Mar 16, 2018 05:35 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 17, 2018 04:49 PM by C C.)
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2018/03/...om-nichols
EXCERPT: . . . [Tom] Nichols is best known these days as an outspoken “Never Trump” Republican, a lifelong conservative whose snappy Twitter feed [...] and [...] op-eds in publications [...] sharply dispraise the U.S. president and his supporters. An “increasingly hideous movement,” Nichols labeled candidate Trump’s rising popularity in early 2016; and this past November, noting the “moral depths” the administration was plumbing, he argued for shaming (rather than more softly engaging) voters who still stood behind a “cast of characters in Washington who make the ‘swamps’ of previous administrations look like experiments in good government.” [...]
Several years ago, Tom Nichols started writing a book about ignorance and unreason in American public discourse—and then he watched it come to life all around him, in ways starker than he had imagined. A political scientist [...] he had begun noticing what he perceived as a new and accelerating—and dangerous—hostility toward established knowledge. People were no longer merely uninformed, Nichols says, but “aggressively wrong” and unwilling to learn. They actively resisted facts that might alter their preexisting beliefs. They insisted that all opinions, however uninformed, be treated as equally serious. And they rejected professional know-how, he says, with such anger. That shook him.
Skepticism toward intellectual authority is bone-deep in the American character, as much a part of the nation’s origin story as the founders’ Enlightenment principles. Overall, that skepticism is a healthy impulse, Nichols believes. But what he was observing was something else, something malignant and deliberate, a collapse of functional citizenship. “Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” he would write in the preface to *The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Expertise and Why It Matters*, which was published by Oxford last year and quickly became a bestseller. “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.” Further down the page, he would add: “I’m worried.”
*The Death of Expertise* resonated deeply with readers. Soaring sales kept Nichols on the road for much of last year, speaking before packed audiences [...] His own expertise is in nuclear policy and Russian affairs—during the Cold War, he was what was called a Sovietologist—and Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. [...] *The Death of Expertise* began as a cri de coeur on his now-defunct blog in late 2013. This was during the Edward Snowden revelations, which to Nichols’s eye, and that of other intelligence experts, looked unmistakably like a Russian operation. “I was trying to tell people, ‘Look, trust me, I’m a Russia guy; there’s a Russian hand behind this.’ ” But he found more arguments than takers. “Young people wanted to believe Snowden was a hero.” Finally one day, someone said to him, “ ‘Tom, I don’t think you understand Russia. Let me explain Russia to you.’ This was a person who didn’t know where Russia was three months earlier.” The dam broke. He pounded out a blog post that got picked up by The Federalist, and not long after that, an editor from Oxford University Press called.
[...] *The Death of Expertise* diagnoses a malady decades in the making, for which Trump represents only one case, albeit perhaps its most famous and extreme. “I didn’t know ahead of time that Trump was going to happen,” Nichols says now, “but I knew that someday something like him would.”
The indictments the book levels are numerous: misguided egalitarianism run amok; the “protective, swaddling environment” of higher education, whose institutions increasingly treat students as customers to be kept satisfied; the 24-hour news cycle and the pressure on journalists to entertain rather than inform; the chaotic fusion of news and punditry and citizen participation. Meanwhile, the Internet’s openness offers a “Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden” mirage of knowledge, Nichols argues, and an inexhaustible supply of “facts” to feed any confirmation bias. “The Internet encourages not only the illusion that we are all equally competent,” he says, “but that we are all peers. And we’re not. There was once a time when saying that would have been considered unremarkable.”
Along the way, The Death of Expertise dissects the Dunning-Kruger Effect, formulated in 1999, which holds that the less competent people are, the greater the belief they tend to have in their own competence....
MORE: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2018/03/...om-nichols
EXCERPT: . . . [Tom] Nichols is best known these days as an outspoken “Never Trump” Republican, a lifelong conservative whose snappy Twitter feed [...] and [...] op-eds in publications [...] sharply dispraise the U.S. president and his supporters. An “increasingly hideous movement,” Nichols labeled candidate Trump’s rising popularity in early 2016; and this past November, noting the “moral depths” the administration was plumbing, he argued for shaming (rather than more softly engaging) voters who still stood behind a “cast of characters in Washington who make the ‘swamps’ of previous administrations look like experiments in good government.” [...]
Several years ago, Tom Nichols started writing a book about ignorance and unreason in American public discourse—and then he watched it come to life all around him, in ways starker than he had imagined. A political scientist [...] he had begun noticing what he perceived as a new and accelerating—and dangerous—hostility toward established knowledge. People were no longer merely uninformed, Nichols says, but “aggressively wrong” and unwilling to learn. They actively resisted facts that might alter their preexisting beliefs. They insisted that all opinions, however uninformed, be treated as equally serious. And they rejected professional know-how, he says, with such anger. That shook him.
Skepticism toward intellectual authority is bone-deep in the American character, as much a part of the nation’s origin story as the founders’ Enlightenment principles. Overall, that skepticism is a healthy impulse, Nichols believes. But what he was observing was something else, something malignant and deliberate, a collapse of functional citizenship. “Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” he would write in the preface to *The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Expertise and Why It Matters*, which was published by Oxford last year and quickly became a bestseller. “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.” Further down the page, he would add: “I’m worried.”
*The Death of Expertise* resonated deeply with readers. Soaring sales kept Nichols on the road for much of last year, speaking before packed audiences [...] His own expertise is in nuclear policy and Russian affairs—during the Cold War, he was what was called a Sovietologist—and Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. [...] *The Death of Expertise* began as a cri de coeur on his now-defunct blog in late 2013. This was during the Edward Snowden revelations, which to Nichols’s eye, and that of other intelligence experts, looked unmistakably like a Russian operation. “I was trying to tell people, ‘Look, trust me, I’m a Russia guy; there’s a Russian hand behind this.’ ” But he found more arguments than takers. “Young people wanted to believe Snowden was a hero.” Finally one day, someone said to him, “ ‘Tom, I don’t think you understand Russia. Let me explain Russia to you.’ This was a person who didn’t know where Russia was three months earlier.” The dam broke. He pounded out a blog post that got picked up by The Federalist, and not long after that, an editor from Oxford University Press called.
[...] *The Death of Expertise* diagnoses a malady decades in the making, for which Trump represents only one case, albeit perhaps its most famous and extreme. “I didn’t know ahead of time that Trump was going to happen,” Nichols says now, “but I knew that someday something like him would.”
The indictments the book levels are numerous: misguided egalitarianism run amok; the “protective, swaddling environment” of higher education, whose institutions increasingly treat students as customers to be kept satisfied; the 24-hour news cycle and the pressure on journalists to entertain rather than inform; the chaotic fusion of news and punditry and citizen participation. Meanwhile, the Internet’s openness offers a “Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden” mirage of knowledge, Nichols argues, and an inexhaustible supply of “facts” to feed any confirmation bias. “The Internet encourages not only the illusion that we are all equally competent,” he says, “but that we are all peers. And we’re not. There was once a time when saying that would have been considered unremarkable.”
Along the way, The Death of Expertise dissects the Dunning-Kruger Effect, formulated in 1999, which holds that the less competent people are, the greater the belief they tend to have in their own competence....
MORE: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2018/03/...om-nichols
