The Death of Expertise

In The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols, an expert in the areas of policy and international affairs, plays his role as a public intellectual. His goal is to inform his readers about “the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters” – the subtitle of his book. He discusses various factors that have led to distrust between the average non-expert public citizen and experts (pejoratively now called elitist”). With his book, Nichols hopes to bridge the gap and avert the death spiral into a future featuring chaotic demagoguery or manipulative technocracy. One of the solutions he calls for in his book is for experts to step up to the role of public intellectual.

The reasons for the widening gulf between experts and non-experts are myriad. I recommend reading the book in full to understand Nichols’ arguments for each contributing factor. While the Internet plays its role in a chapter titled “Let me Google that for you: How unlimited information is making us dumber”, higher education, journalism, experts themselves, the entertainment industry, all play their part. The Dunning-Kruger effect features prominently: The less knowledgeable tend to overestimate their competence and cognitive ability. My experience as a teacher is that the weakest students have the least sense of where they’re at in terms of understanding chemistry. On the other hand, a little knowledge can also be a dangerous thing that leads to over-confidence in one’s abilities. (I previously discussed a study gauging the Easiness Effect.) I recall a conversation a while back with a colleague in the social sciences. I had opined that teaching students who didn’t know anything about chemistry was a challenge in introductory courses. My colleague said it was even more challenging in the social sciences because the students think they know something and have strong opinions about it.

Nichols’ expertise is in political affairs, thus, many of his examples are drawn from that realm. One vignette that stands out: Nichols describes the Q&A following a public lecture where an undergraduate challenged the speaker, both holding to their views in what seems like professional discourse. But what happens at the end is more interesting. The student shrugs and says, “Well, your guess is as good as mine.” At that point, the speaker disagrees and says “No, no, no. My guesses are much, much better than yours.” Nichols thinks that the speaker might have been trying to teach the student something, i.e., “that respecting a person’s opinion does not mean granting equal respect to that person’s knowledge.” Experts aren’t always right, but they’re much more likely (probability comes into play here) to be right than the non-expert. We will return to this point momentarily.

This is, in fact, how Nichols defines expertise. “Experts are the people who know considerably more on a subject than the rest of us… this does not mean that experts know all there is to know… Rather, it means that experts in [their] given subject are, by their nature, a minority whose views are more likely to be… correct or accurate – than anyone else’s.” Distinguishing expertise can be trickier than it looks, and Nichols spends quite a bit of time in Chapter 1 discussing the signs and pitfalls. He lists “education, training, practice, experience, and acknowledgement by others, [as] a rough guide” to discerning expertise. The romanticized Good Will Hunting type savant is remarkably rare.

As a chemistry professor, I have expertise in two main areas: Chemistry and Teaching Chemistry. I have credentials that indicate I am knowledgeable and experience in Chemistry, although my real area of expertise as a practicing research is necessarily narrow. You don’t become an expert in a field without going in deep and narrow. Through experience and sheer practice, I have become an expert in teaching chemistry at the undergraduate level. (The Ph.D. as a credential does not indicate any expertise in teaching.) But one of the important things about continuing to be an expert is that you have to keep practicing your expertise. I keep learning more chemistry in my reading and research, and I continue to find ways to improve my teaching. I think one of the key goals of higher education is to learn how to continue learning, and I hope my students get a glimpse of this while they are in college.

But experts can be wrong. And when they are wrong, the consequences can be significant. As Dumbledore says in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, “I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being – forgive me – rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.” The general public loves to gobble up such stories, and the media responds in kind. Nichols traces the denigration of expertise from talk radio to cable news to the world wide web where punditry of every stripe can be found. The Dunning-Kruger effect combined with the ability to tune out everything but one’s own echo chamber exacerbates the problem exponentially. (Nichols also explains why crowdsourcing approaches have limited applicability to a range of problems, in case you were wondering.)

Linus Pauling, chemist-physicist par excellence, gets a mention in Nichols’ book as a cautionary tale. Nobel prize winner in chemistry becomes Vitamin C quack. I’m particularly sensitive to this example because Chemical Bonding is my expertise and Pauling is one of the giants in the field. Interestingly, part of why Valency forms a significant part in introductory chemistry textbooks at the high school and college level, is because Pauling was a master at communicating his ideas clearly and practically. Mulliken, on the other hand... well that’s another story. (If you’re interested in such details I recommend the book Neither Physics nor Chemistry.)

Why do such things happen? Nichols writes: “Cross-expertise violations happen for a number of reasons, from innocent error to intellectual vanity. Sometimes, however, the motivation is as simple as the opportunity provided by fame. Entertainers are the worst offenders here. Their celebrity affords them easy access to issues and controversies, and to actual experts or policymakers who will work with them because of the natural proclivity to answer the phone when someone famous calls.” (Nichols also discusses whether an expert is a fox or a hedgehog and the dangers of making predictions, with or without expertise.)

It’s hard for anyone to say “I don’t know”, but this might be harder for experts because of “previous successes and achievements [as] evidence of their superior knowledge”. I’ve had to train myself to say “I don’t know” when I get the occasional student question that I don’t actually know the answer to, even though I feel tempted to “wing it” in front of the class. Worse, I catch myself making authoritative-sounding pronouncements in areas that I have no expertise in. Colleagues observing my classroom say that I have an authoritative teaching-style. (They mean it in a good way, having to do with clarity and directness in my approach and how I project my voice when making certain points.) The most common comment on my course evaluations from students is that I am “knowledgeable”, partly as a result of this. I mentioned this to my spouse a number of years ago and we now have a tacit agreement that when she notices me doing this, she says: “You said that very confidently.” It’s a good check for me, and I’ve learned to humbly backtrack and clarify my speculative statements.

Nichols closes his book with a discussion of the meaning of democracy and how it plays out in a republic, the political “system” of the United States. “[Disturbingly] citizens of the Western democracies, and Americans in particular, no longer understand the concept of democracy itself. This, perhaps more than anything, has corroded the relationship between experts and citizens… Citizens no longer understand democracy to mean a condition of political equality, in which one person gets one vote, and every individual is no more and no less equal in the eyes of the law. Rather [they] now think of democracy as a state of actual equality [in talent and intelligence], in which every opinion is as good as any other on almost any subject under the sun.”

Now everyone’s an expert or nobody’s an expert. What’s the difference?

I close with a vignette mentioned by Nichols from that fount of wisdom, National Lampoon’s Animal House. The antics of the Delta fraternity brothers have earned the wrath of Dean Wormer who has organized a hearing to revoke their charter. Some of the Deltas are worried and the following exchange takes place at a house meeting. (Text quoted from Rotten Tomatoes.)

Robert Hoover: Don’t screw around, they’re serious this time!

Eric "Otter" Stratton: Take it easy, I'm pre-law.

Donald "Boon" Schoenstein: I thought you were pre-med.

Eric "Otter" Stratton: What's the difference?