i

THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

The Campaign against Established

Knowledge and Why It Matters

Tom Nichols

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 1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nichols, Tom, 1960- author.
Title: The death of expertise : the campaign against established
knowledge and why it matters / Tom Nichols.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016037219 | ISBN 9780190469412
Subjects: LCSH: Information society—Political aspects. | Knowledge,
Theory of—Political aspects. | Knowledge, Sociology of. | Expertise—
Political aspects. | Education, Higher—Political aspects. | Internet—Political
aspects.
Classification: LCC HM851 .N54 2017 | DDC 303.48/33—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037219

135798642
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For
Lynn Marie Nichols
and
Hope Virginia Nichols
v

Expert wife and peerless daughter

 CONTENTS
i

vii

iii

Preface ix

Introduction: The Death of Expertise 1

1.
Experts and Citizens 13
2.
How Conversation Became Exhausting 40
3.
Higher Education: The Customer Is Always Right 70
4 . Let Me Google That for You: How Unlimited
Information Is Making Us Dumber 105
134
The “New” New Journalism, and Lots of It
170
5.

When the Experts Are Wrong

209
6.

Conclusion: Experts and Democracy

23
Notes 9
Index 24
9
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PREFACE
“The death of expertise” is one of those phrases that grandly
announces its own self-i mportance. It’s a title that risks
alienating a lot of people before they even open the book,
almost daring the reader to find a mistake in it somewhere just
to take the author down a peg. I understand that reaction,
because I feel much the same way about such sweeping
pronouncements. Our cultural and literary life is full of
premature burials of everything: shame, common sense,
manliness, femininity, childhood, good taste, literacy, the
Oxford comma, and so on. The last thing we all need is one
more encomium for something we know isn’t quite dead.
While expertise isn’t dead, however, it’s in trouble.
Something is going terribly wrong. 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. And
really, it’s not even a problem, insofar as we live in a society
that works because of a division of labor, a system designed to
relieve each of us of having to know about everything. Pilots
fly airplanes, lawyers file lawsuits, doctors prescribe

ix
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PREFACE

medication. None of us is a Da Vinci, painting the Mona Lisa

in the morning and designing helicopters at night. That’s as it
should be.
No, the bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing
things. 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. It is a new
Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths
to be self- evident, we hold all truths to be self- evident, even
the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every
opinion on any subject is as good as any other.
This isn’t the same thing as the traditional American
distaste for intellectuals and know- it- alls. I’m a professor, and
I get it: most people don’t like professors. When I began my
teaching career nearly three decades ago, it was at a college not
far from my hometown, and so I would drop in now and then to
say hello and visit a small tavern owned by my brother. One
evening, after I left, a patron turned to my brother and said,
“He’s a professor, huh? Well, he seems like a good guy
anyway.” If you’re in my profession, you get used to that.
But that’s not why I wrote this book. Intellectuals who get
outraged over zingers about the uselessness of intellectuals
should find a different line of work. I’ve been a teacher, a
political adviser, a subject-matter expert for both government
and private industry, and a commenter on various media. I’m
used to people disagreeing with me; in fact, I encourage it.
Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health
and vitality in a democracy.
Rather, I wrote this because I’m worried. We no longer
have those principled and informed arguments. The
foundational knowledge of the average American is now so
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PREFACE

low that it has crashed through the floor of “uninformed,”

passed “misinformed” on the way down, and is now
plummeting to “aggressively wrong.” People don’t just believe
dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let
go

of those beliefs. I was not alive in the Middle Ages, so I cannot

say it is unprecedented, but within my living memory I’ve
never seen anything like it.
That’s not to say that this is the first time I’ve ever thought
about this subject. Back in the late 1980s, when I was working
in Washington, DC, I learned how quickly people in even
casual conversation would immediately instruct me in what
needed to be done in any number of areas, especially in my
own areas of arms control and foreign policy. (As usual, it was
what “they” should do, as in “they ought to … .”) I was young
and not yet a seasoned expert, but I was astonished at the way
people who did not have the first clue about those subjects
would confidently direct me on how best to make peace
between Moscow and Washington.
To some extent, this was understandable. Politics invites
discussion. And especially during the Cold War, when the
stakes were global annihilation, people wanted to be heard. I
accepted that this was just part of the cost of doing business in
the public policy world. 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.
In later years, however, I started hearing the same stories
from doctors. And from lawyers. And from teachers. And, as it
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PREFACE

turns out, from many other professionals whose advice is

usually not contradicted easily. These stories astonished me:
they were not about patients or clients asking sensible
questions, but about those same patients and clients actively
telling professionals why their advice was wrong. In every
case, the idea that the expert knew what he or she was doing
was dismissed almost out of hand.
Worse, what I find so striking today is not that people
dismiss expertise, but that they do so with such frequency, on
so many issues, and with such anger. Again, it may be that
attacks on expertise are

xi

more obvious due to the ubiquity of the Internet, the

undisciplined nature of conversation on social media, or the
demands of the twenty- four- hour news cycle. But there is a
self- righteousness and fury to this new rejection of expertise
that suggest, at least to me, that this isn’t just mistrust or
questioning or the pursuit of alternatives: it is narcissism,
coupled to a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in
self- actualization.
This makes it all the harder for experts to push back and to
insist that people come to their senses. No matter what the
subject, the argument always goes down the drain of an
enraged ego and ends with minds unchanged, sometimes with
professional relationships or even friendships damaged. 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
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PREFACE

opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong …
well, then we’re just being jerks, apparently.
It’s possible, I suppose, that I am merely a symptom of
generational change. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, an era
when perhaps too much deference was paid to experts. These
were the heady days when America was at the forefront of not
only science but also international leadership. My parents were
knowledgeable but uneducated people who, like most
Americans, assumed that the same people who put a man on
the moon were probably right about most other important
things. I was not raised in an environment of utter obedience to
authority, but in general, my family was typical in trusting that
the people who worked in specialized fields, from podiatry to
politics, knew what they were doing.
As critics of expertise rightly point out, in those days we
were trusting the people who landed Neil Armstrong in the Sea
of Tranquility, but who also landed a lot of less famous
American men

xii

in places like Khe Sanh and the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam.

The public’s trust, both in experts and political leaders, was not
only misplaced but abused.
Now, however, we’ve gone in the other direction. We do
not have a healthy skepticism about experts: instead, we
actively resent them, with many people assuming that experts
are wrong simply by virtue of being experts. We hiss at the
“eggheads”— a pejorative coming back into vogue— while
instructing our doctors about which medications we need or
while insisting to teachers that our children’s answers on a test
are right even if they’re wrong. Not only is everyone as smart
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PREFACE

as everyone else, but we all think we’re the smartest people

ever.
And we couldn’t be more wrong.

I have many people to thank for their assistance with this book,
and many more to absolve from any association with its views
or conclusions.
I first wrote a post called “The Death of Expertise” for my
personal blog, The War Room, back in 2013. That post was
noticed by Sean Davis at The Federalist, and he contacted me
about writing it up as an article. I am grateful to Sean and to
The Federalist for giving the piece a home, where it was soon
read by well over a million people from around the world.
David McBride at Oxford University Press then saw the article,
and in turn he contacted me about turning its main thesis into a
book. His editorial guidance and advice were key to fleshing
out the argument at greater length, and I am grateful to him and
to Oxford, as well as to the anonymous reviewers of the
proposal, for bringing the book to fruition.
I am fortunate to work at the US Naval War College, and
many of my colleagues there, including David Burbach, David
Cooper, Steve Knott, Derek Reveron, and Paul Smith, among
others, provided comments and material. But the opinions and
conclusions in

xiii

this book are mine: they do not in any way represent the views
of any other institution, nor of any agency of the US
government.
Several friends and correspondents in various professions
were kind enough to provide comments, read chapters, or to
provide answers to a variety of questions outside my area of
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PREFACE

expertise, including Andrew Facini, Ron Granieri, Tom

Hengeveld, Dan Kaszeta, Kevin Kruse, Rob Mickey, Linda
Nichols, Brendan Nyhan, Will Saletan, Larry Sanger, John
Schindler, Josh Sheehan, Robert Trobich, Michael Weiss,
Salena Zito, and especially Dan Murphy and Joel Engel. I owe
special thanks to David Becker, Nick Gvosdev, and Paul
Midura for their comments on several drafts of the manuscript.
I am very grateful to the Harvard Extension School, for not
only the opportunity to teach in the program, but also the many
excellent student research assistants that Extension provides to
its faculty. Kate Arline was an invaluable assistant on this
project: she fielded even some of the oddest queries quickly
and with aplomb. (Want to know how many fast- food joints
have opened in America since 1959? Kate can find out.) Any
of the factual errors or misinterpretations in this book,
however, are mine and mine alone.
Writing a book can be a wonderful and engaging experience
for the author, but less so for the people around him. My wife,
Lynn, and my daughter, Hope, were as patient as ever with me
while I worked on this volume, and I owe them a significant
debt of gratitude for putting up with me while I was writing.
This book is dedicated to both of them, with love.
Finally, I must thank the people who assisted me with this
book but who, for obvious reasons, wish to remain anonymous.
I am grateful to the many medical professionals, journalists,
lawyers, educators, policy analysts, scientists, scholars,
military experts, and others who shared their experiences and
contributed their stories to this book. I could not have written it
without them.

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PREFACE

I hope in some way this book helps them and other experts
in their work. But in the end, the clients of all professionals are
the people of the society in which they live, and so I especially
hope this book helps my fellow citizens in better using and
understanding the experts on whom we all rely. More than
anything, I hope this work contributes to bridging the rift
between experts and laypeople that in the long run threatens
not only the well- being of millions of Americans, but also the
survival of our democratic experiment.
xv

PREFACE
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1

Introduction
The Death of Expertise

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there

always has been. The strain of anti-i ntellectualism 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

In the early 1990s, a small group of “AIDS denialists,” including a

University of California professor named Peter Duesberg,
argued against virtually the entire medical establishment’s
consensus that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was
the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Science
thrives on such counterintuitive challenges, but there was no
evidence for Duesberg’s beliefs, which turned out to be
baseless. Once researchers found HIV, doctors and public
health officials were able to save countless lives through
measures aimed at preventing its transmission.
The Duesberg business might have ended as just another
quirky theory defeated by research. The history of science is
littered with such dead ends. In this case, however, a
discredited idea nonetheless managed to capture the attention
of a national leader, with deadly results. Thabo Mbeki, then the
president of South Africa, seized on the idea that AIDS was
caused not by a virus but by other factors, such as
malnourishment and poor health, and so he rejected offers of
drugs and other forms of assistance to combat HIV infection in

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

South Africa. By the mid-2 000s, his government relented, but
not before Mbeki’s fixation on AIDS denialism ended up
costing, by the estimates of doctors at the Harvard School of
Public Health, well over three hundred thousand lives and the
births of some thirty- five thousand HIV-p ositive children
whose infections could have been avoided.1 Mbeki, to this day,
thinks he was on to something.
Many Americans might scoff at this kind of ignorance, but
they shouldn’t be too confident in their own abilities. In 2014,
the Washington Post polled Americans about whether the
United States should engage in military intervention in the
wake of the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The United
States and Russia are former Cold War adversaries, each armed
with hundreds of long- range nuclear weapons. A military
conflict in the center of Europe, right on the Russian border,
carries a risk of igniting World War III, with potentially
catastrophic consequences. And yet only one in six Americans
— and fewer than one in four college graduates— could
identify Ukraine on a map. Ukraine is the largest country
entirely in Europe, but the median respondent was still off by
about 1,800 miles.
Map tests are easy to fail. Far more unsettling is that this
lack of knowledge did not stop respondents from expressing
fairly pointed views about the matter. Actually, this is an
understatement: the public not only expressed strong views,
but respondents actually showed enthusiasm for military
intervention in Ukraine in direct proportion to their lack of
knowledge about Ukraine. 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. 2

2
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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. In the United States and other
developed nations,

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement

and reject the advice of experts. 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.
This is more than a natural skepticism toward experts. I fear
we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a
Google- fueled, Wikipedia- based, blog- sodden collapse of
any division between professionals and laypeople, students and
teachers, knowers and wonderers— in other words, between
those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.
Attacks on established knowledge and the subsequent rash
of poor information in the general public are sometimes
amusing. Sometimes they’re even hilarious. Late- night
comedians have made a cottage industry of asking people
questions that reveal their ignorance about their own strongly
held ideas, their attachment to fads, and their unwillingness to
admit their own cluelessness about current events. It’s mostly
harmless when people emphatically say, for example, that
they’re avoiding gluten and then have to admit that they have
no idea what gluten is. And let’s face it: watching people
confidently improvise opinions about ludicrous scenarios like
whether “Margaret Thatcher’s absence at Coachella is
beneficial in terms of North Korea’s decision to launch a
nuclear weapon” never gets old.
When life and death are involved, however, it’s a lot less
funny. The antics of clownish antivaccine crusaders like actors
Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy undeniably make for great
television or for a fun afternoon of reading on Twitter. But
when they and other uninformed celebrities and public figures
seize on myths and misinformation about the dangers of

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INTRODuCTION

vaccines, millions of people could once again be in serious

danger from preventable afflictions like measles and whooping
cough.
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.
By the “death of expertise,” I do not mean the death of
actual expert abilities, the knowledge of specific things that
sets some people apart from others in various areas. There will
always be doctors and diplomats, lawyers and engineers, and
many other specialists in various fields. On a day-t o- day
basis, the world cannot function without them. If we break a
bone or get arrested, we call a doctor or a lawyer. When we
travel, we take it for granted that the pilot knows how airplanes
work. If we run into trouble overseas, we call a consular
official who we assume will know what to do.
This, however, is a reliance on experts as technicians. It is
not a dialogue between experts and the larger community, but
the use of established knowledge as an off-t he- shelf
convenience as needed and only so far as desired. Stitch this
cut in my leg, but don’t lecture me about my diet. (More than
two- thirds of Americans are overweight.) Help me beat this
tax problem, but don’t remind me that I should have a will.
(Roughly half of Americans with children haven’t bothered to
write one.) Keep my country safe, but don’t confuse me with
the costs and calculations of national security. (Most US
citizens do not have even a remote idea of how much the
United States spends on its armed forces.)

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

All of these choices, from a nutritious diet to national

defense, require a conversation between citizens and experts.
Increasingly, it seems, citizens don’t want to have that
conversation. For their part, they’d rather believe they’ve
gained enough information to make those decisions on their
own, insofar as they care about making any of those decisions
at all.
On the other hand, many experts, and particularly those in
the academy, have abandoned their duty to engage with the
public. They have retreated into jargon and irrelevance,
preferring to interact with each other only. Meanwhile, the
people holding the middle ground to whom we often refer as
“public intellectuals”— I’d like to think I’m one of them— are
becoming as frustrated and polarized as the rest of society.
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. It is a sign, as the art critic Robert Hughes once
described late twentieth- century America, of “a polity
obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal
politics,” chronically “skeptical of authority” and “prey to
superstition.” We have come full circle from a premodern age,
in which folk wisdom filled unavoidable gaps in human
knowledge, through a period of rapid development based
heavily on specialization and expertise, and now to a
postindustrial, information- oriented world where all citizens
believe themselves to be experts on everything.
Any assertion of expertise from an actual expert,
meanwhile, produces an explosion of anger from certain
quarters of the American public, who immediately complain
that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to
authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious
effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a

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INTRODuCTION

“real” democracy. 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. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite
being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality
that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous.
This book, then, is about expertise. Or, more accurately, it is
about the relationship between experts and citizens in a
democracy, why that relationship is collapsing, and what all of
us, citizens and experts, might do about it.
The immediate response from most people when confronted
with the death of expertise is to blame the Internet.
Professionals, especially, tend to point to the Internet as the
culprit when faced with clients and customers who think they
know better. As we’ll see, that’s not entirely wrong, but it is
also too simple an explanation. Attacks on established
knowledge have a long pedigree, and the Internet is only the
most recent tool in a recurring problem that in the past misused
television, radio, the printing press, and other innovations the
same way.
So why all the fuss? What exactly has changed so
dramatically for me to have written this book and for you to be
reading it? Is this really the “death of expertise,” or is this
nothing more than the usual complaints from intellectuals that
no one listens to them despite their self- anointed status as the
smartest people in the room? Maybe it’s nothing more than the
anxiety about the masses that arises among professionals after
each cycle of social or technological change. Or maybe it’s just
a typical expression of the outraged vanity of overeducated,
elitist professors like me.
Indeed, maybe the death of expertise is a sign of progress.
Educated professionals, after all, no longer have a stranglehold
on knowledge. The secrets of life are no longer hidden in giant

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

marble mausoleums, the great libraries of the world whose

halls are intimidating even to the relatively few people who can
visit them. Under such conditions in the past, there was less
stress between experts and laypeople, but only because citizens
were simply unable to challenge experts in any substantive
way. Moreover, there were few public venues in which to
mount such challenges in the era before mass communications.
Participation in political, intellectual, and scientific life until
the early twentieth century was far more circumscribed, with
debates about science, philosophy, and public policy all
conducted by a small circle of educated males with pen and
ink. Those were not exactly the Good Old Days, and they
weren’t that long ago. The time when most people didn’t finish
high school, when very few went to college, and when only a
tiny fraction of the population entered professions is still within
living memory of many Americans.
Social changes only in the past half century finally broke
down old barriers of race, class, and sex not only between
Americans in general but also between uneducated citizens and
elite experts in particular. A wider circle of debate meant more
knowledge but more social friction. Universal education, the
greater empowerment of women and minorities, the growth of
a middle class, and increased social mobility all threw a
minority of experts and the majority of citizens into direct
contact, after nearly two centuries in which they rarely had to
interact with each other.
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

8
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INTRODuCTION

acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than

the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.

WHAT’S AHEAD

In the chapters that follow, I’ll suggest several sources of this

problem, some of which are rooted in human nature, others that
are unique to America, and some that are the unavoidable
product of modernity and affluence.
In the next chapter, I’ll discuss the notion of an “expert”
and whether conflict between experts and laypeople is all that
new. What does it even mean to be an expert? When faced with
a tough decision on a subject outside of your own background
or experience, whom would you ask for advice? (If you don’t
think you need any advice but your own, you’re likely one of
the people who inspired me to write this book.)
In chapter 2, I’ll explore why conversation in America has
become so exhausting not just between experts and ordinary
citizens, but among everyone. If we’re honest, we all would
admit that any of us can be annoying, even infuriating, when
we talk about things that mean a great deal to us, especially
regarding beliefs and ideas to which we’re firmly attached.
Many of the obstacles to the working relationship between
experts and their clients in society rest in basic human
weaknesses, and in this chapter we’ll start by considering the
natural barriers to better understanding before we look more
closely at the particular problems of the early twenty- first
century.
We all suffer from problems, for example, like
“confirmation bias,” the natural tendency only to accept
evidence that confirms what we already believe. We all have
personal experiences, prejudices, fears, and even phobias that

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

prevent us from accepting expert advice. If we think a certain

number is lucky, no mathematician can tell us otherwise; if we
believe flying is dangerous, even reassurance from an astronaut
or a fighter pilot will not allay our fears. 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.
Just as we are not all equally able to carry a tune or draw a
straight line, many people simply cannot recognize the gaps in
their own knowledge or understand their own inability to
construct a logical argument.
Education is supposed to help us to recognize problems like
“confirmation bias” and to overcome the gaps in our
knowledge so that we can be better citizens. Unfortunately, the
modern American university, and the way students and their
parents treat it as a generic commodity, is now part of the
problem. In chapter 3 I’ll discuss why the broad availability of
a college education—p aradoxically— is making many people
think they’ve become smarter when in fact they’ve gained only
an illusory intelligence bolstered by a degree of dubious worth.
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.
The modern era of technology and communications is
empowering great leaps in knowledge, but it’s also enabling
and reinforcing our human failings. While the Internet doesn’t
explain all of the death of expertise, it explains quite a lot of it,
at least in the twenty- first century. In chapter 4, I’ll examine
how the greatest source of knowledge in human history since
Gutenberg stained his fingers has become as much a platform
for attacks on established knowledge as a defense against them.

10
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INTRODuCTION

The Internet is a magnificent repository of knowledge, and yet

it’s also the source and enabler of a spreading epidemic of
misinformation. 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.
In a free society, journalists are, or should be, among the
most important referees in the great scrum between ignorance
and learning. And what happens when citizens demand to be
entertained instead of informed? We’ll look at these unsettling
questions in chapter 5.
We count on the media to keep us informed, to separate fact
from fiction, and to make complicated matters comprehensible
to people who do not have endless amounts of time and energy
to keep up with every development in a busy world.
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.
In this hypercompetitive media environment, editors and
producers no longer have the patience— or the financial luxury
—t o allow journalists to develop their own expertise or deep
knowledge of a subject. Nor is there any evidence that most
news consumers want such detail. Experts are often reduced to
sound bites or “pull quotes,” if they are consulted at all. And
everyone involved in the news industry knows that if the
reports aren’t pretty or glossy or entertaining enough, the fickle
viewing public can find other, less taxing alternatives with the
click of a mouse or the press of a button on a television remote.
Experts are not infallible. They have made terrible mistakes,
with ghastly consequences. To defend the role of expertise in
modern America is to invite a litany of these disasters and
errors: thalidomide, Vietnam, the Challenger, the dire warnings

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

about the dietary hazards of eggs. (Go ahead and enjoy them
again. They’re off the list of things that are bad for you.)
Experts, understandably, retort that this is the equivalent of
remembering one plane crash and ignoring billions of safely
traveled air miles. That may be true, but sometimes airplanes
do crash, and sometimes they crash because an expert screwed
up.
In chapter 6, I’ll consider what happens when experts are
wrong. Experts can be wrong in many ways, from outright
fraud to well- intentioned but arrogant overconfidence in their
own abilities. And sometimes, like other human beings, they
just make mistakes. It is important for laypeople to understand,
however, how and why experts can err, not only to make
citizens better consumers of expert advice but also to reassure
the public about the ways in which experts try and police
themselves and their work. Otherwise, expert errors become
fodder for ill-i nformed arguments that leave specialists
resentful of attacks on their profession and laypeople fearful
that the experts have no idea what they’re doing.
Finally, in the conclusion I’ll raise the most dangerous
aspect of the death of expertise: how it undermines American
democracy. The United States is a republic, in which the
people designate others to make decisions on their behalf.
Those elected representatives cannot master every issue, and
they rely on experts and professionals to help them. Despite
what most people think, experts and policymakers are not the
same people, and to confuse the two, as Americans often do,
corrodes trust among experts, citizens, and political leaders.
Experts advise. Elected leaders decide. In order to judge the
performance of the experts, and to judge the votes and
decisions of their representatives, laypeople must familiarize
themselves with the issues at hand. This does not mean that
every American must engage in deep study of policy, but if

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INTRODuCTION

citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that

affect their lives, they abdicate control over those issues
whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of
these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their
democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and
gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian
technocracy.
Experts, too, have an important responsibility in a
democracy, and it is one they’ve shirked in recent decades.
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.
Experts have a responsibility to educate. Voters have a
responsibility to learn. In the end, regardless of how much
advice the professionals might provide, only the public can
decide the direction of the important policy choices facing their
nation. Only voters can resolve among the choices that affect
their families and for their country, and only they bear the
ultimate responsibility for those decisions.
But the experts have an obligation to help. That’s why I
wrote this book.

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Experts and Citizens

WASHINGTON, DC— Citing years of frustration over their
advice being misunderstood, misrepresented or simply
ignored, America’s foremost experts in every field
collectively tendered their resignation Monday.
The Onion

A NATION OF EXPLAINERS

We’ve all met them. They’re our coworkers, our friends, our
family members. They are young and old, rich and poor, some
with education, others armed only with a laptop or a library
card. But they all have one thing in common: they are ordinary
people who believe they are actually troves of knowledge.
Convinced that they are more informed than the experts, more
broadly knowledgeable than the professors, and more insightful
than the gullible masses, they are the explainers who are more
than happy to enlighten the rest of us about everything from the
history of imperialism to the dangers of vaccines.
We accept such people and put up with them not least
because we know that deep down, they usually mean well. We
even have a certain affection for them. The 1980s television
sitcom Cheers, for example, immortalized the character of Cliff
Clavin, the Boston mailman and barfly who was an expert on

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

everything. Cliff, like his real-l ife counterparts, prefaced every

statement with “studies have shown” or “it’s a known fact.”
Viewers loved Cliff because everyone knew someone like him:
the cranky uncle at a holiday dinner, the young student home
from that crucial first year of college.
We could find such people endearing because they were
quirky exceptions in a country that otherwise respected and
relied on the views of experts. But something has changed over
the past few decades. The public space is increasingly
dominated by a loose assortment of poorly informed people,
many of them autodidacts who are disdainful of formal
education and dismissive of experience. “If experience is
necessary for being president,” the cartoonist and author Scott
Adams tweeted during the 2016 election, “name a political
topic I can’t master in one hour under the tutelage of top
experts,” as though a discussion with an expert is like copying
information from one computer drive to another. A kind of
intellectual Gresham’s Law is gathering momentum: where
once the rule was “bad money drives out good,” we now live in
an age where misinformation pushes aside knowledge.
This is a very bad thing. A modern society cannot function
without a social division of labor and a reliance on experts,
professionals, and intellectuals. (For the moment, I will use
these three words interchangeably.) No one is an expert on
everything. 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.
In the early 1970s, the science fiction writer Robert
Heinlein issued a dictum, often quoted since, that
“specialization is for insects.” Truly capable human beings, he
wrote, should be able to do almost anything from changing a

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

diaper to commanding a warship. It is a noble sentiment that

celebrates human adaptability and resilience, but it’s wrong.
While there was once a time when every homesteader
lumbered his own trees and built his own house, this not only
was inefficient, but produced only rudimentary housing.
There’s a reason we don’t do things that way anymore.
When we build skyscrapers, we do not expect the metallurgist
who knows what goes into a girder, the architect who designs
the building, and the glazier who installs the windows to be the
same person. That’s why we can enjoy the view from a
hundred floors above a city: each expert, although possessing
some overlapping knowledge, respects the professional
abilities of many others and concentrates on doing what he or
she knows best. Their trust and cooperation lead to a final
product greater than anything they could have produced alone.
The fact of the matter is that we cannot function without
admitting the limits of our knowledge and trusting in the
expertise of others. We sometimes resist this conclusion
because it undermines our sense of independence and
autonomy. We want to believe we are capable of making all
kinds of decisions, and we chafe at the person who corrects us,
or tells us we’re wrong, or instructs us in things we don’t
understand. This natural human reaction among individuals is
dangerous when it becomes a shared characteristic among
entire societies.

