in the dark, experts and policymakers cannot help but ask, “How would you know?”
  • Connect to Nate Bargatze joke about “whose gonna know?”
• Anti-intellectualism is itself a means of short-circuiting democracy, because a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices.
• The relationship between experts and citizens is not “democratic.” All people are not, and can never be, equally talented or intelligent. Democratic societies, however, are always tempted to this resentful insistence on equality, which becomes oppressive ignorance if given its head.
• Feelings are more important than facts: if people think vaccines are harmful, or if they believe that half of the US budget is going to foreign aid, then it is “undemocratic” and “elitist” to contradict them.
  • Connect to Newt Gingrich video
• “Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose,” Screwtape gleefully advises the graduates, and he then promises that by use of the word “purely as an incantation,” human beings can be fooled not only into believing an obvious lie, but led to nurture that lie as a cherished feeling: The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you. No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which [a human being] refuses to accept. And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation.
• This was the same warning José Ortega y Gasset gave when he wrote Revolt of the Masses in 1930: “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.”
  • “Thought Police” and “thought criminal” from 1984. When the [[Voice of People]] begins to govern they focus on resorting to the mean and eradicating any voices that fail to conform
• When resentful laypeople demand that all marks of achievement, including expertise, be leveled and equalized in the name of “democracy” and “fairness,” there is no hope for either democracy or fairness.
• Everything becomes a matter of opinion, with all views dragged to the lowest common denominator in the name of equality.
• Most causes of ignorance can be overcome, if people are willing to learn. Nothing, however, can overcome the toxic confluence of arrogance, narcissism, and cynicism that Americans now wear like full suit of armor against the efforts of experts and professionals.
  • #[[Spirit of Humility]]
• A Yale professor, Dan Kahan, was more pessimistic: “Bombarding people with knowledge doesn’t help,” he said in 2015. “It doesn’t do anything to explain things to people, but here I am just explaining the facts over and over again. Maybe the joke’s on me.”
  • #[[Learning, No Greater Responsibility]]
• In the end, experts cannot demand that citizens pay attention to the world around them. They cannot insist people eat healthy meals or exercise more. They cannot drag citizens by the neck away from the latest reality television show and make them look at a map instead. They cannot cure narcissism by fiat.
  • The critical role of [[Accountability]] - connect to President Nelson’s comment about not being able to survive without guidance of the spirit
• The creation of a vibrant intellectual and scientific culture in the West and in the United States required democracy and secular tolerance. Without such virtues, knowledge and progress fall prey to ideological, religious, and populist attacks. Nations that have given in to such temptations have suffered any number of terrible fates, including mass repression, cultural and material poverty, and defeat in war.
• If citizens, however, are to be the masters, they must equip themselves not just with education, but with the kind of civic virtue that keeps them involved in the running of their own country.