IS THIS NEW?

Is knowledge in more danger, and are conversation and debate

really all that more difficult today than they were fifty or a
hundred years ago? Intellectuals are always complaining about
the denseness of their fellow citizens, and laypeople have

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

always distrusted the pointy- heads and experts. How new is

this problem, and how seriously should we take it?
Some of this conflict in the public square is just so much
predictable noise, now amplified by the Internet and social
media. The Internet gathers factoids and half- baked ideas, and
it then splays all that bad information and poor reasoning all
over the electronic world. (Imagine what the 1920s would have
sounded like if every crank in every small town had his own
radio station.) Maybe it’s not that people are any dumber or
any less willing to listen to experts than they were a hundred
years ago: it’s just that we can hear them all now.
Besides, a certain amount of conflict between people who
know some things and people who know other things is
inevitable. There were probably arguments between the first
hunters and gatherers over what to have for dinner. As various
areas of human achievement became the province of
professionals, disagreements were bound to grow and to
become sharper. And as the distance between experts and the
rest of the citizenry grew, so did the social gulf and the mistrust
between them. All societies, no matter how advanced, have an
undercurrent of resentment against educated elites, as well as
persistent cultural attachments to folk wisdom, urban legends,
and other irrational but normal human reactions to the
complexity and confusion of modern life.
Democracies, with their noisy public spaces, have always
been especially prone to challenges to established knowledge.
Actually, they’re more prone to challenges to established
anything: it’s one of the characteristics that makes them
“democratic.” Even in the ancient world, democracies were
known for their fascination with change and progress.
Thucydides, for example, described the democratic Athenians
of the fifth century b.c. as a restless people “addicted to
innovation,” and centuries later, St. Paul found that the

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

Athenians “spent their time doing nothing but talking about

and listening to the latest ideas.” This kind of restless
questioning of orthodoxy is celebrated and protected in a
democratic culture.
The United States, with its intense focus on the liberties of
the individual, enshrines this resistance to intellectual authority
even more than other democracies. Of course, no discussion
about “how Americans think” is complete without an
obligatory nod to 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.”
This distrust of intellectual authority was rooted, Tocqueville
theorized, in the nature of American democracy. When
“citizens, placed on an equal footing, are all closely seen by
one another,” he wrote, they “are constantly brought back to
their own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of
truth. It is not only confidence in this or that man which is
destroyed, but the disposition to trust the authority of any man
whatsoever.”
Such observations have not been limited to early America.
Teachers, experts, and professional “knowers” have been
venting about a lack of deference from their societies since
Socrates was forced to drink his hemlock. 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-i ntellectual, unqualified,

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

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.1

In terms that would not sound out of place in our current era,
Ortega y
Gasset attributed the rise of an increasingly powerful but
increasingly ignorant public to many factors, including material
affluence, prosperity, and scientific achievements.
The American attachment to intellectual self- reliance
described by Tocqueville survived for nearly a century before
falling under a series of assaults from both within and without.
Technology, universal secondary education, the proliferation of
specialized expertise, and the emergence of the United States
as a global power in the mid- twentieth century all undermined
the idea— or, more accurately, the myth— that the average
American was adequately equipped either for the challenges of
daily life or for running the affairs of a large country.
Over a half century ago, the political scientist Richard
Hofstadter wrote that “the complexity of modern life has
steadily whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can
intelligently and competently perform for himself.”

In the original American populistic dream, the

omnicompetence of the common man was fundamental and

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

indispensable. It was believed that he could, without much

special preparation, pursue the professions and run the
government.
Today, he knows that he cannot even make his
breakfast without using devices, more or less mysterious to
him, which expertise has put at his disposal; and when he
sits down to breakfast and looks at his morning newspaper,
he reads about a whole range of issues and acknowledges,
if he is candid with himself, that he has not acquired
competence to judge most of them.2

Hofstadter argued— and this was back in 1963—t hat this

overwhelming complexity produced feelings of helplessness
and anger among a citizenry that knew itself increasingly to be
at the mercy of smarter elites. “What used to be a jocular and
usually benign ridicule of intellect and formal training has
turned into a malign resentment of the intellectual in his
capacity as expert,” Hofstadter warned. “Once the intellectual
was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is
fiercely resented because he is needed too much.”
Fifty years later, the law professor Ilya Somin pointedly
described how little had changed. Like Hofstadter before him,
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.”
More disturbing is that Americans have done little in those
intervening decades to remedy the gap between their own
knowledge and the level of information required to participate
in an advanced democracy. “The low level of political
knowledge in the American electorate,” Somin correctly notes,
“is still one of the best- established findings in social science.” 3

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

SO IT’S NOT NEW. IS IT EVEN A PROBLEM?

People who specialize in particular subjects are prone to think

that others should be as interested in it as they are. But really,
who needs to know all this stuff? Most experts in international
affairs would have difficulty passing a map test outside of their
area of specialization, so what’s the harm if the average person
has no idea how to nail the exact location of Kazakhstan? After
all, when the Rwandan genocide broke out in 1994, future
secretary of state Warren Christopher had to be shown the
location of Rwanda. So why should the rest of us walk around
carrying that kind of trivia in our heads?
No one can master that much information. We do our best,
and when we need to find something out, we consult the best
sources we can find. I remember asking my high school
chemistry teacher (a man I was certain knew everything) for
the atomic number of a certain element off the top of his head,
in part to challenge him but mostly because I was too lazy to
look it up myself. He raised an eyebrow and said that he didn’t
know. He then gestured over his shoulder at the periodic table
of elements posted on the wall and said, “This is why scientists
use charts, Tom.”
Without doubt, some of these expert complaints about
laypeople are unfair. Even the most attentive parent, the most
informed shopper, or the most civic- minded voter cannot keep
up with the flood of news about everything from childhood
nutrition to product safety to trade policy. If ordinary citizens
could absorb all of that information, they wouldn’t need
experts in the first place.
The death of expertise, however, is a different problem than
the historical fact of low levels of information among
laypeople. The issue is not indifference to established

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such

knowledge. This is new in American culture, and it represents
the aggressive replacement of expert views or established
knowledge with the insistence that every opinion on any matter
is as good as every other. This is a remarkable change in our
public discourse.
This change is not only unprecedented but dangerous. The
distrust of experts and the more general anti-i ntellectual
attitudes that go with it are problems that should be getting
better, but instead are getting worse. When Professor Somin
and others note that the public’s ignorance is no worse than it
was a half century ago, this in itself should be a cause for
alarm, if not panic. Holding the line isn’t good enough. In fact,
the line may not be holding at all: the death of expertise
actually threatens to reverse the gains of years of knowledge
among people who now assume they know more than they
actually do. This is a threat to the material and civic well-
being of citizens in a democracy.
It would be easy to dismiss a distrust of established
knowledge by attributing it to the stereotype of suspicious,
uneducated yokels rejecting the big- city ways of the
mysterious eggheads. But again the reality is far more
unsettling: campaigns against established knowledge are being
led by people who should know better.
In the case of vaccines, for example, low rates of
participation in child vaccination programs are actually not a
problem among small- town mothers with little schooling.
Those mothers have to accept vaccinations for their kids
because of the requirements in the public schools. The parents
more likely to resist vaccines, as it turns out, are found among
educated San Francisco suburbanites in Marin County. While
these mothers and fathers are not doctors, they are educated
just enough to believe they have the background to challenge

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

established medical science. Thus, in a counterintuitive irony,

educated parents are actually making worse decisions than
those with far less schooling, and they are putting everyone’s
children at risk.
Indeed, ignorance has become hip, with some Americans
now wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of
cultural sophistication. Consider, for example, the raw milk
movement, a fad among gourmands who advocate the right to
ingest untreated dairy products. In 2012, the New Yorker
reported on this trend, noting that “raw milk stirs the hedonism
of food lovers in a special way.”

Because it is not heated or homogenized and often comes

from animals raised on pasture, it tends to be richer and
sweeter, and, sometimes, to retain a whiff of the farm—t he
slightly discomfiting flavor known to connoisseurs as “cow
butt.” “Pasteurization strips away layers of complexity,
layers of aromatics,” Daniel Patterson, a chef who has used
raw milk to make custard and eggless ice cream at Coi, his
two- Michelin- star restaurant in San Francisco, said.4

Chef Patterson is an expert in the preparation of food, and

there’s no arguing with his, or anyone else’s, palate. But while
pasteurization may affect the taste of milk, it also strips away
pathogens that can kill human beings.
The raw milk movement is not some on- the- edge
experience plumped by a few exotic chefs. Raw milk adherents
argue not only that untreated dairy products taste good, but also
that they are healthier and better for human beings. After all, if
raw vegetables are better for us, why not raw everything? Why
not eat the way nature intended us to and go back to a purer,
simpler time?

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

It may have been a simpler time, but it was also a time

when people routinely died of food- borne diseases. Still, it’s a
free country, and if fully informed adult gastronomes want to
risk a trip to the hospital for the scent of a cow’s nether regions
in their coffee, that’s their choice. I’m not one to judge this too
harshly, since my favorite dishes include raw shellfish and
steak tartare, items whose menu disclaimers always make me
feel as if I’m ordering contraband. Still, while raw meat and
raw shellfish carry risks, they are not dietary staples, and
especially not for children, for whom raw milk is outright
hazardous.
In short order, doctors at the Centers for Disease Control
(CDC) tried to get involved, to no avail. The CDC issued a
report in 2012 that noted that raw dairy products were 150
times more likely than pasteurized products to cause food-
borne illness. A Food and Drug Administration expert put it as
bluntly as possible, calling the consumption of raw dairy the
food equivalent of Russian roulette. None of this has swayed
people who not only continue to ingest untreated products but
who insist on giving it to the consumers who have no choice or
ability to understand the debate: their children.
Why listen to doctors about raw milk? After all, they’ve
gotten other things wrong. When it comes to food, for example,
Americans for decades have been told to limit their
consumption of eggs and certain kinds of fats. Government
experts told people to limit their intake of red meat, increase
the role of grains in their diet, and in general to stay away from
anything that tastes good. (That last one, I admit, is how I
interpreted those recommendations.) Years later, it turned out
that eggs are not only harmless, they might even be good for
you. Margarine turned out to be worse for us than butter. And a
few glasses of wine each day might be better than teetotaling.

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

So there it is: the doctors were wrong. Is it time to break out

the bacon cheeseburgers and pour another martini?
Not quite. The debate about eggs isn’t over, but to focus on
one aspect of the American diet is to miss the point. The
doctors may have been mistaken about the specific impact of
eggs, but they’re not wrong that a steady diet of fast food,
washed down with a sugary soda or a six- pack of beer, isn’t
good for you. Some folks seized on the news about eggs (much
as they did on a bogus story about chocolate being a healthy
snack that made the rounds earlier) to rationalize never
listening to doctors, who clearly have a better track record than
the average overweight American at keeping people alive with
healthier diets.
At the root of all this is an inability among laypeople to
understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain
issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently
on everything. The fact of the matter is that experts are more
often right than wrong, especially on essential matters of fact.
And yet the public constantly searches for the loopholes in
expert knowledge that will allow them to disregard all expert
advice they don’t like.
In part, this is because human nature— as we’ll see— tends
to search for those loopholes in everything. But equally if not
more important is that when experts and professionals are
wrong, the consequences can be catastrophic. Raise the issue of
medical advice, for example, and you will almost certainly find
someone who will throw out the word “thalidomide” as though
it is a self- explanatory rejoinder. It’s been decades since the
introduction of thalidomide, a drug once thought safe that was
given to pregnant women as a sedative. No one realized at the
time that thalidomide also caused horrendous birth defects, and
pictures of children with missing or deformed limbs haunted

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

the public imagination for many years afterward. The drug’s

name has become synonymous with expert failure to this day.
No one is arguing, however, that experts can’t be wrong (a
subject we’ll discuss in this book). Rather, the point is that they
are less likely to be wrong than nonexperts. The same people
who anxiously point back in history to the thalidomide disaster
routinely pop dozens of drugs into their mouths, from aspirin to
antihistamines, which are among the thousands and thousands
of medications shown to be safe by decades of trials and tests
conducted by experts. It rarely occurs to the skeptics that for
every terrible mistake, there are countless successes that
prolong their lives.
Sometimes, second- guessing the professionals can turn into
an obsession, with tragic results. In 2015, a Massachusetts
accountant named Stephen Pasceri lost his seventy- eight- year-
old mother to cardiovascular disease. Mrs. Pasceri had a long
history of health trouble, including emphysema, and died after
an operation to repair a heart valve. Pasceri, however, was
convinced that one of his mother’s doctors, Michael Davidson
—t he director of endovascular cardiac surgery at a top Boston
hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School— had
ignored warnings about a particular drug given to Pasceri’s
mother. In a literal case of the death of expertise, the
accountant showed up at the hospital and shot the doctor to
death. He then killed himself after leaving behind a flash drive
with his “research” about the drug.
Obviously, Stephen Pasceri was a disturbed man, unhinged
by the death of his mother. But a few minutes of conversations
with professionals in any field will yield similar, if less
dramatic, stories. Doctors routinely tussle with patients over
drugs. Lawyers will describe clients losing money, and
sometimes their freedom, because of unheeded advice.
Teachers will relate stories of parents insisting that their

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

children’s exam answers are right even when they’re

demonstrably wrong. Realtors tell of clients who bought
houses against their experienced advice and ended up trapped
in a money pit.
No area of American life is immune to the death of
expertise. The American public’s declining capabilities in
science and mathematics are enabling multiple public health
crises from obesity to childhood diseases. Meanwhile, in the
worlds of politics and public policy— where at least some
familiarity with history, civics, and geography is crucial to
informed debate— attacks on established knowledge have
reached frightening proportions.

THE RISE OF THE LOW-I NFORMATION VOTER

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.
There are many examples of these brawls among what
pundits and analysts gently refer to now as “low- information
voters.” Whether about science or policy, however, they all
share the same disturbing characteristic: a solipsistic and thin-
skinned insistence that every opinion be treated as truth.
Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong”
from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to disrespect.

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

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.
The epidemic of ignorance in public policy debates has real
consequences for the quality of life and well- being of every
American. During the debate in 2009 over the Affordable Care
Act, for example, at least half of all Americans believed claims
by opponents like former Republican vice presidential nominee
Sarah Palin that the legislation included “death panels” that
would decide who gets health care based on a bureaucratic
decision about a patient’s worthiness to live. (Four years later,
almost a third of surgeons apparently continued to believe
this.)5 Nearly half of Americans also thought the ACA
established a uniform government health plan. Love it or hate
it, the program does none of these things. And two years after
the bill passed, at least 40 percent of Americans weren’t even
sure the program was still in force as a law.
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. Other complicated initiatives have produced
similar confusion.
Taxes are another good example of how public ignorance
influences national debates. Everybody hates taxes. Everybody
complains about them. And every spring, the hideous
complexity of the US tax code produces a fair amount of
anxiety among honest citizens who, at best, end up guessing at
the right answers when trying to pay their levy.

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The sad reality, however, is that the average American has

no real idea how his or her money is spent. Polls upon polls
show not only that Americans generally feel government
spends too much, and taxes them too highly, but also that they
are consistently wrong about who pays taxes, how much they
pay, and where the money goes. This, despite the fact that
information about the budget of the United States is more
accessible than the days when the government would have to
mail a document the size of a cinder block to the few voters
who wanted to see it.
Or consider foreign aid. This is a hot- button issue among
some Americans, who deride foreign aid as wasted money.
Americans routinely believe, on average, that more than 25
percent of the national budget is given away as largesse in the
form of foreign aid. In reality, that guess is not only wrong, but
wildly wrong: foreign aid is a small fraction of the budget, less
than three- quarters of 1 percent of the total expenditures of the
United States of America.
Only 5 percent of Americans know this. One in ten
Americans, meanwhile, think that more than half of the US
budget— that is, several trillion dollars— is given away
annually to other countries.6 Most think that no matter how
much it is, it’s given as a check worth cold cash. That’s also
wrong. Foreign aid, in fact, might even qualify as a jobs
program, since much of it is given in the form of products,
from food to military aircraft, actually purchased by the
government from Americans and then sent to other nations.
To argue that foreign aid is a waste of money is a
comprehensible political position. I and other experts might say
that such a blanket objection is unwise, but it is at least a
position rooted in principle rather than based on an error of
fact. To object to foreign aid because of a mistaken belief that

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it constitutes a quarter of the US budget, however, almost

immediately defeats any sensible discussion right at the outset.
This level of ignorance can get pretty expensive. Americans
tend to support national missile defenses against nuclear attack,
for example, in part because many believe the United States
already has them. (This is a public misconception going back
decades, long before the United States fielded the small
number of interceptors now operational in Alaska.) Whether
such systems will work or whether they should be built are
now largely irrelevant questions. What began as a program
aimed at the Soviet Union during the Cold War in the 1980s is
now enshrined in the popular imagination and supported by
both Republicans and Democrats to the tune of billions of
dollars.
The overall problem here isn’t among people who have
genuine concerns about possible side effects from vaccines, or
who might be conflicted about whether to build defenses
against nuclear attack. Reasoned skepticism is essential not
only to science but also to a healthy democracy. Instead, the
death of expertise is more like a national bout of ill temper, a
childish rejection of authority in all its forms coupled to an
insistence that strongly held opinions are indistinguishable
from facts.
Experts are supposed to clear up this kind of confusion or at
least to serve as guides through the thicket of confusion issues.
But who are the real “experts”? Before we move on to discuss
the sources of the campaign against established knowledge,
and why we’re in such a pickle at a time when citizens should
be more informed and engaged than ever before, we need to
think about how we divide “experts” or “intellectuals” from the
rest of the population.
“Expert” is an overused label, of course: every business
proclaims itself “the yard care experts” or the “carpet cleaning

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

experts,” and while that has some meaning, surgeons and

carpet cleaners are not the same kind of expert. “Intellectual”
and “academic” are, more than ever, terms of derision in
America. Let’s untangle some of this before we proceed.

EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

So who’s an expert? What constitutes “expertise”?

A lot of people declare that they’re experts or intellectuals,
and sometimes they are. On the other hand, self- identification
can be worse than misleading. People who claim to be experts
are sometimes only about as self- aware as people who think
they’re good kissers.
Dictionaries aren’t much help here. Most define experts in a
rather circular way, as people who have “comprehensive” and
“authoritative” knowledge, which is another way of describing
people whose command of a subject means that the
information they provide the rest of us is true and can be
trusted. (How do we know it can be trusted? Because experts
tell us so.) As Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography,
expertise is one of those things that’s difficult to define, but we
usually know it when we see it.
There are lots of experts in the world. Some are easy to
spot: medical doctors, engineers, and airline pilots are experts,
as are film directors and concert pianists. Athletes and their
coaches are experts. But so are plumbers, police officers, and
carpenters. For that matter, your local mail carrier is an expert,
at least in his own field; if you need a blood test interpreted,
you should ask a doctor or a nurse, but if you’d like to know
exactly how a letter from your friend in Brazil got to your door
in Michigan, you might ask someone who’s been handling that
responsibility for years.

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

Specialized knowledge is inherent in every occupation, and

so here I will use the words “professionals,” “intellectuals,”
and “experts” interchangeably, in the broader sense of people
who have mastered particular skills or bodies of knowledge
and who practice those skills or use that knowledge as their
main occupation in life. This helps us to distinguish the
“professional pilot” from the weekend flyer, or even a
“professional gambler” from the hapless mark who
occasionally hands money to a casino.
Put another way, experts are the people who know
considerably more on a subject than the rest of us, and are
those to whom we turn when we need advice, education, or
solutions in a particular area of human knowledge. Note that
this does not mean that experts know all there is to know about
something. Rather, it means that experts in any given subject
are, by their nature, a minority whose views are more likely to
be “authoritative”—t hat is, correct or accurate— than anyone
else’s.
And even among experts, there are experts. A doctor with a
newly minted MD is far more qualified than any layperson to
diagnose and treat a disease, but when faced by a puzzling case
he or she may in turn defer to a specialist. A practicing attorney
and a Supreme Court justice are both lawyers, but the one in
the black robes in Washington is more likely to be an expert on
constitutional issues than the one handling wills and divorces
for a small community. Of course, experience counts, too. In
2009, when a USAir flight in New York City was crippled on
takeoff by striking a flock of birds, there were two pilots in the
cockpit, but the more expert captain, with many more hours of
flying time, said “my aircraft” and guided the jet to a water
ditching in the Hudson River. Everyone aboard survived.
One reason claims of expertise grate on people in a
democracy is that specialization is necessarily exclusive. When

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

we study a certain area of knowledge or spend our lives in a

particular occupation, we not only forego expertise in other
jobs or subjects, but also trust that other people in the
community know what they’re doing in their area as surely as
we do in our own. As much as we might want to go up to the
cockpit after the engine flames out to give the pilots some
helpful tips, we assume— in part, because we have to— that
they’re better able to cope with the problem than we are.
Otherwise, our highly evolved society breaks down into islands
of incoherence, where we spend our time in poorly informed
second- guessing instead of trusting each other.
So how do we distinguish these experts among us, and how
do we identify them? True expertise, the kind of knowledge on
which others rely, is an intangible but recognizable
combination of education, talent, experience, and peer
affirmation. Each of these is a mark of expertise, but most
people would rightly judge how all of them are combined in a
given subject or professional field when deciding whose advice
to trust.
Formal training or education is the most obvious mark of
expert status, and the easiest to identify, but it is only a start.
For many professions, credentials are necessary for entry into a
field: teachers, nurses, and plumbers all have to have
certification of some kind to exercise their skills, as a signal to
others that their abilities have been reviewed by their peers and
meet a basic standard of competence. While some of the most
determined opponents of established knowledge deride this as
mere “credentialism,” these degrees and licenses are tangible
signs of achievement and important markers that help the rest
of us separate hobbyists (or charlatans) from true experts.
To be fair, some of these credentials are new inventions,
and some of them might not matter very much. In some cases,
credentials are made up by states and localities as revenue

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

gimmicks, while others affirm no skill other than passing a test

once and then never again. Lawyers in modern America
complete a law degree, but in earlier times young men merely
“read law” and then had to pass admittance to their state’s bar.
While this less formal system produced men of greatness like
Abraham Lincoln—a nd by all accounts, he wasn’t that
competent an attorney— it also produced lesser lights such as
Henry Billings Brown, the Supreme Court justice who wrote
the majority opinion in the “separate but equal” Plessy v.
Ferguson decision. (Brown attended courses in law at both
Harvard and Yale but did not graduate from either of them.)
Still, credentials are a start. They carry the imprimatur of
the institutions that bestow them, and they are a signal of
quality, just as consumer brands tend to promote (and,
hopefully, to protect) the quality of their products. Look
carefully at an actual college degree, and note what most of
them actually say: that the bearer has been examined by the
faculty and admitted to the degree, which in turn is backed by a
committee of schools in that region or a body representing a
particular profession. Those faculties, and the associations who
accredit their courses of study, are in effect vouching for the
graduate’s knowledge of a particular subject. The name of the
school or institution, no less than the degree holder, is on the
line, at least as an initial affirmation of capability.
There is no denying that good colleges have graduated a lot
of people without a lick of common sense. Lesser institutions
have likewise produced geniuses. But as the saying goes, while
the race may not always be to the swift, that’s the way to bet.
The track record for genius production from MIT or Georgia
Tech is demonstrably higher than for less competitive schools
or self- educated inventors. Still, MIT has also produced people
who not only can’t balance a checkbook, but who aren’t very
good engineers. What makes the experts, especially the

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

prominent leaders in their specialization, stand apart from

others with similar credentials?
One difference is aptitude or natural talent. Talent is
indispensable to an expert. (As Ernest Hemingway once said
about writing, “Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of
two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent.”)
The person who studied Chaucer in college is going to know
more than most other people about English literature, in some
purely factual way. But the scholar who has a real talent for the
study of medieval literature not only knows more, but can
explain it coherently and perhaps even generate new
knowledge on the subject.
Talent separates those who have gained a credential from
people who have a deeper feel or understanding of their area of
expertise. Every field has maze- bright achievers who, as it
turns out, are not good at their jobs. There are brilliant law
students who freeze in front of a jury. Some of the high scorers
on a police examination have no street smarts and will never
develop them. A fair number of new holders of doctorates from
top universities will never write another thing of consequence
after laboring through a dissertation. 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.
This is where experience helps to separate the credentialed
from the incompetent. Sometimes, markets themselves winnow
out untalented or unskilled would- be experts. While
professional stockbrokers make mistakes, for example, most
manage to make a living. Amateur day-t raders, however,
almost never make money. Business Insider CEO and former
Wall Street analyst Henry Blodgett once called amateur day-t
rading “the dumbest job there is” and that most people who
engage it “would make more money working at Burger King.” 7

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

Eventually, they run out of cash. Likewise, bad teachers over

time will tend to get bad evaluations, lousy lawyers will lose
clients, and untalented athletes will fail to make the cut.
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. Indeed,
asking about “experience” is another way of asking the age-
old question: “What have you done lately?” Experts stay
engaged in their field, continually improve their skills, learn
from their mistakes, and have visible track records. Over the
span of their career, they get better, or at least maintain their
high level of competence, and couple it to the wisdom— again,
an intangible— that comes from time.
There are many examples of the role of experience in
expertise. Experienced law enforcement officers often have an
instinct for trouble that their younger colleagues miss, an
intuition they can explain only as a sense that something “isn’t
right.” Doctors or pilots who’ve experienced and survived
multiple crises in the operating theater or the cockpit are less
likely to be panicked by adversity than their newer colleagues.
Veteran teachers are less intimidated by challenging or difficult
students. Stand- up comedians who’ve done a lot of gigs on the
road do not fear hecklers, and even know how to use them as
raw material for more laughs.
These are not always quantifiable skills. Here’s an example
from my own education and field of study.
After college, I went on to the Harriman Institute at
Columbia University for further study in the politics of the
Soviet Union. This was part of my own credentialing: I wanted
to teach and work in Soviet affairs, and Columbia was one of
the best schools in that field at the time. The director of the
institute was a professor named Marshall Shulman, a well-k

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

nown Sovietologist who had also served in Jimmy Carter’s

White House as an advisor on Soviet matters.
Like all Sovietologists, Shulman studied the Soviet press
very carefully for indications of policy positions within the
Kremlin. This process was an almost Talmudic exercise in
textual analysis, and it was a mystery to those of us who had
never done it. How, we students asked him, did he make sense
of any of the stilted prose of Soviet newspapers, or divine any
meaning from such turgid passages? How could a thousand
formulaic stories on the heroic struggles of collective farms
illuminate the secrets of one of the most closed systems on
earth? Shulman shrugged and said, “I can’t really explain it. I
just read Pravda until my nose twitches.”
At the time, I thought that this was one of the stupidest
things I’d ever heard. I even started to wonder if I’d made a
poor life choice investing in further education. What Shulman
meant, however, is that he’d spent years reading Soviet
periodicals, and thus he had become so attuned to their method
of communication that he could spot changes or irregularities
when they passed before his trained and experienced eye.
Although skeptical, I did the same throughout my schooling
and into the early years of my career. I read Soviet materials
almost daily and tried to see the patterns in them that were
previously invisible to me. Eventually, I came to understand
what Shulman meant. I can’t say that my nose ever twitched or
my ears wiggled, but I realized that reading things from a
foreign country in a foreign language was a specific kind of
expertise. It could not be distilled into a course or a test. There
was no quick means to develop it as a skill: it took time,
practice, and advice from more experienced experts in the same
field.
Another mark of true experts is their acceptance of
evaluation and correction by other experts. Every professional

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

group and expert community has watchdogs, boards,

accreditors, and certification authorities whose job is to police
its own members and to ensure not only that they live up to the
standards of their own specialty, but also that their arts are
practiced only by people who actually know what they’re
doing.
This self-p olicing is central to the concept of
professionalism and is another way how we can identify
experts. Every specialized group creates barriers to entry into
their profession. Some of these barriers are more reasonable
and honest than others, but usually they are grounded in the
need to ensure that the name of the profession isn’t devalued
by incompetence or fraud. I could gather together a handful of
colleagues, hang a shingle outside my home, and call it the
“Tom Nichols Institute of High- Energy Physics,” but the fact
of the matter is that I don’t know a thing about high- energy
physics. That’s why my notional institute would never be
accredited by real physicists, who would not take kindly to me
printing up phony degrees and who in short order would seek
to close me down to protect the meaning of the word
“physicist.”
Expert communities rely on these peer- run institutions to
maintain standards and to enhance social trust. Mechanisms
like peer review, board certification, professional associations,
and other organizations and professions help to protect quality
and to assure society— that is, the expert’s clients—t hat
they’re safe in accepting expert claims of competence. When
you take an elevator to the top floor of a tall building, the
certificate in the elevator does not say “good luck up there”; it
says that a civic authority, relying on engineers educated and
examined by other engineers, have looked at that box and
know, with as much certainty as anyone can, that you’ll be
safe.

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

Experience and professional affirmation matter, but it’s also

true that there is considerable wisdom in the old Chinese
warning to beware a craftsman who claims twenty years of
experience when in reality he’s only had one year of
experience twenty times. There are bad dentists who were
lousy at pulling teeth when they graduated from dentistry
school and who do not get much better at it before retirement.
There are teachers who induce narcolepsy in their students on
the first day of their class just as they do on their last. But we
should remember two important things about experts, even
ones who might not be the best in their field.
First, while our clumsy dentist might not be the best tooth
puller in town, he or she is better at it than you. We don’t all
need the dean of the dentistry school for a crown or a simple
cavity. You might be able to get lucky once and pull a tooth,
but you’re not educated or experienced enough to do it without
a great deal of risk. Most people won’t even cut their own hair.
(Beauticians, after all, handle all kinds of chemicals and sharp
objects, and they are another group that requires training and
licensing.) Few of us are going to risk taking out our own teeth
or those of our loved ones.
Second, and related to this point about relative skill, experts
will make mistakes, but they are far less likely to make
mistakes than a layperson. This is a crucial distinction between
experts and everyone else, in that experts know better than
anyone the pitfalls of their own profession. As the renowned
physicist Werner Heisenberg once put it, an expert “is someone
who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his
subject and how to avoid them.” (His fellow physicist Niels
Bohr had a different take: “An expert is someone who has
made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow
field.”) Both of these points should help us to understand why
the pernicious idea that “everyone can be an expert” is so

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

dangerous. It’s true in a relative sense that almost anyone with

particular skills can develop specialized knowledge to which
others, in most circumstances, must defer. Trouble, however,
rears its head when people start to believe that knowing a little
bit about something means “expertise.” It’s a thin line between
the hobbyist who knows a lot about warships from reading
Jane’s Fighting Ships and an actual expert on the capabilities
of the world’s naval vessels, but that line nonetheless exists.
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.
And while there are self-t rained experts, they are rare
exceptions. More common are the people seeking quick entry
into complicated fields but who have no idea how poor their
efforts are. They are like the moderately entertaining karaoke
singers who think they have a chance to become the next
winner of American Idol, or the scratch golfers who think they
might take a shot at going pro. Doing something well is not the
same thing as becoming a trusted source of advice or learning
about a subject. (Notice that the same people who think they
can become singers never think they can become voice
coaches.)
This lack of self- awareness and intellectual limits can
produce some awkward interactions between experts and
laypeople. Some years ago, for example, I had a call from a
gentleman who insisted that he had some important work that
might be of use in our curriculum at the Naval War College.
He’d been referred to me by a former student at another school,
and he very much wanted me to read an important article about
the Middle East. I asked who wrote the piece. Well, he
answered, he did. He was a businessman, and he’d “read a lot.”
I asked if he’d had any training in the subject, visited the
region, or read any of the languages of the Middle East. He had

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EXPERTS AND CITIzENS

no such background, he admitted, and then said, “But after all,

you can
become an expert reading a book a month, right?”
Wrong.
American culture tends to fuel these kinds of romantic
notions about the wisdom of the common person or the
gumption of the self- educated genius. These images empower
a certain kind of satisfying social fantasy, in which ordinary
people out- perform the stuffy professor or the nerdy scientist
through sheer grit and ingenuity.
There are plenty of examples of this in American popular
culture, especially in films that depict remarkably bright young
people outsmarting businesses, universities, and even
governments. In 1997, for example, Ben Affleck and Matt
Damon scripted a film called Good Will Hunting, about a
janitor who turns out to be a secret prodigy. In what is now an
iconic scene, Damon growls out a chowdery Boston working-
man’s accent and faces down an effete, ponytailed Ivy League
graduate student in a bar:

You’re a first- year grad student; you just got finished

reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably.
You’re gonna be convinced of that ’til next month when
you get to James Lemon. Then you’re going to be talking
about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania
were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740.
That’s gonna last until next year. You’re gonna be in
here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know,
the pre- revolutionary utopia and the capital- forming
effects of military mobilization… . You got that from
Vickers, “Work in Essex County,” page 98, right? Yeah, I
read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this

matter?
You dropped 150 grand on a [expletive] education you
could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public
library.
Later, the young man fences with his psychotherapist about the
works of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Stilted and silly,
these moments nonetheless resonated with moviegoers at the
time. Damon and Affleck went home with Oscars for the
screenplay, and no doubt they encouraged at least some
viewers to believe that reading enough books is almost like
going to school.
In the end, expertise is difficult to define, and experts are
sometimes hard to tell from dilettantes. Still, we should be able
to distinguish between people who have a passing acquaintance
with a subject and people whose knowledge is definitive. No
one’s knowledge is complete, and experts realize this better
than anyone. But education, training, practice, experience, and
acknowledgment by others in the same field should provide us
with at least a rough guide to dividing experts from the rest of
society.
One of the most basic reasons experts and laypeople have
always driven each other crazy is because they’re all human
beings. That is, they all share similar problems in the way they
absorb and interpret information. Even the most educated
people can make elementary mistakes in reasoning, while less
intelligent people are prone to overlook the limitations in their
own abilities. Expert or layperson, our brains work (or
sometimes don’t) in similar ways: we hear things the way we
want to hear them, and we reject facts we don’t like. Those
problems are the subject of the next chapter.

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How Conversation
Became Exhausting
A few centuries earlier … humans still knew pretty well when
a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved
they really believed it.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
“The Dude,” The Big Lebowski

I’D LIKE AN ARGuMENT, PLEASE

Conversation in the twenty- first century is sometimes

exhausting and often maddening, not only between experts and
laypeople, but among everyone else, too. If in a previous era
too much deference was paid to experts, today there is little
deference paid to anyone at all. Even among laypeople in their
daily interactions, disagreement and debate have devolved into
grueling exchanges of contradiction, random factoids, and
shaky sources few of the participants themselves understand.
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

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

deliberate and decide. Instead, these advances seem to have

made all of this worse rather than better.
Public debate over almost everything devolves into trench
warfare, in which the most important goal is to establish that
the other person is wrong. Sensible differences of opinion
deteriorate into a bad high school debate in which the objective
is to win and facts are deployed like checkers on a board—
none of this rises to the level of chess— mostly to knock out
other facts. Like the customer in Monty Python’s legendary
“Argument Clinic” sketch, we find ourselves merely
gainsaying whatever the other person said last. (“This isn’t an
argument,” the angry customer tells the professional arguer.
“Yes, it is,” he responds. “No, it isn’t! It’s just contradiction!”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is!”)
Here, we need to start with the obvious and universal
problem: you and me. Or more accurately, the way you and I
think. From biology to social psychology, we fight an uphill
battle in trying to understand each other.
We all have an inherent and natural tendency to search for
evidence that already meshes with our beliefs. Our brains are
actually wired to work this way, which is why we argue even
when we shouldn’t. And if we feel socially or personally
threatened, we will argue until we’re blue in the face. (Perhaps
in the Internet age, the expression on social media should be
“until our fingers are numb.”) Experts are no exception here;
like everyone else, we want to believe what we want to believe.
In our personal lives, we tend to be a bit more forgiving,
because we are social animals who want acceptance and
affection from those closest to us. In our intimate social circles,
most of us think we’re competent and trustworthy, and we
want others to see us that way, too. We all want to be taken
seriously and to be respected. In practice, this means we don’t

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HOW CONVERSATION BECAME EXHAuSTING

want anyone to think we’re dumb, and so we pretend to be

smarter than we are. Over time, we even come to believe it.
Of course, there’s also the basic problem that some people
just aren’t very bright. And as we’ll see, the people who are the
most certain about being right tend to be the people with the
least reason to have such self- confidence. But it is too facile
simply to dismiss the exasperating nature of modern discussion
as only a function of the stupidity of others. (That’s not to say
it isn’t sometimes true.) Most people simply are not that
intellectually limited, at least not if measured by basic
indicators such as rates of literacy or completion of high
school.
The fact of the matter is that the pitfalls of discussion and
debate aren’t limited to mistakes made by the least intelligent
among us. We all fall prey to a series of problems, including
the way we all try to resolve problems and questions in ways
that make us feel better about ourselves and our friends. The
many influences on the death of expertise, including higher
education, the media, and the Internet, are all enablers of these
basic human traits. All of these challenges to better
communication between experts and citizens can be overcome
with education, rigor, and honesty, but only if we know how
they’re plaguing us in the first place.

MAYBE WE’RE ALL JuST DuMB

Let’s confront the most painful possibility first. Perhaps

experts and laypeople have problems talking with each other
because the ordinary citizen is just unintelligent. Maybe the
intellectual gulf between the educated elites and the masses is
now so large that they simply cannot talk to each other except
to exchange expressions of mutual contempt. Maybe

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

conversations and arguments fail because one— or both— of

the parties is just stupid.
These are fighting words. No one likes to be called stupid:
it’s a judgmental, harsh word that implies not only a lack of
intelligence, but a willful ignorance almost to the point of
moral failure. (I have used it, more than I should. So have you,
most likely.) You can call people with whom you disagree
misinformed, mistaken, incorrect, or almost anything else. But
don’t call them stupid.
Fortunately, the use of “stupid” is not only rude, it’s mostly
inaccurate. By any measure Americans are smarter, or at least
no less intelligent, than they were several decades ago. Nor was
the early twentieth century a Periclean Age of culture and
learning. In 1943, incoming college freshmen— only 6 percent
of whom could list the original thirteen colonies— named
Abraham Lincoln as the first president and the one who
“emaciated [sic] the slaves.” The New York Times saw those
results and took a moment from reporting on World War II to
lament the nation’s “appallingly ignorant” youth.1
Whether people in the twenty- first century can keep up
with the gap between their education and the speed of change
in the world is another matter entirely. Grade school students in
1910 and 2010 both had to learn how to calculate the sides of a
triangle, but today’s students must use that knowledge to
comprehend the existence of a permanent international space
station, whereas their great- great- grandparents likely had
never seen a car, much less an airplane. And nothing can
prevent willful detachment, in any era. No amount of education
can teach someone the name of their member of Congress if
they don’t care in the first place.
With that said, there’s still the problem of at least some
people thinking they’re bright when in fact they’re not very
bright at all. We’ve all been trapped at a party or a dinner when

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the least- informed person in the room holds court, never

doubting his or her own intelligence and confidently lecturing
the rest of us with a cascade of mistakes and misinformation.
It’s not your imagination: people spooling off on subjects about
which they know very little and with completely unfounded
confidence really happens, and science has finally figured it
out.
This phenomenon is called “the Dunning- Kruger Effect,”
named for David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the research
psychologists at Cornell University who identified it in a
landmark 1999 study. The Dunning- Kruger Effect, in sum,
means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that
you’re not actually dumb. Dunning and Kruger more gently
label such people as “unskilled” or “incompetent.” But that
doesn’t change their central finding: “Not only do they reach
erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their
incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”2
In fairness to the “unskilled,” we all tend to overestimate
ourselves. Ask people where they think they rate on any
number of talents, and you will encounter the “above average
effect,” in which everyone thinks they’re … well, above
average. This, as Dunning and Kruger dryly note, is “a result
that defies the logic of descriptive statistics.” It is nonetheless
so recognizable a human failing that the humorist Garrison
Keillor famously created an entire town dedicated to this
principle, the mythical Lake Woebegone, where “all the
children are above average” in his radio show A Prairie Home
Companion.
As Dunning later explained, we all overestimate ourselves,
but the less competent do it more than the rest of us.

A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others

have confirmed that people who don’t know much about a

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given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to
grossly overestimate their prowess and performance,
whether it’s grammar, emotional intelligence, logical
reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial
knowledge. College students who hand in exams that will
earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be
worthy of far higher grades; low- performing chess players,
bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people
applying for a renewed driver’s license, similarly
overestimate their competence by a long shot.3

Students who study for a test, older people trying to maintain

their independence, and medical students looking forward to
their careers would rather be optimistic than underestimate
themselves. Other than in fields like athletic competition,
where incompetence is manifest and undeniable, it’s normal for
people to avoid saying they’re bad at something.
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. Good
singers know when they’ve hit a sour note; good directors
know when a scene in a play isn’t working; good marketers
know when an ad campaign is going to be a flop. Their less
competent counterparts, by comparison, have no such ability.
They think they’re doing a great job.
Pair such people with experts, and, predictably enough,
misery results. The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious
loop, in which people who don’t know much about a subject do
not know when they’re in over their head talking with an
expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who

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have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize

when they’re failing to make a logical argument. In short order,
the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone
walks away angry.
Even more exasperating is that there is no way to educate or
inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.
Dunning described the research done at Cornell as something
like “a less flamboyant version of Jimmy Kimmel’s bit,” and it
proved the comedian’s point that when people have no idea
what they’re talking about, it does not deter them from talking
anyway.

In our work, we ask survey respondents if they are familiar

with certain technical concepts from physics, biology,
politics, and geography. A fair number claim familiarity
with genuine terms like centripetal force and photon. But
interestingly, they also claim some familiarity with
concepts that are entirely made up, such as the plates of
parallax, ultra- lipid, and cholarine. In one study, roughly
90 percent claimed some knowledge of at least one of the
nine fictitious concepts we asked them about.

Even worse, “the more well- versed respondents considered

themselves in a general topic, the more familiarity they claimed
with the meaningless terms associated with it in the survey.”
This makes it tough to argue with these “incompetent
individuals,” because when compared with the experts, “they
were less able to spot competence when they saw it.”
In other words, the least- competent people were the least
likely to know they were wrong or to know that others were
right, the most likely to try to fake it, and the least able to learn
anything.

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Dunning and Kruger have several explanations for this

problem. In general, people don’t like to hurt each other’s
feelings, and in some workplaces, people and even supervisors
might be reluctant to correct incompetent friends or colleagues.
Some activities, like writing or speaking, do not have any
evident means of producing immediate feedback. You can only
miss so many swings in baseball before you have to admit you
might not be a good hitter, but you can mangle grammar and
syntax every day without ever realizing how poorly you speak.
The problem of the “least competent” is an immediate
challenge to discussions between experts and laypeople, but
there’s not much we can do about a fundamental characteristic
of human nature. Not everyone, however, is incompetent, and
almost no one is incompetent at everything. What kinds of
errors do more intelligent or agile- minded people make in
trying to comprehend complicated issues? Not surprisingly,
ordinary citizens encounter pitfalls and biases that befall
experts as well.
CONFIRMATION BIAS: BECAuSE YOu KNEW THIS
ALREADY

“Confirmation bias” is the most common—a nd easily the most

irritating— obstacle to productive conversation, and not just
between experts and laypeople. The term refers to the tendency
to look for information that only confirms what we believe, to
accept facts that only strengthen our preferred explanations,
and to dismiss data that challenge what we already accept as
truth. We all do it, and you can be certain that you and I and
everyone who’s ever had an argument with anyone about
anything has infuriated someone else with it.
For example, if we think left-h anded people are evil (it’s
where the word sinister comes from, after all), every left-
handed murderer proves our point. We’ll see them everywhere

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in the news, since those are the stories we will choose to

remember. No amount of data on how many more right-
handed killers are on Death Row will sway us. Every lefty is
proof; every righty is an exception. Likewise, if we’ve heard
Boston drivers are rude, the next time we’re visiting Beantown
we’ll remember the ones who honked at us or cut us off. We
will promptly ignore or forget the ones who let us into traffic or
waved a thank you. (For the record, in 2014 the roadside
assistance company AutoVantage rated Houston the worst city
for rude drivers. Boston was fifth.)
In the 1988 film Rain Man, the autistic character Ray is a
perfect, if extreme, example of confirmation bias. Ray is a
savant whose mind is like a computer: it can do complex
calculations at great speed, and it contains a giant repository of
unrelated facts. But Ray, due to his condition, cannot arrange
those facts into a coherent context. Whatever Ray’s mind
remembers is more important than all the other facts in the
world.
Thus, when Ray and his brother have to fly from Ohio to
California, Ray panics. Every US airline has, at some point,
suffered a terrible disaster and Ray can remember the dates and
body counts of every single one. Focused on these terrifying
exceptions, Ray refuses to get on any of the available flights.
When the exasperated brother asks which company Ray will
trust, he quietly names Australia’s national airline. “Qantas,”
he says. “Qantas never crashed.” Of course, Qantas does not
fly domestically within the United States, and so Ray and his
brother set off to drive cross- country, which is vastly more
dangerous than flying. But because Ray has no databank of
awe-i nducing car crashes in his head, he gladly gets in the car.
We’re all a little bit like Ray. We focus on the data that
confirm our fears or fuel our hopes. We remember things that
make an impression on us and ignore less dramatic realities.

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And when we argue with each other, or when we consult the

advice of an expert, most of us have a hard time letting go of
those memories, no matter how irrational it may be to focus on
them.
To some extent, this is a problem not of general intelligence
but of education. People simply do not understand numbers,
risk, or probability, and few things can make discussion
between experts and laypeople more frustrating than this
“innumeracy,” as the mathematician John Allen Paulos
memorably called it. For people who believe flying is
dangerous, there will never be enough safe landings to
outweigh the fear of the one crash. “Confronted with these
large numbers and with the correspondingly small probabilities
associated with them,” Paulos wrote in 2001, “the innumerate
will inevitably respond with the non sequitur, ‘Yes, but what if
you’re that one,’ and then nod knowingly, as if they’ve
demolished your argument with their penetrating insight.”4
Human beings can get quite creative with the “but what if
I’m the one unlucky case” argument. Back in the early 1970s, I
visited an uncle who lived in rural Greece. He was a tough,
athletic man, but he had a terrible fear of flying, which was
preventing him from going to London to seek medical
treatment for a serious ailment. My father tried to assure him
with the fatalistic suggestion that while everyone has a time
they have to leave the earth one way or another, it’s likely not
his time to go. My uncle, like so many people who fear flying,
resorted to a common objection: “Yes, but what if it’s the
pilot’s time to go?”
None of us is perfectly rational, and most of us fear
situations in which we are not in control. My uncle was an
uneducated man born in a village in Greece at the turn of the
nineteenth century. I am an educated man of the twenty- first
century with a good grasp of statistics and history—a nd yet

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I’m not much better about flying on those nights I’ve been
buckled into the seat of a jetliner during some bumpy
approaches into Providence. At moments like that, I try to think
about the thousands of aircraft on approach all over the world,
and the incredibly small chance that my plane will hit the
Disaster Lottery. Usually, I fail miserably: all the flights that
may be safely landing from Vancouver to Johannesburg are
completely irrelevant to me as I grip the arms of my seat while
my aircraft skims the housetops of Rhode Island.
The late science fiction writer and medical doctor Michael
Crichton used an example from the early days of the AIDS
epidemic in the early 1980s to show how people are so often
convinced that they will always draw the shortest straw. The
disease was poorly understood at the time, and a friend called
Crichton for reassurance. Instead, she ended up nettled at the
doctor’s insistence on logic:

I try to explain about risk. Because I have recently noticed

how few people really understand the risks they face. I
watch people keep guns in their houses, drive without
seatbelts, eat artery- clogging French food, and smoke
cigarettes, yet they never worry about these things. Instead
they worry about AIDS. It’s kind of crazy.
“Ellen. Do you worry about dying in a car crash?”
“No, never.”
“Worry about getting murdered?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re much more likely to die in a car accident,
or be murdered by a stranger, than to get AIDS.”
“Thanks a lot,” Ellen says. She sounds annoyed. “I’m
so glad I called you. You’re really reassuring, Michael.”5

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A decade later, AIDS was better understood and the hysteria

faded. In later years, however, new health risks like Ebola,
SARS, and other rare afflictions have caused similar irrational
reactions, all of them a concern to innumerate Americans who
worry more about an exotic disease than about talking on their
mobile phones while driving home after having a few drinks at
the local pub.
Notice, too, how this bias almost never works in the other
direction. Few of us are certain of being the exception in a
good way. We’ll buy a lottery ticket, fantasize about it for a
moment, and then put it in our pocket and forget about it. No
one heads to a car dealership or a realtor with tomorrow’s
Powerball number.
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. Your brain doesn’t much care about all those other
people who survived a plane ride or a one- night stand: they’re
not you. Your intellect, operating on limited or erroneous
information, is doing its job, trying to minimize any risk to
your life, no matter how small. When we fight confirmation
bias, we’re trying to correct for a basic function—a feature,
not a bug— of the human mind.
Whether the question is mortal peril or one of life’s daily
dilemmas, confirmation bias comes into play because people
must rely on what they already know. They cannot approach
every problem as though their minds are clean slates. This is
not the way memory works, and more to the point, it would
hardly be an effective strategy to begin every morning trying to
figure everything out from scratch.
Scientists and researchers tussle with confirmation bias all
the time as a professional hazard. They, too, have to make
assumptions in order to set up experiments or explain puzzles,

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which in turn means they’re already bringing some baggage to

their projects. They have to make guesses and use intuition,
just like the rest of us, since it would waste a lot of time for
every research program to begin from the assumption that no
one knows anything and nothing ever happened before today. 6
“Doing before knowing” is a common problem in setting up
any kind of careful investigation: after all, how do we know
what we’re looking for if we haven’t found it yet?7
Researchers learn to recognize this dilemma early in their
training, and they don’t always succeed in defeating it.
Confirmation bias can lead even the most experienced experts
astray. Doctors, for example, will sometimes get attached to a
diagnosis and then look for evidence of the symptoms they
suspect already exist in a patient while ignoring markers of
another disease or injury. (Television’s fictional diagnostician
Dr. House would tell his medical students, “It’s never lupus,”
which, of course, led to an episode where the most arrogant
doctor in the world had to contend with his failure to spot the
one case in which it was, in fact, lupus.) Even though every
researcher is told that “a negative result is still a result,” no one
really wants to discover that their initial assumptions went up
in smoke.
This is how, for example, a 2014 study of public attitudes
about gay marriage went terribly wrong. A graduate student
claimed he’d found statistically unassailable proof that if
opponents of gay marriage talked about the issue with someone
who was actually gay, they were likelier to change their minds.
His findings were endorsed by a senior faculty member at
Columbia University who had signed on as a coauthor of the
study. It was a remarkable finding that basically amounted to
proof that reasonable people can actually be talked out of
homophobia.

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The only problem was that the ambitious young researcher

had falsified the data. The discussions he claimed he was
analyzing never took place. When others outside the study
reviewed it and raised alarms, the Columbia professor pulled
the article. The student, who was about to start work on a
bright future as a faculty member at Princeton, found himself
out of a job.
Why didn’t the faculty and reviewers who should have been
keeping tabs on the student find the fraud right at the start?
Because of confirmation bias. As the journalist Maria
Konnikova later reported in the New Yorker, the student’s
supervisor admitted that he wanted to believe in its findings.
He and other scholars wanted the results to be true, and so they
were less likely to question the methods that produced their
preferred answer. “In short, confirmation bias— which is
especially powerful when we think about social issues— may
have made the study’s shakiness easier to overlook,”
Konnikova wrote in a review of the whole business. 8 Indeed, it
was “enthusiasm about the study that led to its exposure,”
because other scholars, hoping to build on the results, found the
fraud only when they delved into the details of research they
thought had already reached the conclusion they preferred.
This is why scientists, when possible, run experiments over
and over and then submit their results to other people in a
process called “peer review.” This process— when it works—
calls upon an expert’s colleagues (his or her peers) to act as
well- intentioned but rigorous devil’s advocates. This usually
takes place in a “double- blind” process, meaning that the
researcher and the referees are not identified to each other, the
better to prevent personal or institutional biases from
influencing the review.
This is an invaluable process. Even the most honest and
self-a ware scholar or researcher needs a reality check from

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someone less personally invested in the outcome of a project.

(The proposal for the book you’re reading right now was peer-
reviewed: that doesn’t mean that the scholars who read it
agreed with it, but that they were asked to consider the
arguments and present whatever objections or advice they
might have.) The ability to serve as a referee is often the role of
a senior expert, since the ability to find and to recognize
evidence that challenges or even disconfirms a hypothesis is
something that takes quite a while to learn. Scholars and
researchers spend a good part of their careers trying to master it
as one of their core skills.
These reviews and revisions are invisible to laypeople
because they all take place before the final product is released.
The public only becomes aware of these processes when they
go wrong—a nd when peer review goes wrong, it can go
horribly wrong. The whole enterprise, instead of producing
expert assurances of quality, can turn into fakery,
backscratching, score settling, favoritism, and all the other
petty behavior to which human beings are prone. In the case of
the gay- marriage study, the fraud was discovered and the
system worked, albeit not in time to stop the article’s initial
publication.
In modern life outside of the academy, however, arguments
and debates have no external review. Facts come and go as
people find convenient at the moment. Thus, confirmation bias
makes attempts at reasoned argument exhausting because it
produces arguments and theories that are nonfalsifiable. It is
the nature of confirmation bias itself to dismiss all
contradictory evidence as irrelevant, and so my evidence is
always the rule, your evidence is always a mistake or an
exception. It’s impossible to argue with this kind of
explanation, because by definition it’s never wrong.

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An additional problem here is that most laypeople have

never been taught, or they have forgotten, the basics of the
“scientific method.” This is the set of steps that lead from a
general question to a hypothesis, testing, and analysis.
Although people commonly use the word “evidence,” they use
it too loosely; the tendency in conversation is to use “evidence”
to mean “things which I perceive to be true,” rather than
“things that have been subjected to a test of their factual nature
by agreed- upon rules.”
At this point, laypeople might object to all this as just so
much intellectual hokum. Why does the average person need
all this scholarly self-a wareness? There’s always common
sense. Why isn’t that good enough?
Most of the time, laypeople actually do not need any of this
scholarly apparatus. In day- to- day matters, common sense
serves us well and is usually better than needlessly complicated
explanations. We don’t need to know, for example, exactly
how fast a car can go in a rainstorm before the tires begin to
lose contact with the road. Somewhere there’s a mathematical
formula that would allow us to know the answer with great
precision, but our common sense needs no such formula to tell
us to slow down in bad weather, and that’s good enough.
When it comes to untangling more complicated issues,
however, common sense is not sufficient. Cause and effect, the
nature of evidence, and statistical frequency are far more
intricate than common sense can handle. Many of the thorniest
research problems often have counterintuitive answers that by
their nature defy our common sense. (Simple observation, after
all, told early humans that the sun revolved around the earth,
not the other way around.) The simple tools of common sense
can betray us and make us susceptible to errors both great and
small, which is why laypeople and experts so often talk past

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each other even on relatively trivial issues like superstitions

and folk wisdom.

WIVES’ TALES, SuPERSTITION, AND

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

“Old wives’ tales” and other superstitions are classic examples

of confirmation bias and nonfalsifiable arguments. Many
superstitions have some kind of grounding in experience.
While it’s a superstition that you shouldn’t walk under ladders,
for example, it’s also true that it’s dangerous to walk under a
ladder. Whether you’ll have bad luck all day by annoying a
house painter is a different matter, but it’s just dumb to walk
under his ladder.
Superstitions are especially prone to confirmation bias, and
they survive because common sense and confirmation bias
sometimes reinforce each other. Are black cats unlucky? Cats,
black or otherwise, by their nature tend to get underfoot, but
we might only remember the black ones who trip us up. I
actually live with a lovely black cat named Carla, and I can
confirm that she is, on occasion, a menace to my navigation of
the stairs. A superstitious person might nod here knowingly;
the fact that Carla is also the only cat in the house, of course, or
whether other cat owners have tumbled over their tabbies will
mean nothing.
The most extreme cases of confirmation bias are found not
in the wives’ tales and superstitions of the ignorant, but in the
conspiracy theories of more educated or intelligent people.
Unlike superstitions, which are simple, conspiracy theories are
horrendously complicated. Indeed, it takes a reasonably smart
person to construct a really interesting conspiracy theory,
because conspiracy theories are actually highly complex

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explanations. They are also challenging intellectual exercises

both for those who hold them and those who would disprove
them. Superstitions are generally easy enough to disprove. Any
statistician can verify that my cat is probably no more or less
dangerous than any other on a staircase. Deep down, we know
it anyway, which is why superstitions tend to be little more
than harmless habits.
Conspiracy theories, by contrast, are frustrating precisely
because they are so intricate. Each rejoinder or contradiction
only produces a more complicated theory. Conspiracy theorists
manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but
worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as even
stronger confirmation. 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.
These kinds of overcomplicated explanations violate the
famous concept of “Occam’s Razor” (sometimes spelled
“Ockham”), named for the medieval monk who advocated the
straightforward idea that we should always begin from the
simplest explanation for anything we see. We should only work
our way up toward more complicated explanations if we need
them. This is also called the “law of parsimony,” meaning that
the most likely explanation is the one that requires the fewest
number of logical leaps or shaky assumptions.
Imagine, for example, that we hear a noise, followed by
someone swearing loudly in the next room. We run to the room
and see a man, alone, holding his foot and jumping around with
a grimace on his face. There’s an empty crate and broken
bottles of beer all over the floor. What happened?
Most of us will derive a simple explanation that the man
dropped the crate on the floor, hurt his foot, and yelped an

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expletive. We heard the crash and we’ve seen people swear

when injured. We have a good grasp of what other people look
like when they’re in pain, and the fellow is obviously hurting.
It does not take many assumptions to create a reasonable
explanation. It might not be a complete explanation, but it’s a
sensible first cut, given the available evidence.
But wait. Maybe the man is an alcoholic, and he’s swearing
because he’s angry that he dropped the crate and the beer is
now gone. Or maybe he’s a temperance advocate, and he
smashed the beer to the floor himself while cursing its vile
existence. And perhaps he’s holding his foot and jumping
around because he is from a little- known culture in the far
Canadian Arctic where people’s faces are usually covered by
parkas and they therefore express sorrow (or joy, or anger) by
holding their feet and jumping. Or maybe he’s a foreigner who
thinks that certain pungent Anglo- Saxon words actually mean
“Help, I dropped a crate of beer on my foot.”
This is where the law of parsimony comes in. Any one of
those oddball and highly unlikely possibilities could be true,
but it would be ridiculous to jump right to such immensely
complicated theorizing when we have a far more direct and
serviceable explanation staring us right in the face. We have no
idea if the man is a teetotaler or a drunk, whether he’s from
Canada or Cleveland, or whether his native language is
English. While we can conduct some eventual investigation to
find out whether any of those things are true, to start from any
of those assumptions violates both logic and human
experience.
If conspiracy theories are so complicated and ridiculous,
why do they have such a hold on the popular imagination in so
many societies? And make no mistake: they are in fact very
popular and have been for centuries. Modern America is no
exception. In the 1970s, for example, the novelist Robert

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Ludlum excelled at creating such conspiracies in a hugely

popular series of novels, including one about a circle of
political killers who were responsible for the assassination of
President Franklin Roosevelt. (But wait, you say: FDR wasn’t
assassinated. Exactly.) Ludlum sold millions of books and
created the fictional superassassin Jason Bourne, who was the
main character in a string of lucrative movies in the twenty-
first century. Books, films, and television shows from The
Manchurian Candidate in the 1960s to The X- Files thirty years
later have had millions of fans.
In modern American politics, conspiracy theories abound.
President Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Africa.
President Bush was part of the plot to attack America on 9/1 1.
The Queen of England is a drug dealer. The US government is
spraying mind- controlling chemicals in the air through the
exhaust ports of jet aircraft. The Jews control everything—
except when the Saudis or Swiss bankers are controlling
everything.
One reason we all love a good conspiracy thriller is that it
appeals to our sense of heroism. A brave individual against a
great conspiracy, fighting forces that would defeat the ordinary
person, is a trope as old as the many legends of heroes
themselves. American culture in particular is attracted to the
idea of the talented amateur (as opposed, say, to the experts
and elites) who can take on entire governments— or even
bigger organizations— and win. James Bond didn’t confront
the evil superconspiracy of SPECTRE until the British author
Ian Fleming realized he needed something bigger than
communism for Bond to fight when his novels started to move
to the Hollywood screen for American audiences.
More important and more relevant to the death of expertise,
however, is that conspiracy theories are deeply attractive to
people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated

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world and who have no patience for less dramatic explanations.

Such theories also appeal to a strong streak of narcissism: there
are people who would choose to believe in complicated
nonsense rather than accept that their own circumstances are
incomprehensible, the result of issues beyond their intellectual
capacity to understand, or even their own fault.
Conspiracy theories are also a way for people to give
context and meaning to events that frighten them. Without a
coherent explanation for why terrible things happen to innocent
people, they would have to accept such occurrences as nothing
more than the random cruelty either of an uncaring universe or
an incomprehensible deity. These are awful choices, and even
thinking about them can induce the kind of existential despair
that leads a character in the nineteenth- century classic The
Brothers Karamazov to make a famous declaration about
tragedy: “If the sufferings of children go to make up the sum of
the sufferings necessary to buy truth, then I protest that the
truth is not worth such a price.”
The only way out of this dilemma is to imagine a world in
which our troubles are the fault of powerful people who had it
within their power to avert such misery. In such a world, a
loved one’s incurable disease is not a natural event: it is the
result of some larger malfeasance by industry or government.
Revelations of the horrid behavior of a celebrity are not
evidence that someone we admired is evil: it is a plot to smear
a beloved figure. Even the loss of our favorite sports team
might be a fix. (“I don’t want to see the Buffalo Bills winning
the Super Bowl,” the chief villain in The X- Files said in a 1996
episode. “As long as I’m alive, that doesn’t happen.”)
Whatever it is, somebody is at fault, because otherwise we’re
left blaming only God, pure chance, or ourselves.
Just as individuals facing grief and confusion look for
reasons where none may exist, so, too, will entire societies

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gravitate toward outlandish theories when collectively

subjected to a terrible national experience. Conspiracy theories
and the flawed reasoning behind them, as the Canadian writer
Jonathan Kay has noted, become especially seductive “in any
society that has suffered an epic, collectively felt trauma. In the
aftermath, millions of people find themselves casting about for
an answer to the ancient question of why bad things happen to
good people.”9 This is why conspiracy theories spiked in
popularity after World War I, the Russian Revolution, the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the terror attacks of
September 2001, among other historical events.
Today, conspiracy theories are reactions mostly to the
economic and social dislocations of globalization, just as they
were to the aftermath of war and the advent of rapid
industrialization in the 1920s and 1930s. This is not a trivial
obstacle when it comes to the problems of expert engagement
with the public: nearly 30 percent of Americans, for example,
think “a secretive elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to
eventually rule the world,” and 15 percent think media or
government add secret “mind- controlling” technology to TV
broadcasts. (Another 15 percent aren’t quite sure about the
television issue.) Nearly half of all respondents think it at least
likely that Princess Diana of the United Kingdom was
murdered in a plot. “At these rates,” as Kay rightly points out,
“we can’t speak of conspiracy thinking as a fringe
phenomenon, nor one that has only a negligible impact on the
civic sphere and cultural values.”
Conspiracy theories are not harmless. At their worst,
conspiracy theories can produce a moral panic in which
innocent people get hurt. In the early 1980s, for example,
hysteria swept the United States when many parents became
convinced that Satanic sex cults were operating inside
children’s day- care centers. Faux “experts” helped to fuel the

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panic, interpreting every confused utterance from a toddler as

confirming abuse of the weirdest kind. It goes without saying
that child abuse exists, but a grandiose theory— which likely
reflected the fears and guilty feelings of working parents more
than anything else— took hold of the American imagination,
damaging numerous lives forever and temporarily clouding
better approaches to a very real but far more limited problem. 10
If trying to get around confirmation bias is difficult, trying
to deal with a conspiracy theory is impossible. Someone who
believes that the oil companies are suppressing a new car that
can run on seaweed is unlikely to be impressed by your new
Prius or Volt. (That’s the efficient car the industrial barons will
allow you to have.) The people who think alien bodies were
housed at Area 51 won’t change their minds if they take a tour
of the base. (The alien research lab is underground, you see.)
Arguing at length with a conspiracy theorist is not only
fruitless but sometimes dangerous, and I do not recommend it.
It’s a treadmill of nonsense that can exhaust even the most
tenacious teacher. Such theories are the ultimate bulwark
against expertise, because of course every expert who
contradicts the theory is ipso facto part of the conspiracy. As
the writer Jef Rouner has put it,

You have to remember that the sort of person who readily

subscribes to conspiracy theories already fears that there
are vast, powerful forces maliciously allied against the
areas of life that mean the most to them. Any denial of the
threat increases the power of the threat by virtue of its
being allowed to operate undetected.11

That’s a place in a conversation where none of us wants to be.

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Fortunately, these large- scale cases of irrationality are far

and few between. The more prosaic and common
unwillingness to accept expert advice, however, is rooted in the
same kind of populist suspicion of those perceived as smarter
or more educated than the general public. The damage might
be less dramatic, but it is no less tangible, and sometimes quite
costly.

STEREOTYPES AND GENERALIzATIONS

“You can’t generalize like that!” Few expressions are more

likely to arise in even a mildly controversial discussion. People
resist generalizations— boys tend to be like this, girls tend to
be like that— because we all want to believe we’re unique and
that we cannot be pigeonholed that easily.
What most people usually mean when they object to
“generalizing,” however, is not that we shouldn’t generalize,
but that we shouldn’t stereotype, which is a different issue. The
problem in casual discourse is that people often don’t
understand the difference between stereotypes and
generalizations, and this makes conversation, especially
between experts and laypeople, arduous and exhausting. (I
realize, of course, that I am generalizing here. But bear with
me.)
The difference matters. Stereotyping is an ugly social habit,
but generalization is at the root of every form of science.
Generalizations are probabilistic statements, based in
observable facts. They are not, however, explanations in
themselves—a nother important difference from stereotypes.
They’re measurable and verifiable. Sometimes generalizations
can lead us to posit cause and effect, and in some cases we

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might even observe enough to create a theory or a law that

under constant circumstances is always true.
It is a generalization, for example, to say that “people in
China are usually shorter than people in America.” That may or
may not be true. People who mistake this for a stereotype will
immediately rush to find exceptions, and discussion will
quickly run into a ditch: “I think Chinese people tend to be
shorter than Americans.” “You can’t generalize like that!
Chinese- born basketball player Yao Ming is seven and a half
feet tall!”
The existence of an unusually tall Chinese basketball player
proves nothing either way. We can settle this question only by
going to the United States and China, measuring people, and
seeing how often our assumption is true. If it’s the case that
Chinese people overall are shorter than Americans, then we’ve
only noted something that is factually true enough times that
we would not be wrong to assert it as a general but not
infallible rule.
The hard work of explanation comes after generalization.
Why are Americans taller than the Chinese? Is it genetic? Is it
the result of a different diet? Are there environmental factors at
work? There are answers to this question somewhere, but
whatever they are, it’s still not wrong to say that Americans
tend to be taller than the Chinese, no matter how many slam-
dunking exceptions we might find.
To say that all Chinese people are short, however, is to
stereotype. The key to a stereotype is that it is impervious to
factual testing. A stereotype brooks no annoying interference
with reality, and it relies on the clever use of confirmation bias
to dismiss all exceptions as irrelevant. (Racists have mastered
this mode of argument: “All Romanians are thieves except this
one lady I work with, but she’s different.”) Stereotypes are not

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predictions, they’re conclusions. That’s why it’s called

“prejudice”: it relies on pre- judging.
The tangle comes when we make generalizations that are
negative or rooted in arguable criteria. No one can really
dispute a generalization about height; it’s something easily
measurable in ways we all accept. Nor do we impute any sort
of moral or political character to height. “Tall, aren’t you?” a
femme fatale says to the literary detective Phillip Marlowe in
the 1939 novel The Big Sleep. “I didn’t mean to be,” Marlowe
replies. It’s witty precisely because we know being short or tall
isn’t something we control or for which we have to apologize.
Negative generalizations, however, raise hackles, especially
when they are based on arguable definitions. To say that
“Russians are more corrupt than Norwegians,” for example, is
true but only if we adopt a shared definition of “corrupt.” By
Western definitions, Russia is plagued by corruption, but it’s
also a perfectly reasonable objection to note that one culture’s
“corruption” is another culture’s “favors.” This is why
generalizations need to be as carefully formulated as possible if
they are to serve as basis for future research. There is a clear
difference between “Russians in official positions are more
willing to break established rules in conducting government
business than Norwegians in similar offices” as opposed to a
broader statement that “Russians are more corrupt than
Norwegians.”
If we apply those narrower filters, we have a statement that
is far less inflammatory and measurably true. Again, however,
we have no idea why it’s generally true. We know only that if
we apply the same criteria consistently— that is, if we watch
the same Russian and Norwegian officials process the same
transactions enough times— we can establish something that is
more often true than false. It may be that Russian laws are
outdated and impossible to follow even for the most honest

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bureaucrat. (That’s a bit of a stretch, but there’s an element of

truth in it, and it is an argument made quite often by actual
Russians.) That’s where more research comes in: to establish
the why after confirming the what.
Of course, in daily conversation, none of this matters very
much. These things may be true in some narrow, definable
sense, but who wants to hear things that, if given without
context, sound only like inflammatory assertions?
Conversations among laypeople, and between laypeople and
experts, can get difficult because human emotions are involved,
especially if they are about things that are true in general but
might not apply to any one case or circumstance.
That’s why one of the most important characteristics of an
expert is the ability to remain dispassionate, even on the most
controversial issues. Experts must treat everything from cancer
to nuclear war as problems to be solved with detachment and
objectivity. Their distance from the subject enables open
debate and consideration of alternatives, in ways meant to
defeat emotional temptations, including fear, that lead to bias.
This is a tall order, but otherwise conversation is not only
arduous but sometimes explosive.

I’M OK, YOu’RE OK— SORT OF

There are other social and psychological realities that hobble

our ability to exchange information. No matter how much we
might suffer from confirmation bias or the heavy hand of the
Dunning- Kruger Effect, for example, we don’t like to tell
people we know or care about that they’re wrong. (At least not
to their face.) Likewise, as much as we enjoy the natural
feeling of being right about something, we’re sometimes
reluctant to defend our actual expertise. And overall we find it

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hard to separate the information, erroneous or otherwise, that

serves as the foundations of our political and social beliefs
from our self- image and our conceptions about who we are.
In 2014, for example, an international study reached a
surprising conclusion: people will go to great lengths to give
each other a fair hearing and to weigh all opinions equally,
even when everyone involved in the conversation knows there
are substantial differences in competence between them. The
authors of the study (which included people from China, Iran,
and Denmark) suggest that this is an “equality bias” built into
us based on a human need to be accepted as part of a group.
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.12
At first, this sounds like nothing more than good manners
and a desire for acceptance. Each party wanted to stay relevant
to the other, rather than risk disrupting the relationship. The
less competent person wanted to be respected and involved by
not being seen as wrong or uninformed. The more competent
person, meanwhile, did not want to alienate anyone by being
consistently right.
This might make for a pleasant afternoon, but it’s a lousy
way to make decisions. As Chris Mooney, a Washington Post
science writer, noted, this kind of social dynamic might grease
the wheels of human relationships, but it can do real harm
where facts are at stake. The study, he wrote, underscored “that
we need to recognize experts more, respect them, and listen to
them. But it also shows how our evolution in social groups
binds us powerfully together and enforces collective norms, but

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can go haywire when it comes to recognizing and accepting

inconvenient truths.”13
Why can’t people simply accept these differences in
knowledge or competence? This is an unreasonable question,
since it amounts to saying “Why don’t people just accept that
other people are smarter than they are?” (Or, conversely, “Why
don’t smart people just explain why other people are dumber
than they are?”) The reality is that social insecurity trips up
both the smart and the dumb. We all want to be liked.
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.14

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People skim headlines or articles and share them on social

media, but they do not read them. Nonetheless, because people
want to be perceived by others as intelligent and well informed,
they fake it as best they can.
As if all of this weren’t enough of a challenge, the addition
of politics makes things even more complicated. 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-i mage
and our most cherished beliefs about who we are as people.
As Konnikova put it in her examination of the fraudulent
gay- marriage study, confirmation bias is more likely to
produce “persistently false beliefs” when it stems “from issues
closely tied to our conception of self.” These are the views that
brook no opposition and that we will often defend beyond all
reason, as Dunning noted:

Some of our most stubborn misbeliefs arise not from

primitive childlike intuitions or careless category errors,
but from the very values and philosophies that define who
we are as individuals. Each of us possesses certain
foundational beliefs— narratives about the self, ideas about
the social order—t hat essentially cannot be violated: To
contradict them would call into question our very self-w
orth. As such, these views demand fealty from other
opinions.

Put another way, what we believe says something important

about how we see ourselves as people. We can take being
wrong about the kind of bird we just saw in our backyard, or
who the first person was to circumnavigate the globe, but we

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cannot tolerate being wrong about the concepts and facts that
we rely upon to govern how we live our lives.
Take, for example, a fairly common American kitchen-t
able debate: the causes of unemployment. Bring up the
problem of joblessness with almost any group of laypeople and
every possible intellectual problem will rear its head.
Stereotypes, confirmation bias, half- truths, and statistical
incompetence all bedevil this discussion.
Consider a person who holds firmly, as many Americans
do, to the idea that unemployed people are just lazy and that
unemployment benefits might even encourage that laziness.
Like so many examples of confirmation bias, this could spring
from personal experience. Perhaps it proceeds from a lifetime
of continuous employment, or it may be the result of knowing
someone who’s genuinely averse to work. Every “help wanted”
sign— which confirmation bias will note and file away—i s
further proof of the laziness of the unemployed. A page of job
advertisements or a chronically irresponsible nephew
constitutes irrefutable evidence that unemployment is a
personal failing rather than a problem requiring government
intervention.
Now imagine someone else at the table who believes that
the nature of the American economy itself forces people into
unemployment. This person might draw from experience as
well: he or she may know someone who moved to follow a
start- up company and ended up broke and far from home, or
who was unjustly fired by a corrupt or incompetent supervisor.
Every corporate downsizing, every racist or sexist boss, and
every failed enterprise is proof that the system is stacked
against innocent people who would never choose
unemployment over work. Unemployment benefits, rather than
subsidizing indolence, are a lifeline and perhaps the only thing
standing between an honest person and complete ruin.

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There’s a real argument to be had, of course, about the

degree to which any of this is true, but these two people—
admittedly, drawn as caricatures for our purposes here— are
not going to be the ones to have it. It’s unarguable that
unemployment benefits suppress the urge to work in at least
some people; it’s also undeniable that some corporations have a
history of ruthlessness at the expense of their workers, whose
reliance on benefits is reluctant and temporary. This
conversation can go on forever, because both the Hard Worker
on one side and the Kind Heart on the other can adduce
anecdotes, carefully vetted by their own confirmation bias, that
are always true but are in no way dispositive.
There’s no way to win this argument, because in the end,
there are no answers that will satisfy everyone. Laypeople want
a definitive answer from the experts, but none can be had
because there is not one answer but many, depending on
circumstances. When do benefits encourage sloth? How often
are people thrown out of work against their will, and for how
long? These are nuances in a broad problem, and where our
self- image is involved, nuance isn’t helpful. Unable to see
their own biases, most people will simply drive each other
crazy arguing rather than accept answers that contradict what
they already think about the subject. 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.”15
This tendency is in fact so strong that a fair number of
people, regardless of political affiliation, will shoot the
messenger rather than hear something they don’t like. 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

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Even more disturbing, the study found that when exposed to

scientific research that challenged their views, both liberals and
conservatives reacted by doubting the science, rather than
themselves. “Just reading about these polarizing topics,” one of
the authors noted, “is having a negative effect on how people
feel about science.”
This is why, as we’ll see later in this book, the only way to
resolve these debates in terms of policy choices is to move
them from the realm of research to the arena of politics and
democratic choice. If democracy is to mean anything at all,
then experts and laypeople have to solve complicated problems
together. First, however, they have to overcome the widening
gulf between them. More education seems like an obvious
solution, but in the next chapter we’ll see that education, at
least at the college level, is now part of the problem.

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Higher Education
The Customer Is Always
Right

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

Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me what those four

years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard
work?

Benjamin: You got me.

The Graduate

THOSE MAGICAL SEVEN YEARS

Higher education is supposed to cure us of the false belief that

everyone is as smart as everyone else. Unfortunately, in the
twenty- first century the effect of widespread college
attendance is just the opposite: the great number of people who
have been in or near a college think of themselves as the
educated peers of even the most accomplished scholars and

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experts. 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.
Before World War II, most people did not finish high
school and few went to college. In this earlier time, admissions
to top schools were dominated by privileged families, although
sometimes young men and a very few women could scrape up
the money for tuition or earn a scholarship. It was an exclusive
experience often governed as much by social class as by merit.
Still, college attendance was an indication of potential, and
graduation was a mark of achievement. A university degree
was rare, serving as one of the signposts dividing experts and
knowers from the rest of society.
Today, attendance at postsecondary institutions is a mass
experience. As a result of this increased access to higher
education, the word “college” itself is losing meaning, at least
in terms of separating educated people from everyone else.
“College graduate” today means a lot of things. Unfortunately,
“a person of demonstrated educational achievement” is not
always one of them.
Bashing colleges and universities is an American tradition,
as is bashing the faculty, like me, who teach in them.
Stereotypes abound, including the stuffy (or radical, or
irrelevant) professor in front of a collection of bored children
who themselves came to campus for any number of activities
except education. “College boy” was once a zinger aimed by
older people at young men, with the clear implication that
education was no substitute for maturity or wisdom.
But this book isn’t about why colleges are screwed up. I
don’t have enough pages for that. Rather, it is about why fewer

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people respect learning and expertise, and this chapter, in turn,

is about how colleges and universities paradoxically became an
important part of that problem.
I say this while remaining a defender of the American
university system, including the much- maligned liberal arts. I
am personally a beneficiary of wider access to higher education
in the twentieth century and the social mobility it provided.
The record of these institutions is unarguable: universities in
the United States are still the leading intellectual powerhouses
in the world. I continue to have faith in the ability of America’s
postsecondary schools to produce both knowledge and
knowledgeable citizens.
Still, the fact of the matter is that many of those American
higher educational institutions are failing to provide to their
students the basic knowledge and skills that form expertise.
More important, they are failing to provide the ability to
recognize expertise and to engage productively with experts
and other professionals in daily life. 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.
This is because attendance at a postsecondary institution no
longer guarantees a “college education.” Instead, colleges and
universities now provide a full- service experience of “going to
college.” These are not remotely the same thing, and students
now graduate believing they know a lot more than they actually
do. Today, when an expert says, “Well, I went to college,” it’s
hard to blame the public for answering, “Who hasn’t?”
Americans with college degrees now broadly think of
themselves as “educated” when in reality the best that many of
them can say is that they’ve continued on in some kind of
classroom setting after high school, with wildly varying results.

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The influx of students into America’s postsecondary

schools has driven an increasing commodification of education.
Students at most schools today are treated as clients, rather
than as students. Younger people, barely out of high school, are
pandered to both materially and intellectually, reinforcing some
of the worst tendencies in students who have not yet learned
the self- discipline that once was essential to the pursuit of
higher education. Colleges now are marketed like multiyear
vacation packages, rather than as a contract with an institution
and its faculty for a course of educational study. This
commodification of the college experience itself as a product is
not only destroying the value of college degrees but is also
undermining confidence among ordinary Americans that
college means anything.
This is a deeper problem than the usual stunts, fads, and
intellectual silliness on campuses that capture the public
imagination from time to time. There will always be a certain
amount of foolishness to a lot of campus life. As a Tufts
University professor, Dan Drezner, has written, “One of the
purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid
ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students
and professors, exactly how stupid they are.” 1 College life,
especially at the most elite schools, is insulated from society,
and when young people and intellectuals are walled off from
the real world, strange things can happen.
Some of this is just so much expensive inanity, harmless in
itself. Parents of students at Brown University, for example, are
shelling out some serious money so their children can take part
in things like “Campus Nudity Week.” (One female Brown
participant said in 2013 that “the negative feedback” about the
event “has helped prepare her for life after college.” One can
only hope.) In the end, however, I’m not all that worried about
naked students amok in the streets of Providence. Instead, my

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concerns about colleges and how they’ve accelerated the death

of expertise rest more with what happens— or isn’t happening
— in the classroom.
At its best, college should aim to produce graduates with a
reasonable background in a subject, a willingness to continue
learning for the rest of their lives, and an ability to assume
roles as capable citizens. Instead, for many people college has
become, in the words of a graduate of a well- known party
school in California, “those magical seven years between high
school and your first warehouse job.” College is no longer a
passage to educated maturity and instead is only a delaying
tactic against the onset of adulthood—i n some cases, for the
faculty as well as for the students.
Part of the problem is that there are too many students, a
fair number of whom simply don’t belong in college. The new
culture of education in the United States is that everyone
should, and must, go to college. This cultural change is
important to the death of expertise, because as programs
proliferate to meet demand, schools become diploma mills
whose actual degrees are indicative less of education than of
training, two distinctly different concepts that are increasingly
conflated in the public mind. In the worst cases, degrees affirm
neither education nor training, but attendance. At the barest
minimum, they certify only the timely payment of tuition.
This is one of those things professors are not supposed to
say in polite company, but it’s true. Young people who might
have done better in a trade sign up for college without a lot of
thought given to how to graduate, or what they’ll do when it all
ends. Four years turns into five, and increasingly six or more.
A limited course of study eventually turns into repeated visits
to an expensive educational buffet laden mostly with
intellectual junk food, with very little adult supervision to
ensure that the students choose nutrition over nonsense.

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The most competitive and elite colleges and universities

have fewer concerns in this regard, as they can pick and choose
from applicants as they wish and fill their incoming classes
with generally excellent students. Their students will get a full
education, or close to it, and then usually go on to profitable
employment. Other institutions, however, end up in a race to
the bottom. All these children, after all, are going to go to
college somewhere, and so schools that are otherwise
indistinguishable on the level of intellectual quality compete to
offer better pizza in the food court, plushier dorms, and more
activities besides the boring grind of actually going to class.
Not only are there too many students, there are too many
professors. The very best national universities, the traditional
sources of university faculty, are promiscuously pumping out
PhDs at a rate far higher than any academic job market can
possibly absorb. Lesser schools that have no business offering
advanced degrees—a nd many of which barely qualify as
glorified high schools even at the undergraduate level— offer
doctorates of such low quality that they themselves would
never hire their own graduates. Scads of unemployed PhDs,
toting mediocre dissertations in any number of overly esoteric
subjects, roam the academic landscape literally willing to teach
for food.
Even the term “professor” has been denatured by overuse.
Once a rare title, American postsecondary institutions now use
it at will. Anyone who teaches in anything above the level of a
high school is now a professor, from the head of a top
department at a major research university to a part- time
instructor in a local community college. And just as every
teacher is a “professor,” so, too, is every small college now a
“university,” a phenomenon that has reached ridiculous
proportions. Tiny local schools that once catered to area

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residents have reemerged as “universities,” as though they now

have a particle collider behind the cafeteria.
The emergence of these faux universities is in part a
response to an insatiable demand for degrees in a culture where
everyone thinks they should go to college. This, in turn, has
created a destructive spiral of credential inflation. Schools and
colleges cause this degree inflation the same way governments
cause monetary inflation: by printing more paper. A high
school diploma was once the requirement for entering the
trades or beginning a profession. But everybody has one of
those now, including people who can’t even read.
Consequently, colleges serve to verify the completion of high
school, and so a master’s degree now fills the requirement once
served by a bachelor’s degree. Students are going broke
running around in this educational hamster wheel, without
learning very much.2
How to solve all this is a crucial question for the future of
American education. In 2016, a Democratic Party presidential
candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, said that a college degree
today is the equivalent of what a high school degree was fifty
years ago— and that therefore everyone should go to college
just as everyone now attends high school. In reality, treating
colleges as remedial high schools is a large part of how we got
here in the first place. The larger point, however, is that the
cumulative result of too many “students,” too many
“professors,” too many “universities,” and too many degrees is
that college attendance is no longer a guarantee that people
know what they’re talking about.
The failures of the modern university are fueling attacks on
the very knowledge those same institutions have worked for
centuries to create and to teach to future generations.
Intellectual discipline and maturation have fallen by the
wayside. The transmission of important cultural learning—

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including everything from how to construct a logical argument

to the foundational DNA of American civilization—i s no
longer the mission of the customer- service university.

WELCOME, CLIENTS!

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—
h opefully, for a lifetime. A college degree, whether in physics
or philosophy, is supposed to be the mark of a truly “educated”
person who not only has command of a particular subject, but
also has a wider understanding of his or her own culture and
history. It’s not supposed to be easy.
This is no longer how college is viewed in modern America
either by the providers or by the consumers of higher
education. College as a client- centered experience caters to
adolescents instead of escorting them away from adolescence.
Rather than disabusing students of their intellectual solipsism,
the modern university ends up reinforcing it. Students can
leave campus without fully accepting that they’ve met anyone
more intelligent than they are, either among their peers or their
teachers. (This assumes that they even bother to make any
distinction between peers and teachers at all.) They accept their
degree as a receipt for spending several years around a lot of
interesting people they and their families have paid for a
service.
This is not to say that today’s students are intellectually
incompetent. Most of the young people at competitive schools
have already mastered the rituals of test taking,
recommendations, extracurricular activities, and other college-

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bound merit badges. Unfortunately, once they defeat the

admissions maze and arrive at college, they then spend the next
four years being undereducated but overly praised. They might
even suspect as much, and as a result they risk developing a
toxic combination of insecurity and arrogance that serves them
poorly once they’re beyond the embrace of their parents and
the walls of their schools.
Meanwhile, at less competitive schools, students have far
fewer worries during the application process. As the economic
writer Ben Casselman pointed out in 2016, most college
applicants “never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a
résumé or sweet-t alk a potential letter-w riter,” because more
than three- quarters of American undergraduates attend
colleges that accept at least half their applicants. Only 4
percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and fewer
than 1 percent attend elite schools that accept fewer than 10
percent of their applicants.3 Students at these less competitive
institutions then struggle to finish, with only half completing a
bachelor’s degree within six years.
Many of these incoming students are not qualified to be in
college and need significant remedial work. The colleges know
it, but they accept students who are in over their heads, stick
them in large (but cost- efficient) introductory courses, and
hope for the best. Why would schools do this and obviously
violate what few admissions standards they might still enforce?
As James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute wrote in 2016,
“Follow the money.” The fact of the matter is that “private
colleges— at least those below the elite levels— are desperate
for students and willing to accept deeply unqualified ones if it
means more tuition dollars.”4 Some finish, some don’t, but for
a few years the institution gets paid either way, and somewhere
a young person can say he or she has at least “some college.”

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Even without these financial pressures, the stampede toward

college by unprepared students is also due to a culture of
affirmation and self- actualization that forbids confronting
children with failure. As Robert Hughes wrote in 1995,
America is a culture in which “children are coddled not to
think they’re dumb.”5 A junior high school teacher in Maryland
captured the essence of this problem two decades later in a
2014 article she published in the Washington Post after she
decided to quit her profession. She said that her school
administration gave her two instructions that to her were
“defining slogans for public education.” One was that students
were not allowed to fail. The other foreshadowed the client-
centered approach to college: “If they have D’s or F’s, there is
something that you are not doing for them.”6
I have encountered this myself numerous times, and not just
among children or young college undergraduates. I have had
graduate students tell me that if they did not get an A in my
class, their lesser grade would be evidence of poor instruction
on my part. I have also had students who’ve nearly failed my
class ask me for— and, in some cases, demand— a
recommendation for a graduate program or a professional
school. 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.
Parenting obviously plays a major role here. Overprotective
parents have become so intrusive that a former dean of first-
year students at Stanford wrote an entire book in which she
said that this “helicopter parenting” was ruining a generation of
children. These are the parents who defend and coddle their
children even into high school and college, doing their
homework for them—t he Stanford dean politely calls this
“overhelping”— and in general participating in every aspect of
their child’s life.7 Some are worse than others: there are even

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parents now moving to the same town as their children’s

colleges to be near them while they attend school. This is not
“helicopter parenting” but more like “close air- support jet
fighter parenting.”
Another problem, paradoxically enough, is affluence. This
sounds like a remarkable claim at a time when so many parents
and young people are worrying about how to meet educational
costs. But the fact of the matter is that more people than ever
before are going to college, mostly by tapping a virtually
inexhaustible supply of ruinous loans. Buoyed by this
government- guaranteed money, and in response to aggressive
marketing from tuition- driven institutions, teenagers from
almost all of America’s social classes now shop for colleges
the way the rest of us shop for cars.
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.
Usually, the youngsters like most of the schools, because, to
a teenager stuck in high school, all colleges seem like pretty
great places. Some choices, of course, quickly drop off the
radar. An ugly town, a dingy campus, a decrepit dormitory, and
that’s that. Other times, prospective students fall in love with a

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school and then spend months agonizing like anxious suitors,

hoping that a school they chose while they were barely past
their sixteenth birthdays will give them the nod and change the
course of their lives.
The idea that adolescents should first think about why they
want to go to college at all, find schools that might best suit
their abilities, apply only to those schools, and then visit the
ones to which they’re accepted is now alien to many parents
and their children. Ask the parents why they drove their
daughter all over Creation to visit schools she may have no
desire to attend or to which she has no chance of admittance,
and the answer rarely varies: “Well, she wanted to see it.” The
sentence few of them add is: “And we chose to spend the
money to do it.” College applications, at fifty bucks a pop or
more, aren’t cheap, but it’s a lot more expensive to go road-t
ripping from Amherst to Atlanta.
This entire process means not only that children are in
charge, but that they are already being taught to value schools
for some reason other than the education it might provide them.
Schools know this, and they’re ready for it. In the same way
the local car dealership knows exactly how to place a new
model in the showroom, or a casino knows exactly how to
perfume the air that hits patrons just as they walk in the door,
colleges have all kinds of perks and programs at the ready as
selling points, mostly to edge out their competitors over things
that matter only to kids.
Driven to compete for teenagers and their loan dollars,
educational institutions promise an experience rather than an
education. (I am leaving aside for- profit schools here, which
are largely only factories that create debt and that in general I
exclude from the definition of “higher education.”) There’s
nothing wrong with creating an attractive student center or
offering a slew of activities, but at some point it’s like having a

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hospital entice heart patients to choose it for a coronary bypass

because it has great food.
Children and young adults are more empowered in this
process at least in part because loan programs have shifted
control over tuition from parents to students. There is also the
more general trend, however, that parents for some decades
have abdicated more and more decisions about many things to
their children. Either way, it is hard to disagree with the
Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle’s observation that
decisions over the whole business have migrated from parents
to children, with predictable results when “students are more
worried about whether their experience is unpleasant than are
parents.”8
Undergraduate institutions play to these demands in every
way. For example, some schools now try to accommodate the
anxiety every high school student faces about living with
strangers. Once upon a time, learning to live with a roommate
was part of the maturing process but one that was
understandably dreaded by children still living with their
parents. No longer, as a faculty member at Arizona State wrote
in 2015:

At many colleges, new students already have been

introduced to their roommates on social media and live in
luxurious apartment- like dorms. That ensures they
basically never have to share a room or a bathroom, or
even eat in the dining halls if they don’t want to. Those
were the places where previous generations learned to get
along with different people and manage conflicts when
they were chosen at random to live with strangers in close
and communal quarters.9

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If a student chooses to go to Arizona State because he or she

likes the idea of never eating in a dining hall, something is
already wrong with the entire process. Many young people, of
course, have made worse choices for even sillier reasons.
Students are young and parents love their kids. Fair enough.
But when the entire carnival of applications and admissions is
over, the faculty have to teach students who have walked into
their classrooms with expectations completely unrelated to the
actual requirements of gaining a college education. Today,
professors do not instruct their students; instead, the students
instruct their professors, with an authority that comes naturally
to them. 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.” 10 As a professor at an elite
school once said to me, “Some days, I feel less like a teacher
and more like a clerk in an expensive boutique.”
And why shouldn’t he? These are children who have been
taught to address adults by their first names since they were
toddlers. They have been given “grades” meant to raise their
self- esteem rather than to spur achievement. And they have
matriculated after being allowed to peruse colleges as though
they were inspecting a condo near a golf course. This stream of
small but meaningful adult concessions to children and their
self- esteem corrodes their ability to learn, and it inculcates a
false sense of achievement and overconfidence in their own
knowledge that lasts well into adulthood.
When I first arrived at Dartmouth at the end of the 1980s, I
was told a story about a well-k nown (and, at the time, still-
living) mem ber of the faculty that in a small way illustrates
this problem and the challenge it presents to experts and
educators. The renowned astrophysicist Robert Jastrow gave a

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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.”
Professor Jastrow has since passed away, and I never got
the chance while I was in Hanover to ask him what happened
that day. But I suspect that he was trying to teach some life
lessons that are increasingly resisted by college students and
citizens alike: that admission to college is the beginning, not
the end, of education and that respecting a person’s opinion
does not mean granting equal respect to that person’s
knowledge. Whether national missile defenses are a wise policy
is still debatable. What hasn’t changed, however, is that the
guesses of an experienced astrophysicist and a college
sophomore are not equivalently good.
This is more than some Ivy League smart- alecks cracking
wise with their professors. To take a less rarified example, a
young woman in 2013 took to social media for help with a
class assignment. (Where she lives or where she was studying
is unclear, but she described herself as a future doctor.) She
apparently was tasked with researching the deadly chemical
substance Sarin, and, as she explained to thousands on Twitter,
she needed help because she had to watch her child while
doing her assignment. In minutes, her request was answered by
Dan Kaszeta, the director of a security consulting firm in

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London and a top expert in the field of chemical weapons, who

volunteered to help her.
What happened next transfixed many readers. (Jeffrey
Lewis, an arms expert in California, captured and posted the
exchange online.) “I can’t find the chemical and physical
properties of sarin gas [sic] someone please help me,” the
student tweeted. Kaszeta offered his help. He corrected her by
noting that Sarin isn’t a gas and that the word should be
capitalized. As Lewis later wryly noted, “Dan’s help [met] with
a welcome sigh of relief from our beleaguered student.”
Actually, it met with a string of expletives. The student
lectured the expert in a gale- force storm of outraged ego: “yes
the [expletive] it is a gas you ignorant [expletive]. sarin is a
liquid & can evaporate … shut the [expletive] up.” Kaszeta,
clearly stunned, tried one more time: “Google me. I’m an
expert on Sarin. Sorry for offering to help.” Things did not
improve before the exchange finally ended.
One smug Dartmouth kid and one angry Twitter user could
be outliers, and they’re certainly extreme examples of trying to
deal with students. But faculty both in the classroom and on
social media report that incidents where students take
correction as an insult are occurring more frequently. 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.

CAN’T I JuST EMAIL YOu?

Client servicing and the treatment of expertise as a product are

evident in colleges today, even in the smallest things. Consider,
for example, the influence of email, which encourages all kinds

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of odd behavior that students would usually hesitate to display

in person.
Even if we leave aside the occasional bad decision after a
weekend of drinking and partying to write something and hit
“send,” email encourages a misplaced sense of intimacy that
erodes the boundaries necessary to effective teaching. As we’ll
see in the next chapter, this is a characteristic of interactions
over electronic media in general, but the informality of
communication between teachers and students is one more
example of how college life in particular now contributes to the
eroding respect for experts and their abilities.
Email became common on campuses in the early 1990s, and
within a decade, professors noticed the changes wrought by
instant communications. In 2006, the New York Times asked
college educators about their experiences with student email,
and their frustration was evident. “These days,” the Times
wrote, “students seem to view [faculty] as available around the
clock, sending a steady stream of e- mail messages … that are
too informal or downright inappropriate.” As a Georgetown
theology professor told the Times, “The tone that they would
take in e- mail was pretty astounding. ‘I need to know this and
you need to tell me right now,’ with a familiarity that can
sometimes border on imperative.”11
Email, like social media, is a great equalizer, and it makes
students comfortable with the idea of messages to teachers as
being like any communication with a customer- service
department. This has a direct impact on respect for expertise,
because it erases any distinction between the students who ask
questions and the teachers who answer them. As the Times
noted,

While once professors may have expected deference, their

expertise seems to have become just another service that

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students, as consumers, are buying. So students may have
no fear of giving offense, imposing on the professor’s time
or even of asking a question that may reflect badly on their
own judgment.
Kathleen E. Jenkins, a sociology professor at the
College of William and Mary in Virginia, said she had
even received e- mail requests from students who missed
class and wanted copies of her teaching notes.

When faced with these kinds of faculty complaints about email,

one Amherst sophomore said, “If the only way I could
communicate with my professors was by going to their office
or calling them, there would be some sort of ranking or
prioritization taking place. Is this question worth going over to
the office?”
To which a faculty member might respond: that’s exactly
the point. Professors are not intellectual valets or on- call pen
pals. They do not exist to resolve every student question
instantly— including, as one UC Davis professor reported,
advice about whether to use a binder or a subject notebook.
One of the things students are supposed to learn in college is
self- reliance, but why bother looking something up when the
faculty member is only a few keystrokes away?
Education is designed to cure students of all this, not to
encourage it. For many reasons, including the risk to their jobs,
professors are sometimes hesitant to take charge, especially if
they are untenured or adjunct faculty. Some of them, of course,
treat children as their equals because they have absorbed the
idea that the students really are their peers, a mistake that hurts
both teaching and learning. Some educators even repeat the old
saw that “I learn as much from my students as they learn from
me!” (With due respect to my colleagues in the teaching

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profession who use this expression, I am compelled to say: if

that’s true, then you’re not a very good teacher.)
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.
For many years, 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.” Here’s a sample:

Students have obligations to teachers. I know this sounds

like strange doctrine, but let it stand.
The first obligation, particularly operative during the
first weeks of a new semester, is a moderately good will
toward the teacher, a trust, a confidence that is willing to
admit to oneself that the teacher has probably been through
the matter, and, unlike the student, knows where it all
leads. I do not want here to neglect the dangers of the
ideological professor, of course, the one who imposes his
mind on what is. But to be a student requires a certain
modicum of humility.
Thus, the student owes the teacher trust, docility, effort,
thinking.12

Schall made that essay required reading for many years before
retiring. 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. Many faculty members today might

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agree with Schall, but they cannot risk aggravating the

students, because, as everyone in any service industry knows,
the customer is always right.
Students, well intentioned or otherwise, are poorly served
by the idea that students and teachers are intellectual and social
equals and that a student’s opinion is as good as a professor’s
knowledge. Rather than disabusing young people of these
myths, college too often encourages them, with the result that
people end up convinced they’re actually smarter than they are.
As the social psychologist David Dunning has noted, “The way
we traditionally conceive of ignorance—a s an absence of
knowledge—leads us to think of educa tion as its natural
antidote. But education, even when done skillfully, can
produce illusory confidence.”13
Just imagine how difficult things get when education isn’t
done skillfully.
THE GENERIC uNIVERSITY

An administrator at a small college— excuse me, a

“university”— could well read this chapter and protest that I
am unfairly excoriating businesses for acting like businesses.
Higher education, after all, is an industry, and it is no sin if the
corporations in it compete with each other. The business
analogy, however, fails when the schools themselves do not
deliver what they’ve promised: an education.
The game begins long before a prospective student fills out
an application. Even as colleges have moved toward
intellectually low- impact programs surrounded by lifestyle
improvements and nonacademic activities, they have attempted
simultaneously to inflate their importance and burnish their
brands. My earlier comment about the proliferation of
“universities” was not a stray observation: it’s actually

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happening, and it has been going on since at least the1990s.

Like so much else associated with the current maladies of
higher education, it is a change driven by money and status.
One reason these small schools become universities is to
appeal to students who want to believe they’re paying for
something in a higher tier—t hat is, for a regional or national
“university,” rather than a local college. 14 State colleges and
community colleges are lower- status institutions, when
compared with four- year universities, in the eyes of college-
bound high school students. Hence, many of them have tried to
distinguish themselves with an attempted rebranding as
“universities.”
A more prosaic motivation behind this name game is to find
new funding streams by grafting graduate programs onto small
colleges. The competition to pull in more money and the
consequent proliferation of graduate programs have thus forced
these new “universities” into a degree- granting arms race. Not
only are schools adding graduate programs in professional
degrees like business administration, but many of them are
bloating their undergraduate programs with additional
coursework for a master’s degree.
Faced with this competitive pressure from other schools
doing likewise, some of these fledgling universities then step
up their game and add doctoral programs. And because these
small schools cannot support a doctoral program in an
established field, they construct esoteric interdisciplinary fields
that exist only to create new credentials. It’s not hard to see
how this ends up creating degrees that do not actually signal a
corresponding level of knowledge.
All of this borders on academic malpractice. The creation of
graduate programs in colleges that can barely provide a
reasonable undergraduate education cheats both graduates and
undergrads. Small colleges do not have the resources—i

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ncluding the libraries, research facilities, and multiple

programs— of large universities, and repainting the signs at the
front gates cannot magically create that kind of academic
infrastructure. Turning Smallville College into Generic
University might look good on the new stationery, but it is the
kind of move that can push what might have been a serviceable
local college into a new status as a half- baked university.
This rebranding dilutes the worth of all postsecondary
degrees. When everyone has attended a university, it gets that
much more difficult to sort out actual achievement and
expertise among all those “university graduates.” Americans
are burying themselves in a blizzard of degrees, certificates,
and other affirmations of varying value. People eager to
misinform their fellow citizens will often say that they have
graduate education and that they are therefore to be taken
seriously. The only thing more disheartening than finding out
these folks are lying about possessing multiple degrees is to
find out that they’re telling the truth.
Students will likely object that the demands of their major
are a lot more work than I’m giving credit for here. Perhaps,
but that depends on the major itself. The requirements of a
degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering,
mathematics), a demanding foreign language, or a rigorous
degree in the humanities can be a different matter than a major
in communications or visual arts or— as much as it pains me to
say it—p olitical science. Every campus has “default majors,”
chosen when a student has no real idea what to do, some of
which are off- ramps from more demanding programs after
students learn the limits of their abilities.
At the risk of being misunderstood, I should clarify a few
points. First, it’s not news to me or anyone else in higher
education that even the best schools have “gut” courses, the
class a student can pass by exchanging oxygen for carbon

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dioxide for a set number of weeks. Perhaps it might be

shocking for a professor to admit this, but there’s nothing
wrong with easy or fun courses. I would even defend at least
some of them as necessary. There should be classes where
students can experiment with a subject, take something
enjoyable, and get credit for learning something.
The problem comes when all the courses start to look like
gut courses. They exist in the sciences, the humanities, and the
social sciences, and their numbers, at least by my subjective
judgment, are growing. No field is immune, and a look through
the offerings of many programs around the country—a s well
as a compilation of the grades given in them— suggests that
what were once isolated professorial vices are now common
departmental habits.
I should also note that I am not making an argument here
for slimming colleges down to a bunch of STEM departments
with a smattering of English or history majors. I deplore those
kinds of arguments, and I have long objected to what I see as
an assault on the liberal arts. Too often, those who denigrate
the liberal arts are in reality advocating for nothing less than
turning colleges into trade schools. Art history majors always
take the cheap shots here, even though many people don’t
realize that a lot of art history majors go on to some pretty
lucrative careers. In any case, I don’t want to live in a
civilization where there are no art history majors or, for that
matter, film studies, philosophy, or sociology majors.
The question is how many students in these majors are
actually learning anything, or whether there need to be so many
students taking these subjects at third- string institutions—
especially if supported by taxpayer dollars. 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

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enrollments should be restricted to the small number of

students who intend to pursue them seriously and with rigor.
This, too, is one of the many things faculty are not supposed to
say out loud, because to resentful parents and hopeful students,
it sounds like baseless elitism.
It might be elitism, but it’s not baseless. Many small
schools were once called “teacher’s colleges” and served that
purpose well. Their history or English departments fulfilled the
perfectly useful function of producing history and English
teachers. Today, however, these tiny “universities” offer
anthropology or the philosophy of science as though their
students are slated for graduate study at Stanford or Chicago.
These majors are sometimes built around the interests of the
few faculty members who teach them, or offered as a way to
fatten the catalog of a school that otherwise might not seem
intellectually sturdy enough to prospective students.
There’s nothing wrong with personal fulfillment or
following your bliss— if you can afford it. If a small college
has a history course that interests you, by all means, take it. It
might be terrific. 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.
When rebranded universities offer courses and degree
programs as though they are roughly equivalent to their better-
known counterparts, they are not only misleading prospective
students but also undermining later learning. The quality gap
between programs risks producing a sense of resentment: if
you and I both have university degrees in history, why is your

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view about the Russian Revolution any better than mine? Why
should it matter that your degree is from a top- ranked
department, but mine is from a program so small it has a single
teacher? If I studied film at a local state college, and you went
to the film program at the University of Southern California,
who are you to think you know more than I? We have the same
degree, don’t we?
These kinds of comparisons and arguments about the
differences between colleges and their various degrees and
programs get under the skin pretty quickly. The student who
gained admission to a top school and finished a degree there
resents the leveling that comes with an indifferent comparison
to his or her fellow major from an unknown public
“university.” (If all schools are equally good, why are some
harder to get into than others?) Meanwhile, the student who
worked day and night to get the same degree bridles at the
implication that his or her achievement means less without a
pedigree. (If everything except the Ivy League is junk, why are
all these other programs fully accredited?)
There’s plenty of bad faith in these arguments, which are
often little more than social one- upmanship. 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.
We may not like any of these comparisons, but they matter
in sorting out expertise and relative knowledge. It’s true that
great universities can graduate complete dunderheads. Would-
be universities, however, try to punch above their intellectual

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weight for all the wrong reasons, including marketing, money,

and faculty ego. In the end, they are doing a disservice to both
their students and society. Studying the same thing might give
people a common language for further discussion of a subject,
but it does not automatically make them peers.
Colleges and universities also mislead their students about
their own competence through grade inflation. Collapsing
standards so that schoolwork doesn’t interfere with the fun of
going to college is one way to ensure a happy student body and
relieve the faculty of the pressure of actually failing anyone. As
Bloomberg’s McArdle wrote, this attempt to lessen the
unpleasant impact of actually having to attend college on the
customers should be no surprise when classroom seats are a
commodity rather than a competitively earned privilege.

You see the results most visibly in the lazy rivers and rock-
climbing walls and increasingly luxurious dorms that
colleges use to compete for students, but such a shift does
not limit itself to extraneous amenities. 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.

Or as a Washington Post writer Catherine Rampell describes it,

college is now a deal in which “students pay more in tuition,
and expect more in return— better service, better facilities and
better grades.”15 Less is demanded of students now than even a
few decades ago. There is less homework, shorter trimester and
quarter systems, and technological innovations that make going
to college more fun but less rigorous. When college is a
business, you can’t flunk the customers.

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College isn’t always rock climbing and kayaking, but there

can be no doubt that the trend is toward deemphasizing grades
by inflating them. As a University of Chicago study found in
2011, “it does not take a great deal of effort to demonstrate
satisfactory academic performance in today’s colleges and
universities.”

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.16

Some of those “other activities” are noble and enriching. Many

others are the sorts of things parents would probably just as
soon not know about.
When it comes to the death of expertise, the effect of lighter
workloads and easier grades should be obvious: students
graduate with a high GPA that doesn’t reflect a corresponding
level of education or intellectual achievement. (Again, I am
leaving aside certain kinds of degrees here, and talking about
the bulk of majors taken in the United States today.) “I was a
straight- A student at a university” does not mean what it did in
1960 or even 1980. A study of two hundred colleges and
universities up through 2009 found that A was the most
commonly given grade, an increase of nearly 30 percent since
1960 and over 10 percent just since 1988. Grades in the A and
B range together now account for more than 80 percent of all
grades in all subjects, a trend that continues unabated.17

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In other words, all the children are now above average. In

2012, for example, the most frequently given grade at Harvard
was a straight A. At Yale, more than 60 percent of all grades
are either A- or A. That can happen now and then in a
particular class, but that’s almost impossible across an entire
university in any normal grade distribution, even among the
brightest students.
Every institution, when confronted with these facts, blames
every other institution around it. The problem, of course, is that
no one university or program can take a stand against grade
inflation without harming its own students: the first faculty to
deflate their grades instantly make their students seem less
capable than those from other institutions. This, as Rampell
correctly noted, means that the default grade is no longer the
“gentleman’s C” of the 1950s, but a “gentleman’s A,” now
bestowed more as an entitlement for course completion than as
a reward for excellence.
Princeton, Wellesley, and Harvard, among others,
established committees to look into the problem of grade
inflation. Princeton adopted a policy that tried to limit the
faculty’s ability to give A grades in 2004, an experiment that
was rolled back by the faculty itself less than a decade later. At
Wellesley, humanities departments tried to cap the average
grade at a B+ in their courses; those courses lost a fifth of their
enrollments and the participating departments lost nearly a
third of their majors.
Experienced educators have grappled with this problem for
years. I am one of them, and like my colleagues, I have not
found a solution. The two most important facts about grade
inflation, however, are that it exists and that it suffuses students
with unwarranted confidence in their abilities. Almost every
institution of higher education is complicit in what is
essentially collusion on grades, driven on one side by market

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pressures to make college fun, to make students attractive to

employers, and to help vulnerable professors escape the wrath
of dissatisfied students, and on the other by irresponsible
notions about the role of self- esteem in education.

RATE ME GENTLY

Another way colleges and universities enhance the notion that

students are clients, and thus devalue respect for expertise, is to
encourage the students to evaluate the educators standing in
front of them as though they are peers. Student evaluations
came out of the movement for more “relevance” and student
involvement after the 1960s. They are still with us, and in an
era where businesses, including education, are obsessed with
“metrics,” they are used and abused more than ever.
I am actually a supporter of some limited use of student
evaluations. I will immodestly say that mine have been pretty
good since the day I began teaching— I have won awards for
teaching at both the Naval War College and the Harvard
Extension School— and so I have no personal axe to grind
here. I’m also a former academic administrator who had to
review the evaluations of other faculty as part of my duties
overseeing a department. I’ve read thousands of these
evaluations over the years, from students at all levels, and
they’re a worthwhile exercise if they’re handled properly.
Nonetheless, the whole idea is now out of control, with
students rating professional men and women as though they’re
reviewing a movie or commenting on a pair of shoes.
Evaluations usually fall into a gray area, where most
teachers are competent and most students generally like the
courses. Where evaluations are most useful is in spotting
trends: a multiyear look at evaluations can identify both the

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best and the worst teachers, especially if the readers are adept
at decoding how students write such reports. (“She’s boring,”
for example, often means “she actually expected me to read the
book she assigned instead of just entertaining me.”) In my own
classes, I use them to spot things in my courses that are
working as well as what might be missing the mark, such as
books or lectures that I should drop or keep, or to let me know
if my own sense of whether I had an especially good or weak
term was shared by the students.
Still, there’s something wrong with a system that asks a
student how much they liked their education. College isn’t a
restaurant. (I sometimes hear a Yelp review as I’m reading
these evaluations: “The basic statistics course was served a bit
cold, but it was substantial, while my partner chose a light
introduction to world religions that had just a hint of spice.”)
Evaluating teachers creates a habit of mind in which the
layperson becomes accustomed to judging the expert, despite
being in an obvious position of having inferior knowledge of
the subject material.
Student evaluations are also a hypersensitive indicator,
influenced by the tiniest and most irrelevant things, from the
comfort of the seats to the time of day the course is offered. A
certain number of them have to be ignored. And some of them
are just strange, to the point where professors will exchange
stories of the worst or weirdest evaluations they’ve gotten. One
of my colleagues once gave a detailed lecture on British naval
history, for example, and a military student’s only comment
was that the teacher needed to press his shirt. A top historian I
knew was regularly ridiculed on evaluations for being short. I
was once told by an undergraduate that I was a great professor
but that I needed to lose some weight. (That one was accurate.)
Another student disliked me so much that he or she said on my
evaluation that they would pray for me.

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As entertaining as these evaluations are, they all encourage

students to think of themselves as the arbiters of the talent of
the teachers. And when education is about making sure clients
are happy, a college’s reliance on evaluations forces weaker or
less secure teachers to become dancing bears, striving to be
loved or at least liked, so that more students will read the
reviews and keep the class (and the professor’s contract) alive
for the next term. This creates and sustains a vicious circle of
pandering and grade inflation.
Students should be involved in their education as more than
observers or receptacles for information. Engagement and
debate are the lifeblood of a university, and professors are not
above criticism of either their ideas or their teaching ability.
But the industrial model of education has reduced college to a
commercial transaction, where students are taught to be picky
consumers rather than critical thinkers. The ripple effect on
expertise and the fuel this all provides to attacks on established
knowledge defeat the very purpose of a university.

COLLEGE IS NOT A SAFE SPACE

Young men and women are not as irresponsible as we

sometimes portray them in the media or the pop culture or in
our mind’s eye, for that matter. We laugh at college movie
comedies and fondly remember our own irresponsible
moments as students, and then we sternly lecture our children
never to be like us. We applaud student activism if we like the
cause, and we deplore it if we disagree. Adults always have a
tendency to be sour critics of the generation that follows them.
None of this, however, excuses colleges for allowing their
campuses to turn into circuses. It was probably inevitable that
the anti- intellectualism of American life would invade college

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campuses, but that is no reason to surrender to it. And make no

mistake: campuses in the United States are increasingly
surrendering their intellectual authority not only to children,
but also to activists who are directly attacking the traditions of
free inquiry that scholarly communities are supposed to defend.
I have plenty of strong opinions on what I see as assaults on
free inquiry, but I’m not going to air them here. There are
dozens of books and articles out there about how colleges and
universities have become havens of political correctness, where
academic freedom is suffocated under draconian codes
enforced by ideologues among the students and the faculty. I
see no point in rehearsing those arguments here.
When it comes to the death of expertise, however, it is
important to think about the way the current fads on campus,
including “safe spaces” and speech codes, do in fact corrode
the ability of colleges to produce people capable of critical
thought. (And remember, “critical thinking” isn’t the same
thing as “relentless criticism.”) In the same way that shopping
for schools teaches young men and women to value a school
for reasons other than an education, these accommodations to
young activists encourage them to believe, once again, that the
job of a college student is to enlighten the professors instead of
the other way around.
There are so many examples of this it is almost unfair to
point to any one policy or controversy at any particular
university. The problem is endemic to American universities
and has recurred, in waves of varying strength, since the early
1960s. What is different today, and especially worrisome when
it comes to the creation of educated citizens, is how the
protective, swaddling environment of the modern university
infantilizes students and thus dissolves their ability to conduct
a logical and informed argument. When feelings matter more
than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.

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Emotion is an unassailable defense against expertise, a moat of

anger and resentment in which reason and knowledge quickly
drown. And when students learn that emotion trumps
everything else, it is a lesson they will take with them for the
rest of their lives.
Colleges are supposed to be the calm environment in which
educated men and women determine what’s true and what’s
false, and where they learn to follow a model of scholarly
inquiry no matter where it takes them. Instead, many colleges
have become hostages to students who demand that their
feelings override every other consideration. They no doubt
believe in their right to make this demand because their lives,
up until then, have been lived that way, in a therapeutic culture
that leaves no thought unexpressed and no feeling invalidated.
Still, student activism is a normal part of college life.
Adolescents are supposed to be passionate; it’s part of being a
teen or a twentysomething. I’m still old- fashioned enough that
I expect educated men and women to be leaders among the
voters by virtue of a better education, and so I applaud
tomorrow’s voters exercising their political reasoning in debate
and discussion.
Unfortunately, the new student activism is regressing back
to the old student activism of a half century ago: intolerance,
dogmatism, and even threats and violence. Ironically (or
perhaps tragically), students are mobilizing extreme language
and demands over increasingly small things. While Baby
Boomers might well claim that they were busting up the
campus for peace in 1967, there’s some truth to the notion that
young men about to be drafted and sent to an Asian jungle
were understandably emotional about the subject. Members of
minority groups who were not fully citizens in the eyes of the
law until the early 1960s justifiably felt they were out of less

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spectacular options than protest, even if nothing excuses the

violence that ensued.
Today, by contrast, students explode over imagined slights
that are not even remotely in the same category as fighting for
civil rights or being sent to war. Students now build majestic
Everests from the smallest molehills, and they descend into
hysteria over pranks and hoaxes. 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.
At Yale in 2015, for example, a house master’s wife had the
temerity to tell minority students to ignore Halloween costumes
they thought offensive. This provoked a campuswide temper
tantrum that included professors being shouted down by
screaming students. “In your position as master,” one student
howled in a professor’s face, “it is your job to create a place of
comfort and home for the students… . Do you understand
that?!”
Quietly, the professor said, “No, I don’t agree with that,”
and the student unloaded on him:

“Then why the [expletive] did you accept the position?!

Who the [expletive] hired you?! You should step down! If
that is what you think about being a master you should step
down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is
not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home
here. You are not doing that!”18 [emphasis added]

Yale, instead of disciplining students in violation of their own

norms of academic discourse, apologized to the tantrum
throwers. The house master eventually resigned from his
residential post, while staying on as a faculty member. His

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wife, however, resigned her faculty position and left college

teaching entirely.
To faculty everywhere, the lesson was obvious: the campus
of a top university is not a place for intellectual exploration. It
is a luxury home, rented for four to six years, nine months at a
time, by children of the elite who may shout at faculty as if
they’re berating clumsy maids in a colonial mansion.
A month after the Yale fracas, protests at the University of
Missouri flared up after a juvenile incident in which a swastika
was drawn on a bathroom wall with feces. Exactly what
Missouri’s flagship public university was supposed to do, other
than to wash the wall, was unclear, but the campus erupted
anyway. “Do you know what systemic oppression is?!” a
student yelled at the flustered Mizzou president. “Google it!”
she hollered. Student journalists were harassed and threatened,
in one case by a faculty member with a courtesy appointment,
ironically enough, in the journalism school. After a few more
days of these theatrics, the university’s president resigned. (The
chancellor and a professor who had refused to cancel classes
after the protests both followed suit.)
Missouri, however, isn’t Yale. It does not have a nearly
inelastic demand for its services. Applications and donations
soon took a hit in the wake of the protests and resignations. 19
Some months later, the adjunct journalism professor who had
confronted a student was fired. When the smoke cleared, the
university was left with fewer faculty, administrators,
applicants, and donations, all because a group of students,
enabled by an even smaller group of faculty, reversed the roles
of teachers and learners at a major public university.
Interestingly, this is a subject that often unites liberal and
conservative intellectuals. The British scholar Richard
Dawkins, something of a scourge to conservatives because of
his views on religion, was perplexed by the whole idea of “safe

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spaces,” the places American students demand as a respite

from any form of political expression they might find
“triggering.” Dawkins minced no words: “A university is not a
‘safe space,’ ” he said on Twitter. “If you need a safe space,
leave, go home, hug your teddy and suck your thumb until
ready for university.”
Likewise, after the Yale and Missouri events, an Atlantic
writer, Conor Friedersdorf, noted that “what happens at Yale
does not stay there” and that tomorrow’s elites were
internalizing values not of free expression but of sheer
intolerance. “One feels for these students,” Friedersdorf later
wrote. (I do not, but Friedersdorf is more understanding than I
am.) “But if an email about Halloween costumes has them
skipping class and suffering breakdowns, either they need help
from mental- health professionals or they’ve been grievously
ill- served by debilitating ideological notions they’ve acquired
about what ought to cause them pain.”20
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

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rationally don’t deserve to play a role in running a great
nation.21

It’s a safe bet that no one’s going to amend the Constitution in

response to Professor Reynolds’s suggestion, but his
comments, like those of other observers, point to the bizarre
paradox in which college students are demanding to run the
school while at the same time insisting that they be treated as
children.
Again, I have no idea how to fix this, especially before
students get to college. Like most professors— I hope— 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.
But when students leave my classroom, I am haunted by the
realization that I cannot moderate their arguments forever. I
cannot prevent them from dismissing others, from rejecting
facts, from denouncing well-i ntentioned advice, or from
demanding that their feelings be accepted in place of the truth.
If they’ve spent four years showing such disrespect for their
professors and their institutions, they cannot be expected to
respect their fellow citizens. And if college graduates can no
longer be counted on to lead reasoned debate and discussion in
American life, and to know the difference between knowledge
and feeling, then we’re indeed in the kind of deep trouble no
expert can fix.

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Let Me Google That for

You
How Unlimited Information Is
Making Us Dumber

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net

distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I
was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the
surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Nicholas Carr

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

Do not believe everything you read on the Internet, especially

quotes from famous people.
Abraham Lincoln (probably)

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THE RETuRN OF STuRGEON’S LAW

Ask any professional or expert about the death of expertise,

and most of them will immediately blame the same culprit: the
Internet. People who once had to ask the advice of specialists
in any given field now plug search terms into a browser and get
answers in seconds. Why rely on people with more education
and experience than you— or, worse, have to make
appointments with them—w hen you can just get the
information yourself?
Chest pain? Ask your computer. “Why does my chest
hurt?” will generate more than eleven million results (at least
on the search engine I just used) in exactly 0.52 seconds. A
stream of information will fill your screen, with helpful advice
from sources ranging from the National Institutes of Health to
other outfits whose bona fides are a tad less reputable. Some of
these sites will even walk the would- be patient through a
diagnosis. Your doctor might have a different opinion, but who
is he to argue with a glowing screen that will answer your
question in less than a single second?
In fact, who is anyone to argue with anyone? In the
Information Age, there’s no such thing as an irresolvable
argument. Each of us is now walking around with more
accumulated information on a smartphone or tablet than ever
existed in the entire Library of Alexandria. At the beginning of
this book, I mentioned the character Cliff Clavin from the
classic television show Cheers, the local know-i t- all who
routinely lectured the other regulars in a Boston pub on every
subject under the sun. But Cliff couldn’t exist today: at the first
claim of “it’s a known fact,” everyone in the bar could pull out
a phone and verify (or more likely disprove) any of Cliff’s
claims.

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Put another way, technology has created a world in which

we’re all Cliff Clavin now. And that’s a problem.
Despite what irritated professionals may think, however, the
Internet is not the primary cause of challenges to their
expertise. Rather, the Internet has accelerated the collapse of
communication between experts and laypeople by offering an
apparent shortcut to erudition. It allows people to mimic
intellectual accomplishment by indulging in an illusion of
expertise provided by a limitless supply of facts.
Facts, as experts know, are not the same as knowledge or
ability. And on the Internet, “facts” are sometimes not even
facts. In the various skirmishes in the campaigns against
established knowledge, the Internet is like artillery support: a
constant bombardment of random, disconnected information
that rains down on experts and ordinary citizens alike,
deafening all of us while blowing up attempts at reasonable
discussion.
Internet users have created many humorous laws and
corollaries to describe discussion in the electronic world. The
tendency to bring up Nazi Germany in any argument inspired
Godwin’s Law and the related reductio ad Hiterlum. 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. There are many others,
including my personal favorite, Skitt’s Law: “Any Internet
message correcting an error in another post will contain at least
one error itself.”
When it comes to the death of expertise, however, the law
to bear in mind is an observation coined long before the advent
of the personal computer: Sturgeon’s Law, named for the
legendary science- fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. In the
early 1950s, highbrow critics derided the quality of popular

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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.”
Where the Internet is concerned, Sturgeon’s Law of 90
percent might be lowballing. The sheer size and volume of the
Internet, and the inability to separate meaningful knowledge
from random noise, mean that good information will always be
swamped by lousy data and weird detours. Worse, there’s no
way to keep up with it all, even if any group or institution
wanted to try. In 1994, there were fewer than three thousand
websites online. By 2014, there were more than one billion
sites.1 Most of them are searchable and will arrive before your
eyes in mere seconds, regardless of their quality.
The good news is that even if Sturgeon’s Law holds, that’s
still one hundred million pretty good websites. These include
all the major news publications of the world (many of which
are now read more in pixels than on paper), as well as the home
pages of think tanks, universities, research organizations, and
any number of important scientific, cultural, and political
figures. The bad news, of course, is that finding all of this
information means plowing through a blizzard of useless or
misleading information posted by everyone from well-
intentioned grandmothers to the killers of the Islamic State.
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 countless dumpsters of nonsense parked on the Internet
are a Sturgeon’s Law nightmare. People who already have to

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make hard choices about getting information from a few dozen

news channels on their televisions now face millions upon
millions of web pages produced by anyone willing to pay for
an online presence. 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—t han 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.
The most obvious problem is that the freedom to post
anything online floods the public square with bad information
and half- baked thinking. The Internet lets a billion flowers
bloom, and most of them stink, including everything from the
idle thoughts of random bloggers and the conspiracy theories
of cranks all the way to the sophisticated campaigns of
disinformation conducted by groups and governments. Some of
the information on the Internet is wrong because of sloppiness,
some of it is wrong because well- meaning people just don’t
know any better, and some of it is wrong because it was put
there out of greed or even sheer malice. The medium itself,
without comment or editorial intervention, displays it all with
equal speed. The Internet is a vessel, not a referee.
This, of course, is no more and no less than an updated
version of the basic paradox of the printing press. As the writer
Nicholas Carr pointed out, the arrival of Gutenberg’s invention
in the fifteenth century set off a “round of teeth gnashing”
among early humanists, who worried that “printed books and
broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the
work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and
debauchery.”2
Those medieval naysayers weren’t entirely wrong. The
printing press was used to mass-p roduce Bibles, to teach
people to read, and eventually to empower the literacy that

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drives so much of human freedom. Of course, it also enabled

the dissemination of insanity like the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, taught people to confuse words with facts, and supported
the creation of totalitarian propaganda that undermined that
same human freedom. The Internet is the printing press at the
speed of fiber optics.
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. This might seem an odd
claim coming from a member of the scholarly community,
because I gladly admit that Internet access makes my work as a
writer a lot easier. In the 1980s, I had to put together a
dissertation by lugging around armloads of books and articles.
Today, I keep browser bookmarks and folders full of
electronically readable articles at my fingertips. How can that
not be better than the hours I spent going blind in front of a
copier in the bowels of a library?
In some ways, the convenience of the Internet is a
tremendous boon, but mostly for people already trained in
research and who have some idea what they’re looking for. It’s
much easier to subscribe to the electronic version of, say,
Foreign Affairs or International Security than it is to decamp to
the library or impatiently check an office mailbox. This is no
help, unfortunately, for a student or an untrained layperson
who has never been taught how to judge the provenance of
information or the reputability of a writer.
Libraries, or at least their reference and academic sections,
once served as a kind of first cut through the noise of the
marketplace. Visiting a library was an education in itself,
especially for a reader who took the time to ask for help from a
librarian. The Internet, however, is nothing like a library.
Rather, it’s a giant repository where anyone can dump

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anything, from a first folio to a faked photograph, from a

scientific treatise to pornography, from short bulletins of
information to meaningless electronic graffiti. It’s an
environment almost entirely without regulation, which opens
the door to content being driven by marketing, politics, and the
uninformed decisions of other laypeople rather than the
judgment of experts.
Can fifty million Elvis fans really be wrong? Of course they
can.
In practice, this means that a search for information will
cough up whatever algorithm is at work in a search engine,
usually provided by for- profit companies using criteria that are
largely opaque to the user. A youngster who takes to the
Internet to satisfy a curiosity about tanks in World War II will
more likely come up with the TV personality Bill O’Reilly’s
ridiculous— but best- selling— Killing Patton than with the
chewier but more accurate work of the best military historians
of the twentieth century. On the Internet as in life, money and
popularity unfortunately count for a lot.
Plugging words into a browser window isn’t research: it’s
asking questions of programmable machines that themselves
cannot actually understand human beings. 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. But why
bother with all that tedious hoop-j umping when the screen in
front of us already has the answers, generated by the millions
in just seconds, and beautifully laid out in colorful,
authoritative-l ooking websites?

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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. We expect information
instantly. We want it broken down, presented in a way that is
pleasing to our eye— no more of those small- type, fragile
textbooks, thank you— and we want it to say what we want it
to say. 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 resulting flood
of information, always of varying quality and sometimes of
uncertain sanity, creates a veneer of knowledge that actually
leaves people worse off than if they knew nothing at all. It’s an
old saying, but it’s true: it ain’t what you don’t know that’ll
hurt you, it’s what you do know that ain’t so.
Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, the Internet is
making us meaner, shorter- fused, and incapable of conducting
discussions where anyone learns anything. The major problem
with instantaneous communication is that it’s instantaneous.
While the Internet enables more people to talk to each other
than ever before— a distinctly new historical condition—
everyone talking immediately to everyone else might not
always be such a good idea. 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.

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WHAT’S FAKE ON THE INTERNET: EVERYTHING

There aren’t enough pages in this or any other book to catalog

the amount of bad information on the Internet. Miracle cures,
conspiracy theories, faked documents, misattributed quotes—
all of these and more are the crabgrass and weeds that have
rapidly overgrown a global garden of knowledge. The healthier
but less sturdy grasses and flowers don’t stand a chance.
Durable old urban legends and conspiracy theories, for
example, have been reconditioned and given new life online.
We’ve all heard stories of alligators in the sewers, improbable
celebrity deaths, and libraries that fell down because no one
counted on the weight of the books in them, told and retold
mostly by word of mouth. On the Internet, these stories are
presented with beautiful layouts and graphics. They now
spread so fast through email and social media that there are
groups, like the admirable project at Snopes.com and other
fact- checking organizations, who do nothing but stomp out
these intellectual wastebasket fires all day long.
Unfortunately, they’re shoveling against the tide. People do
not come to the Internet so that their bad information can be
corrected or their cherished theories disproven. Rather, they
ask the electronic oracle to confirm them in their ignorance. 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.”
Two months after she wrote those words, Dewey and the
Post threw in the towel and ceased her weekly “what was fake
on the Internet” column. There was no way to keep up with the
madness, especially once hoaxers figured out how to make

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money out of spreading myths for precious clicks on websites.

“Frankly,” Dewey told her readers, “this column wasn’t
designed to address the current environment. This format
doesn’t make sense.” More alarming were the conversations
Dewey had with professional researchers who told her that
“institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias
so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories
are frequently only interested in consuming information that
conforms with their views— even when it’s demonstrably
fake” (emphasis in the original). 4 Dewey and the Post fought
the Internet, and the Internet won.
A lot of nonsense, particularly in politics, thrives on the
reach and staying power of the Internet. A stubborn group of
cranks might still believe the earth is flat or that Americans
never walked on the moon, but eventually all the pictures from
space are good enough for the rest of us. When it comes to
urban legends like Barack Obama’s African birth, George W.
Bush’s orchestration of the 9/ 11 terror attacks, or the US
Treasury’s secret plan to replace the dollar with a global
currency, astronauts with cameras cannot help. Social media,
websites, and chat rooms turn myths, stories heard from a
“friend of a friend,” and rumors into “facts.”
As the British writer Damian Thompson has explained,
instant communication is empowering people and groups
dedicated to crackpot ideas, some of them quite dangerous.
Thompson calls this “counterknowledge,” in that it all flies in
the face of science and is completely impervious to contrary
evidence.

Now, thanks to the internet … a rumor about the Antichrist

can leap from Goths in Sweden to an extreme traditionalist
Catholic sect in Australia in a matter of seconds. Minority
groups are becoming ever more tolerant of each other’s

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eccentric doctrines. Contacts between black and white

racists, which began tentatively decades ago, are now
flourishing as the two groups swap conspiracy stories.5

In a slower, less- connected world, these kinds of groups could

not reinforce their beliefs with instantaneous affirmation from
other extremists online. The free movement of ideas is a
powerful driver of democracy, but it always carries the risk that
ignorant or evil people will bend the tools of mass
communication to their own ends and propagate lies and myths
that no expert can dispel.
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.
Even when falsehoods or mistakes are deleted at the source,
they’ll show up in an archive somewhere else. If the stories in
them go “viral” and travel the electronic world in days, hours,
or even minutes, they’re effectively impossible to correct.
For example, in 2015 the conservative gadfly Allen West
broke a make- believe scoop that President Obama was forcing
members of the US military to pray like Muslims for
Ramadan.6 West’s website juxtaposed a blaring headline—
“Look what our troops are being FORCED to do”— against a
picture of US soldiers kneeling with their heads to prayer mats.
It was a startling visual and the story spread rapidly through
social media.
No such thing had occurred. West had recycled a picture,
taken several years earlier, of actual Muslims in the US military
at prayer. Even after objections were raised to the misleading
picture (by me, among others), West did not pull the story. It
wouldn’t have mattered, since it was already archived on blogs
and other sites. People surfing the Internet who have neither
the training nor the time to ascertain the provenance of the

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information will from now on come across not only the original
story but also thousands of repetitions of it and never know that
the whole thing is bunk.
Today, no one need be frustrated by fussy fact- checkers or
resolute editors. Just as a nicely bound book could once
mislead people into thinking its contents were authoritative, so,
too, do slick websites provide the visual cues of reliability and
authenticity that help uninformed readers spread bad
information faster than any headline that William Randolph
Hearst could have imagined. Experts and other professionals
who insist on the dreary rigor of logic and factual accuracy
cannot compete with a machine that will always give readers
their preferred answer in sixteen million colors.

OF COuRSE IT’S SAFE, I GOOGLED IT

Leaving aside slick, self- produced websites and the inevitable

Facebook posts and memes that crowd the Internet, the search
for quick answers has also facilitated the growth of entire
industries based on selling bad ideas to the public and charging
them for the privilege of being misinformed. I refer here not to
online journalism—t hat’s in the next chapter— but rather to
the many outlets, often fronted by celebrities, that offer advice
meant to supplant and replace established knowledge from
experts.
Are you a woman concerned about your reproductive
health? I have no experience in these matters, but I’m told by
the women in my life that regular visits to the gynecologist are
not something they particularly enjoy. Now that the Internet
has arrived, however, women have an alternative source of
information other than medical professionals: the actress
Gwyneth Paltrow has her own “lifestyle magazine,”

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GOOP.com, and she can discuss with you, in the privacy of

your home or via your smartphone, the many things women
can do to maintain their gynecological health, including
steaming their vaginas.
If you’re unfamiliar with this practice, Ms. Paltrow highly
recommends it. “You sit on what is essentially a mini- throne,”
she said in 2014, “and a combination of infrared and mugwort
steam cleanses your uterus, et al. It is an energetic release—
not just a steam douche— that balances female hormone levels.
If you’re in [Los Angeles], you have to do it.”
Actual gynecologists, however, do not recommend that
women in Los Angeles or anywhere else steam any of their
middle anatomy. A gynecologist named Jen Gunter took to her
own (distinctly less glamorous) website with a clear alternative
recommendation:

Steam isn’t going to get into your uterus from your vagina
unless you are using an attachment with some kind of
pressure and MOST DEFINITELY NEVER EVER DO
THAT. Mugwort or wormwood or whatever when
steamed, either vaginally or on the vulva, can’t possibly
balance any reproductive hormones, regulate your
menstrual cycle, treat depression, or cure infertility. Even
steamed estrogen couldn’t do that.
If you want to feel relaxed get a good massage.
If you want to relax your vagina, have an orgasm.7

Paltrow’s site, however, is the epitome of hip, at least for a

particular demographic. A satirist named Laura Hooper Beck
captured the credulousness of Paltrow’s fans perfectly:
“Basically, if a doctor tells me to do it, I’m gonna take a hard
pass. But if a skinny blonde in an ugly wig tells me that

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blowing hot air up my vagina is going to cure everything I’ve

ever suffered from, including a bad relationship with my
mother, well, then, I’m gonna listen to Gwyneth Paltrow,
because girlfriend knows science.”8
It’s easy— too easy, I know—t o make fun of vacuous
celebrities, and since this is now more about steam and vaginas
than I’ve ever written in my entire career, let’s leave Paltrow
and her health advice aside. There is nevertheless an important
point here about the influence of the Internet on the death of
expertise, because in an earlier time, a sensible American
woman would have had to exert a great deal of initiative to find
out how a Hollywood actress parboils her plumbing. Now, a
woman searching for answers on everything from fashion to
uterine cancer could accidentally spend more time reading
GOOP than talking to her doctor.
Celebrities abusing their status as celebrities is nothing new,
but the Internet amplifies their effect. While we might dismiss
Jim Carrey’s antivaccine rants as the extension of the
comedian’s already unconventional personality, people with
more storied names get sucked into the electronic funhouse as
well.
In 2015, the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni got a
call from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the senator and
presidential candidate assassinated in 1968. It was important,
Kennedy told Bruni, that they meet. Kennedy was insistent
about correcting Bruni on the issue of vaccination. Like too
many other Americans, Kennedy was lugging around ill-i
nformed paranoia about vaccines causing, in Kennedy’s words,
“a holocaust” among American children. (Indeed, Bruni noted
that Carrey “has obviously done worship in the church of
Robert Kennedy Jr.”) Bruni later recalled of the meeting: “I
had sided with the American Medical Association, the
American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Institutes of

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Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

[But] Kennedy knew better.”9
Kennedy, Carrey, and others did what many Americans do
in such situations: they decided beforehand what they believed
and then went looking for a source on the Internet to buttress
that belief. As Bruni pointed out, “The anti- vaccine agitators
can always find a renegade researcher or random ‘study’ to
back them up. 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.”
This kind of Internet grazing— mistakenly called
“research” by laypeople— makes interactions between experts
and professionals arduous. Once again, confirmation bias is a
major culprit: although many stories on the Internet are false or
inaccurate, the one-i n- a- billion story where Google gets it
right and the experts get it wrong goes viral. In a tragic case in
2015, for example, a British teenager was misdiagnosed by
doctors who told her to “stop Googling her symptoms.” 10 The
patient insisted she had a rare cancer, a possibility the doctors
dismissed. She was right, they were wrong, and she died.
The British teen’s story made big news, and a rare mistake
likely convinced a great many people to be their own doctors.
Of course, people who have died because they used a computer
to misdiagnose their heart disease as indigestion never make
the front page. But none of that matters. These David-a nd-
Goliath stories (a teenager against her team of doctors) feed the
public’s insatiable confirmation bias and fuel their cynicism in
established knowledge while bolstering their false hopes that
the solutions to their problems are just a few mouse clicks
away.
Once upon a time, books were at least a marginal barrier to
the rapid dissemination of misinformation, because books took

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time to produce and required some investment and judgment

on the part of a publisher. “I read it in a book” meant “this
probably isn’t crazy, because a company spent the money to
put it between two covers and publish it.” This was never
entirely true about books, of course; some of them are carefully
fact- checked, peer reviewed, and edited, while others are just
slammed between covers and rushed to bookstores.
Nonetheless, books from reputable presses go through at
least a basic process of negotiation between authors, editors,
reviewers, and publishers, including the book you’re reading
right now. Books from self- published “vanity presses,” by
contrast, are looked down upon by reviewers and readers alike,
and with good reason. Today, however, the Internet is the
equivalent of hundreds of millions of vanity presses all
cranking out whatever anyone with a keyboard wants to say, no
matter how stupid— or how vile. (As National Journal’s Ron
Fournier has said, in the age of the Internet, “every bigot is a
publisher.”) There’s a fair amount of wisdom and information
hiding out there, but there’s no escaping Sturgeon’s Law.
Accessing the Internet can actually make people dumber
than if they had never engaged a subject at all. The very act of
searching for information makes people think they’ve learned
something, when in fact they’re more likely to be immersed in
yet more data they do not understand. This happens because
after enough time surfing, people no longer can distinguish
between things that may have flashed before their eyes and
things they actually know.
Seeing words on a screen is not the same as reading or
understanding them. When a group of experimental
psychologists at Yale investigated how people use the Internet,
they found that “people who search for information on the Web
emerge from the process with an inflated sense of how much
they know— even regarding topics that are unrelated to the

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ones they Googled.”11 This is a kind of electronic version of the

Dunning- Kruger Effect, in which the least competent people
surfing the web are the least likely to realize that they’re not
learning anything.
People looking for information, say, about “fossil fuels”
might end up scrolling past many pages on a related term, like
“dinosaur fossils.” After enough websites fly by, they
eventually lose the ability to recognize that whatever they just
read about either subject isn’t something they actually knew
before they looked at a screen. Instead, they just assume that
they knew things about both dinosaurs and diesel fuel because
they’re just that smart. Unfortunately, people thinking they’re
smart because they searched the Internet is like thinking
they’re good swimmers because they got wet walking through
a rainstorm.
The Yale team somewhat gently described this problem as
“mistaking outsourced knowledge for internal knowledge.” A
blunter way of putting it would be to say that people can’t
remember most of what they see while blowing through dozens
of mouse clicks. As the writer Tom Jacobs observed, searching
“appears to trigger an utterly unjustified belief in one’s own
knowledge—w hich, given the increasingly popular habit of
instinctively looking online to answer virtually any question, is
a bit terrifying.”12
It may well be terrifying, but it’s definitely annoying. These
mistaken assertions of gained knowledge can make the job of
an expert nearly impossible. There is no way to enlighten
people who believe they’ve gained a decade’s worth of
knowledge because they’ve spent a morning with a search
engine. Few words in a discussion with a layperson can make
an expert’s heart sink like hearing “I’ve done some research.”
How can exposure to so much information fail to produce at
least some kind of increased baseline of knowledge, if only by

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electronic osmosis? How can people read so much yet retain so

little? The answer is simple: few people are actually reading
what they find.
As a University College of London (UCL) study found,
people don’t actually read the articles they encounter during a
search on the Internet. Instead, they glance at the top line or the
first few sentences and then move on. Internet users, the
researchers noted, “are not reading online in the traditional
sense; indeed, there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are
emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles,
contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost
seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional
sense.”13 This is actually the opposite of reading, aimed not so
much at learning but at winning arguments or confirming a
preexisting belief.
Children and younger people are especially vulnerable to
this tendency. 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.” These youngsters “do not find library-
sponsored resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use
Google or Yahoo! instead,” because these services “offer a
familiar, if simplistic solution, for their study needs.” Teachers
and other experts are not immune from the same temptations.
“Power browsing and viewing,” according to the study,
“appear to be the norm for all. The popularity of abstracts
among older researchers rather gives the game away.”
“Society,” the UCL study’s authors conclude, “is dumbing
down.”
This already serious problem might even be a bit scarier
than it looks. Internet users tend to gravitate toward, and to

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believe, whichever results of a search come up first in the

rankings, mostly without regard to the origins of those results.
After all, if the search engine trusted it enough to rank it
highly, it must be worthwhile. This is why anyone pushing
content on the Internet looks at ways to improve where their
product shows up in a search: if you sell soup, you’ll do what
you can to rattle a search engine so that people looking for
soup recipes are instead steered instead toward coupons for
your brand of soup.
But what if you’re selling something more important than
soup, like a political candidate? There is at least some evidence
that search- engine rankings can alter people’s perceptions of
political reality. In 2014, two psychologists completed a study
of what they called the “search engine manipulation effect” and
claimed that their tests showed an ability “to boost the
proportion of people who favored any candidate by between 37
and 63 percent after just one search session,” and that this
potentially constitutes a “serious threat to the democratic
system of government.”14 It’s too early to say that search
engines are undermining democracy—a t least yet— but it’s
hard to argue with the reality that most laypeople can no longer
tell the difference between real information and whatever a
search engine burps up.

THE WISDOM OF MEGA- CROWDS

Obviously, nonexperts are not always wrong about everything,

nor are experts always right. Once in a blue moon, a teenager
can get it right and a team of doctors can get it wrong. Experts
are important, but ordinary people do manage to live their lives
every day without the advice of professors, intellectuals, and
other know-i t- alls. The Internet, used properly, can help

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laypeople reach out to each other for basic information that

might be too costly or difficult to access from professionals. In
fact, the Internet, like the stock market and other mechanisms
that aggregate the public’s guesses and hunches about
complicated matters, can produce moments where laypeople
outperform experts.
The way in which a lot of wrong guesses can be milled into
one big right guess is a well- established phenomenon.
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.
Sometimes, people without any specialized knowledge can
make a better guess at something in a large group than any one
member of the group. This tends to be true especially for
decisions where the amalgamation of a lot of guesses might
produce a better aggregate guess than any one expert’s opinion.
Surowiecki recounted the story, for example, of an English
county fair in 1906, when the public was asked to guess the
weight of an ox. The average of the guesses was better than
any one person’s guess and ended up almost exactly on the
mark.15 Likewise, the world’s stock exchanges collectively are
generally better than any one stock analyst at betting on stocks.
There are a lot of reasons crowds are better at estimation
than individuals, including the way in which a large number of
guesses among a lot of people can help to wash out a certain
amount of confirmation bias, misperception, or any other
number of errors. It also allows people with only partial
information to bring those small amounts of knowledge to a
problem and help solve it, much in the way a thousand people

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can complete a huge jigsaw puzzle even though each of them

may only have a few pieces.
To take one example, the unbiased eye of the crowd
actually cost one of the most prominent journalists in America
his job. In 2004, at the height of a US presidential election,
longtime CBS news anchor Dan Rather and his producers went
on the air with a story about incumbent President George W.
Bush’s military record. CBS claimed to have documents from
the early 1970s proving that Bush ditched his Air National
Guard unit and never finished his required service. Bush, a
commander-i n- chief who at that point had led America into
two major wars, was running against Senator John Kerry, a
decorated war hero, and the charge was naturally electrifying in
a race that focused heavily on military issues.
Bush supporters objected to what they claimed was dodgy
sourcing and sloppy reporting, but in the end ordinary people
on the Internet, not angry partisans, brought the story down.
Laypeople with no experience in journalism but who spent
plenty of time around computers noticed that the font in the
documents closely matched those generated by Microsoft’s
Word software. Obviously, in 1971 the Air Force used
typewriters. Microsoft and its programs didn’t exist then. The
documents had to be fakes.
Faced with this crowd- sourced challenge to the story, CBS
ordered an investigation. The network ended up repudiating the
documents and the story. The segment’s producer was fired.
Dan Rather, convinced to this day that he was right and
everyone else was wrong, retired and sued his old employer.
He lost.
So who needs experts? If we ask the same question enough
times, or set enough people to work on the same subject, why
not rely on their collective wisdom instead of seeking the
flawed or biased opinion of only a handful of self-a nointed

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Wise Ones? If one person is smart and a hundred smarter, then

a billion communicating instantly must be even smarter still.
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. The articles would be geared toward the inquisitive minds
of ordinary human beings rather than the narrow interests of a
panel of scholars or editors. Not only would the entries be in a
constant and evolving state of accuracy, but the articles
themselves by definition would constitute a collection about
things that actually engage the readers instead of a systematic
but useless compendium of esoteric 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. A hobby is not the same
thing as a career. As a saying attributed to the British writer

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Alastair Cooke goes, “Professionals are people who can do

their best work when they don’t feel like it.” 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. A researcher who
studied these trends suggested that Wikipedia after 2007 should
have changed its motto from “the encyclopedia that anyone can
edit” to “the encyclopedia that anyone who understands the
norms, socializes him or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of
semi- automated rejection and still wants to voluntarily
contribute his or her time and energy can edit.”16
Eventually, Wikipedia imposed stricter editing controls, but
those restrictions in turn discouraged new contributors. 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.” Wikipedia
still struggles to maintain the quality of its own articles, even
measured by its own criteria:

Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved

is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and
female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on
female novelists or places in sub- Saharan Africa are
sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000
articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as
forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn
even Wikipedia’s own middle- ranking quality scores.17

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Wikipedia does have “featured articles,” which must be “well-

w ritten,” “comprehensive,” and “well- researched,” including
“a thorough and representative survey of the relevant
literature,” with claims verified against “high- quality reliable
sources.”
In other words, what Wikipedia really wants is for its best
pieces to be just like peer- reviewed scholarship— only
without using actual peers. 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.
Of course, if measured by readership, Wikipedia works just
fine. And on some subjects, Wikipedia is a perfectly
serviceable source of information. As the MIT article noted,
articles are skewed “toward technical, Western, and male-
dominated subject matter,” so when it comes to tangible— and,
more important, uncontroversial— information, Wikipedia has
succeeded in bringing together a lot of data in a reliable and
stable format. (Personally, I love that Wikipedia is a great
source for the plot of almost any movie, no matter how small
or obscure.) If you want to know who discovered strontium,
who attended the Washington Naval Conference of 1925, or a
quick explanation of last year’s Nobel Prizes, Wikipedia is a
lot better than a random search engine.
Once any kind of political agenda gets involved, things get
a lot dicier. The Wikipedia entry on the chemical weapon
Sarin, for example, became an arena for infighting among
people who had conflicting agendas over whether the Syrian
government used the substance on its own people. Even the

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basic science fell under attack. A London- based analyst, Dan

Kaszeta— the Sarin expert I mentioned in the last chapter who
learned a hard lesson about trying to help a college student—
told me in late 2015 that

if someone were to rely on the current Wikipedia page for

accurate information about the chemical warfare agent
Sarin, they would be misled by half-t ruths and numerous
vague statements not supported by the supplied references.
Some of the information on the Wiki page, while
technically correct in some aspects, is worded in ways that
are misleading. Some of the statements are false.

Kaszeta added that he “spent many hours after the 2013 use of
Sarin in Syria correcting misconceptions about Sarin, many of
which were doubtless attributable to errors and half- truths on
relevant Wikipedia pages.”
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.” How a
virus is transmitted from one human being to another is not the
same thing as guessing how many jelly beans are in a glass
barrel. As the comedian John Oliver has complained, you don’t
need to gather opinions on a fact: “You might as well have a
poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ or ‘Do owls
exist?’ or ‘Are there hats?’ ”

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Likewise, public policy is not a parlor game of prediction; it

is about long-t erm choices rooted in thoughtful consideration
of costs and alternatives. Asking crowds to guess about specific
events in short-t erm, mental dart–throwing matches just isn’t
much help when trying to navigate in difficult policy waters.
“Will Bashar Assad of Syria use chemical weapons at some
point in 2013” is an even bet, like putting a chip on one color
in roulette. It’s a yes- or- no question, and at some point,
you’ve either won or lost the bet. It’s not the same question as
“Why would Bashar Assad use chemical weapons?” and it is
light- years away from the dilemma of “What should America
do if Bashar Assad uses chemical weapons?” The Internet,
however, conflates all three of these questions, and it turns
every complicated issue into a poll with a one- click radio
button offering a quick solution.
The ease with which people can weigh in on these issues,
and even sometimes get a prediction about them right when
experts might have been wrong, bolts another layer of anti-
intellectual armor to the resistance among laypeople to views
more informed than their own.

I uNFRIEND YOu

Learning new things requires patience and the ability to listen

to other people. The Internet and social media, however, are
making us less social and more confrontational. Online, as in
life, people are clustering into small echo chambers, preferring
only to talk to those with whom they already agree. 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.

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We’re not just associating with people more like ourselves,

we’re actively breaking ties with everyone else, especially on
social media. A 2014 Pew research study found that liberals are
more likely than conservatives to block or unfriend people with
whom they disagreed, but mostly because conservatives
already tended to have fewer people with whom they disagreed
in their online social circles in the first place. (Or as a
Washington Post review of the study put it, conservatives have
“lower levels of ideological diversity in their online
ecosystem.”)18 Liberals were also somewhat more likely to end
a friendship over politics in real life, but the overall trend is
one of ideological segregation enabled by the ability to end a
friendship with a click instead of a face-t o- face discussion.
This unwillingness to hear out others not only makes us all
more unpleasant with each other in general, but also makes us
less able to think, to argue persuasively, and to accept
correction when we’re wrong. 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. This is dangerous because it both undermines the role of
knowledge and expertise in a modern society and corrodes the
basic ability of people to get along with each other in a
democracy.
Underlying much of this ill temper is a false sense of
equality and the illusion of egalitarianism created by the
immediacy of social media. I have a Twitter account and a
Facebook page, and so do you, so we’re peers, aren’t we? After
all, if a top reporter at a major newspaper, a diplomat at the
Kennedy School, a scientist at a research hospital, and your
Aunt Rose from Reno all have an online presence, then all of
their views are just so many messages speeding past your eyes.
Every opinion is only as good as the last posting on a home
page.

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In the age of social media, people using the Internet assume

that everyone is equally intelligent or informed merely by
virtue of being online. As the New York Times movie critic A.
O. Scott has put it,

On the Internet, everyone is a critic—a Yelp- fueled

takedown artist, an Amazon scholar, a cheerleader
empowered by social media to Like and to Share. The
inflated, always suspect authority of ink- stained wretches
like me has been leveled by digital anarchy. Who needs a
cranky nag when you have a friendly algorithm telling you,
based on your previous purchases, that there is something
You May Also Like, and legions of Facebook friends
affirming the wisdom of your choice?19

The anonymity of social media tempts users into arguing as

though every participant is the same, a group of peers starting
from the same level of background and education. This is a rule
very few people would use in real life, but on the Internet, the
intellectual narcissism of the random commenter displaces the
norms that usually govern face- to- face interactions.
This strange combination of distance and intimacy poisons
conversation. Reasonable arguments require participants to be
honest and well intentioned. Actual proximity builds trust and
understanding. We are not just brains in a tank processing
disparate pieces of data; we hear out another person in part by
relying on multiple visual and auditory cues, not just by
watching their words stream past our eyes. Teachers,
especially, know that the same material delivered at a distance
or on a screen has a different impact than personal interaction
with a student who can ask questions, furrow a brow, or show
an expression of sudden understanding.

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Distance and anonymity remove patience and presumptions

of goodwill. Rapid access to information and the ability to
speak without having to listen, combined with the “keyboard
courage” that allows people to say things to each other
electronically they would never say in person, kill
conversation. As the writer Andrew Sullivan has noted, this is
in part because nothing on the Internet is dispositive, and so
every participant in a debate demands to be taken as seriously
as every other.

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.20

Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other online sites can be outlets

for intelligent discussion, but too often these and other venues
become nothing more than a fusillade of assertions, certainties,
poor information, and insults rather than actual exchanges.
To be sure, the Internet is also facilitating conversations
among people who might never otherwise have encountered
each other. Introverts might argue that an arena like Reddit or
the comments section of an online journal opens the door for
more interaction from people who in an earlier time might have
been reluctant to engage in a public discussion. Unfortunately,
allowing anyone to express a view means that almost anyone
will express a view, which is why so many publications, from

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the Toronto Sun to the Daily Beast, have been shutting down
their online comments sections.
All of this interaction is doing little to loosen the attachment
of laypeople to misinformation. In fact, the problem may be
worse than we think. When confronted by hard evidence that
they’re wrong, some people will simply double- down on their
original assertion rather than accept their error. This is the
“backfire effect,” in which people redouble their efforts to keep
their own internal narrative consistent, no matter how clear the
indications that they’re wrong.21
The Internet, as David Dunning points out, sharpens this
problem in multiple ways, not least that refuting a dumb idea
requires repeating it at least once in the course of the
discussion. This creates a minefield for teachers and other
experts who risk confirming a mistake merely by
acknowledging its existence:

Then, of course, there is the problem of rampant

misinformation in places that, unlike classrooms, are hard
to control—l ike the Internet and news media. In these
Wild West settings, it’s best not to repeat common
misbeliefs at all. Telling people that Barack Obama is not a
Muslim fails to change many people’s minds, because they
frequently remember everything that was said— except for
the crucial qualifier “not.”22

Experts trying to confront this kind of stubborn ignorance may

think they’re helping, when in fact they’re basically trying to
throw water on a grease fire. It doesn’t work and only spreads
the damage around.
The Internet is the largest anonymous medium in human
history. The ability to argue from a distance, and the cheapened

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sense of equality it provides, is corroding trust and respect

among all of us, experts and laypeople alike. Alone in front of
the keyboard but awash in websites, newsletters, and online
groups dedicated to confirming any and every idea, the Internet
has politically and intellectually mired millions of Americans
in their own biases. Social media outlets such as Facebook
amplify this echo chamber; as Megan McArdle wrote in 2016,
“Even if we are not deliberately blocking people who disagree
with us, Facebook curates our feeds so that we get more of the
stuff we ‘like.’ What do we ‘like’? People and posts that agree
with us.”23
This is especially dangerous now that social media like
Facebook and Twitter have become the primary sources of
news and information for many Americans, and experts trying
to break through this shell of political insularity and self-
assured ignorance do so at their peril. It’s difficult enough to
argue with one person who has gotten something wrong; it’s
quite another to try to reason with someone as they gather
pretty websites as “evidence” and marshal legions of
anonymous, like- minded social media friends with equally
uninformed views for support. Meanwhile, scholars and
professionals who insist on logic, foundational knowledge, and
basic rules about sources risk condemnation by twenty- first-
century online users as nothing more than elitists who do not
understand the miracles of the Information Age.
Websites and Internet polls might be unreliable, but
reporters can dig out the truth instead of getting pulled down in
the whirlpool. Journalists can still serve as the arbiters of all
this chaos, using the careful tools of investigation, sourcing,
and fact- checking.
Or, as we’ll see in the next chapter, perhaps not.

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Journalism, and
Lots of It
Charlie: Mom, I find it interesting that you refer to the
Weekly World News as “The Paper.” The paper contains facts.

May: This paper contains facts. And this paper has the eighth
highest circulation in the whole wide world. Right? Plenty of
facts. “Pregnant man gives birth.” That’s a fact.
So I Married an Axe Murderer

I READ IT IN THE PAPER

Did you know that chocolate can help you lose weight? Sure
you do. You read it in the paper. In fact, you might have read it
in several papers, and woe to any expert, including a doctor,
who might have told you otherwise. After all, hiding the
miraculous weight- decreasing qualities of the tastiest thing in
the world is just the kind of thing experts would do.
Thankfully, a German scientist, Johannes Bohannon of the
Institute of Diet and Health, wrote a paper that was published
in a journal and then joyfully covered in press throughout the

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world, and he verified what we have all suspected all along:

chocolate is really good for you.
Except Johannes Bohannon doesn’t exist. Neither does the
Institute of Diet and Health. The journal that published the
paper is real, but apparently it is less than scrupulous about
things like peer review and editing. “Johannes” Bohannon was
in fact a journalist named John Bohannon, who was (in
Bohannon’s words) “part of a team of gonzo journalists and
one doctor” who wanted to “demonstrate just how easy it is to
turn bad science into the big headlines behind diet fads.”1
So chocolate won’t make you thinner. But did you know
that the West Bank and Gaza, the occupied Palestinian areas on
two sides of Israel, are connected by a bridge, one on which the
Israelis sometimes maliciously limit Palestinian traffic? You
might well have read that one in the “news,” too. In 2014, the
online journal Vox— which bills itself as a source that explains
complicated issues to everyone else— listed “11 crucial facts
to understand the Israel- Gaza crisis.” Fact number one
included the Gaza– West Bank bridge.
It doesn’t exist.
Vox corrected its error—t he writer claimed he’d seen an
article about a proposed bridge but didn’t realize it was never
built— but not before critics had a good laugh at Vox’s
expense. As the writer Mollie Hemingway noted, no journalist
can avoid the occasional mistake, and few can be experts in
any one subject, but the “bridge to Gaza” was not “about
getting a name wrong or not knowing about some arcane
detail,” it required being “completely unfamiliar with the
area.”2 As is the case with all corrections, one can only wonder
how many people remember the story but not the correction.
Vox is a regular target for such criticism, and for good
reason. In early 2016 Vox ran a headline that said, “The most
radical thing the Black Panthers did was give kids free

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breakfast.” The Panthers, a radical group formed in the late

1960s that fused black nationalism and Marxism- Leninism,
were involved in multiple cases of violence and murder,
including shoot- outs with the police. They were not exactly
the friendly staff of a day- care center. The Vox piece prompted
the Daily Beast columnist Michael Moynihan to tweet,
“Remember when ‘explainer’ writers had to know something
about what they were explaining? Nor do I.”
So, chocolate isn’t a weight- loss miracle, and there’s no
bridge between Gaza and the West Bank. Maybe the Panthers
were a bit rougher than we remember. But perhaps you weren’t
aware of the real meaning of Easter to Christians, which
celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ directly up to
Heaven. The New York Times said so in 2013. Now, the
Gospels make some sort of reference to Jesus walking around
for a bit first, which is probably the version that local parish
priests and ministers relate every spring. Those members of the
clergy might be smart, and there might even be some theology
degrees scattered in among them, but who are they to argue
with the New York Times?
There are well over a billion Christians in the world, and
amazingly enough, a few of them caught the error. The Times
quietly ran what might be one of the most understated
corrections in newspaper history: “An earlier version of this
article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the
celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his
resurrection into heaven.”3 That is a more accurate statement of
the official version, but to get it wrong in the first place means
that someone at the Times had no idea about the story of the
“Doubting Thomas” or of other common cultural references
derived from moments in the New Testament where Jesus
appeared in person, rather than taking the direct elevator to the
top floor on Easter Sunday.

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If keeping up with all this misinformation tires you out, you

can always retreat back to some fine literature and perhaps read
one of the great novels by Evelyn Waugh. After all, Waugh
was listed in 2016 by TIME magazine as one of the “100
greatest female writers of all time,” so her work might well be
worth a look.
Except, of course, that Evelyn Waugh (who lived until
1966) was a man.
These kinds of howlers aren’t just a product of the Internet
era. A front-p age story in the Washington Post from more than
thirty years ago, for example, referred to Ireland as a member
of NATO, which would have been a shock not only to the
famously neutral people of Ireland, but to both the Soviet
Union and the United States. Everyone makes mistakes,
including experts, journalists, editors, and fact- checkers. These
things happen.
Unfortunately, however, these kinds of mistakes happen a
lot more frequently in the new world of twenty- first- century
journalism. Worse, because of the Internet, misinformation
spreads a lot faster and sticks around a lot longer. 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.
I realize it seems churlish to complain about the feast of
news and information brought to us by the Information Age,
but I’m going to complain anyway. Changes in journalism, like
the increased access to the Internet and to college education,
have had unexpectedly corrosive effects on the relationship
between laypeople and experts. Instead of making people better
informed, much of what passes for news in the twenty- first
century often leaves laypeople—a nd sometimes experts—
even more confused and ornery.

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Experts face a vexing challenge: there’s more news

available, and yet people seem less informed, a trend that goes
back at least a quarter century. Paradoxically, it is a problem
that is worsening rather than dissipating. Not only do people
know less about the world around them, they are less interested
in it, despite the availability of more information than ever
before.
As long ago as 1990, for example, a study conducted by the
Pew Trust warned that disengagement from important public
questions was actually worse among people under thirty, the
group that should have been most receptive to then- emerging
sources of information like cable television and electronic
media. 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.4

Those respondents are now themselves middle-a ged, and their

children are faring no better. 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.”5 Like their parents, these young people were not

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only less informed than we might have expected, but they were
also less interested in applying what little they might have
learned to their responsibilities as citizens.
Thus, when a layperson’s riposte to an expert consists of “I
read it in the paper” or “I saw it on the news,” it may not mean
very much. Indeed, the information may not have come from
“the news” or “the paper” at all, but from something that only
looks like a news source. More likely, such an answer means “I
saw something from a source I happen to like and it told me
something I wanted to hear.” At that point, the discussion has
nowhere to go; the original issue is submerged or lost in the
effort to untangle which piece of misinformation is driving the
conversation in the first place.
How did this happen? How can people be more resistant to
facts and knowledge in a world where they are constantly
barraged with facts and knowledge? The short answer where
journalism is concerned—i n an explanation that could be
applied to many modern innovations— is that technology
collided with capitalism and gave people what they wanted,
even when it wasn’t good for them.
I realize that criticizing journalism and the modern news
media puts me at risk of violating the Prime Directive for
experts: never tell other experts how to do their jobs. While I’m
not an expert in journalism, however, I am a consumer of its
products. I rely on the news as part of my own profession, both
as a teacher and as a policy analyst. I have to navigate the
hurdles every expert faces in communicating complex events
and ideas to laypeople every day. In some ways, the modern
media have made my job— helping people make sense of a
complicated world— harder than it was even twenty years ago.

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TOO MuCH OF A GOOD THING IS TOO MuCH

The challenges to expertise and established knowledge created

by modern journalism all flow from the same problem that
afflicts so much of modern American life: there is too much of
everything.
There are more sources of news in the twenty- first century
than ever before. Thanks to radio, television, and the Internet,
people can access those sources easily and share them
electronically; thanks to universal education, they can read
them and discuss them more widely than in the past. It’s a
banquet of information, served up with various kinds of garnish
on any number of platters. 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.
Today, anyone with electricity is up to their neck in news
from every direction whenever they want it. Most newspapers
and local television stations in America are instantaneously
available in electronic format and are updated regularly.
Consumers with access to satellite or cable television—w hich
is to say, almost anyone in most of the developed world— can
take their pick of dozens of newscasts from around the planet.
Today, there is a news source for every taste and political view,
with the line between journalism and entertainment
intentionally obscured to drive ratings and clicks.
To put this in perspective, the average American home in
1960 had three television stations available to it along with
eight radio stations, one newspaper, and three or four
magazines.6 By 2014, the Nielsen rating organization estimated
that the average US home had 189 television channels (60

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more than it had in 2008) with consumers tuning in

consistently to about 17 of those channels. Add to this the
amount of media delivered to consumers through their mobile
devices and home computers, estimated by a researcher at the
San Diego Supercomputer Center in 2015 to be the equivalent
of nine DVDs worth of data per person per day. This much
information would take the average person more than fifteen
hours a day to see or hear.7
But more of everything does not mean more quality in
everything. (Sturgeon’s Law is inescapable everywhere.) To
say that the citizens of the United States now have many more
sources of news than ever before is like saying that they also
have more dining choices than ever before: it’s true, but it
doesn’t mean that anyone’s getting healthier by eating in
America’s nearly three hundred thousand cheap chain
restaurants and fast- food outlets.
Affluence and technology lowered the barriers to journalism
and to the creation of journalistic enterprises in the late
twentieth and early twenty- first centuries, with predictable
consequences. More media meant more competition; more
competition meant dividing the audience into identifiable
political and demographic niches; more opportunity at more
outlets meant more working journalists, regardless of whether
they were competent to cover important issues. All of this
competition was at the behest of the American consumer, who
wanted everything simpler, faster, prettier, and more
entertaining.
Forty years ago the media were more conscientious about
separating “news” from everything else. This also meant,
however, that the “news” was in fact not a fully realized picture
of the world. Instead, it was a carefully curated and edited
stream of information. The small number of networks and news
outlets, and the relatively tiny amount of time devoted to news

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on television, meant that the public saw the world as it was

viewed by the corporations who ran the networks. News
organizations had to try to cover the broadest and most
demographically marketable audience, and so newscasts in the
United States through the 1960s and 1970s were remarkably
alike, with calming, authoritative figures like Walter Cronkite
and Harry Reasoner reporting even the most awful events with
aplomb and detachment.
However, this also meant that not everything counted as
news. There was more corporate and elite control over the
news before the 1990s— and that wasn’t entirely a bad thing.
When each network only had thirty minutes in which to capture
the day’s events, an arms control treaty with the Soviet Union
was likely to get more play than which celebrities were getting
divorces. Networks rarely broke into their programming with
news except for the dread-i nducing “special reports,” which
were usually about a major disaster of some kind. If something
important happened in the world, everyone in America had to
wait for the paperboy—a solemn childhood office I occupied
in the early 1970s— or for their evening newscast.
Not only is there more news, but there is more interactivity
with the news. Americans no longer read whatever fits into a
set number of newspaper columns, nor do they sit passively in
front of a television and receive a digest of events. Instead,
they’re asked, constantly, what they think of the information
they’re being given, often in real time. Twitter and Facebook
are the new news tickers, crowd- sourced streams of
information that break news and spread rumors with equal
force. Talk shows and news broadcasts— increasingly difficult
to distinguish from each other— often ask viewers to weigh in
via social media or on a website instant poll, with the clear
assumption that the audience is watching the news with a
smartphone, tablet, or laptop nearby.

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Interactivity is also driving the selection of stories, which

can make one yearn for the days of corporate editorial control.
When the Dallas Morning News hired a new editor in 2015, it
reached out to Mike Wilson, a journalist from the Internet news
site FiveThirtyEight, which specializes in “data- driven” stories
rather than breaking news. “I think what we need to throw out
are some old notions of what our readers need,” Wilson said in
an interview after he was hired.

We just have to be more responsive to what the audience

wants. I think the tradition in newspapers has been that we
have set the agenda and we’ve told readers what we think
they want to know. I think we need to come down off of
that mountain a little bit and ask people, involve people in
the conversation a little bit more.8

Larger papers agree. “How can you say you don’t care what
your customers think?” Alan Murray, who oversees online
news at the Wall Street Journal, said in 2015. “We care a lot
about what our readers think. But our readers also care a lot
about our editorial judgment. So we’re always trying to balance
the two.”9
Journalists and their editors swear up and down that they
are not allowing the public to drive their selection and coverage
of stories, but that is hard to believe. A 2010 New York Times
report tried to put the best face on it after describing how
closely the Washington Post and other papers monitor their
web traffic: “Rather than corrupt news judgment by causing
editors to pander to the basest reader interests, the availability
of this technology so far seems to be leading to more surgical
decisions about how to cover a topic so it becomes more
appealing to an online audience.” 10 The Post’s readers, the

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story proudly notes, were less interested in the 2010 British

elections than in Crocs (an ugly shoe fad), but that didn’t make
the Post alter its coverage. That might be a relief to hear, but it
is unsettling that this assurance had to be given at all.
To judge from the public’s awareness of major issues, what
readers need is not more input into the stories, but basic
information, including the occasional map with a “You Are
Here” pointer on it. It is difficult to imagine a media outlet in a
less competitive, less crowded market asking its readers what
they want in the same way, but in a market glutted by
information, it was only a matter of time before the tables were
turned and journalists were asking readers what they would
like to read instead of informing them about things they must
know.
This fusing of entertainment, news, punditry, and citizen
participation is a chaotic mess that does not inform people so
much as it creates the illusion of being informed. 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—t hat 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.
This information overload isn’t just overwhelming
laypeople either. The fact is that everyone is drowning in data,
including professionals who pay a lot of attention to news and
who try to be discriminating consumers. In 2015 the National
Journal surveyed people it called “Washington Insiders,”
mostly composed of congressional staff, federal government
executives, and private- sector public affairs professionals, and
asked them how they get their news. According to the study, it
was now easier than ever for these “insiders” to obtain

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information, “but harder than ever for them to make sense of it

all.” Professionals in Washington, like everyone else, were
“somewhat paralyzed” by a “glut” of news that left them
“lacking confidence in individual sources and information.”11
If professional policymakers and staff in Washington can’t
make sense of the news, how can anyone else? Who has
enough time to sort through it all? The National Journal study
even nodded to this time pressure by including a note that the
study itself should take forty- five minutes to read in full, but
only twenty to skim. The irony is both obvious and disturbing.
This endless stream of news and tailored interactive
broadcasting actually predates the Internet and cable. It even
predates television. Radio is where it all began; more
accurately, radio is where people first immersed themselves in
endless news and talk, in a medium that was supposedly killed
off by television in the 1960s but found new life at the end of
the twentieth century.

RADIO KILLED THE VIDEO STAR

While many professionals and experts tend to blame the

Internet for the profusion of would- be know- it- alls lecturing
them in their offices, others invoke the twenty- four- hour news
cycle as another culprit, drowning people in stories and facts
faster than they can absorb them. As with the accusations
against the Internet, there’s good reason for those complaints.
Americans now watch the news as if they’re in the situation
room of the White House, hanging on every new scrap of
information as if they were personally going to make the call
on launching a war. (CNN even appeals to this viewer vanity
by calling its afternoon broadcast “The Situation Room.”)

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This doesn’t explain, however, why Americans erroneously

end up thinking they’re better informed than the experts on the
myriad issues flooding across their screens. For this, we have
to look a little more closely at how the public’s relationship
with the media developed after the 1970s. 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. The
growth of new kinds of media and the decline of trust are both
intimately related to the death of expertise.
Television in the 1950s was supposed to displace radio for
most kinds of programming. AM radio nonetheless dominated
music and sports, with a wide audience reach but a tinny,
monaural sound. This inferior sound quality couldn’t compete
with the obvious problem that human beings, equipped with
two ears, prefer listening to everything in stereo. FM offered
better sound—a s the band Steely Dan promised in a hit song
called “FM,” there was “no static at all”— but it took until
1978 for FM radio broadcasts to reach more listeners than AM.
Television, meanwhile, with its ability to add visual elements
to its reports, grabbed the news and other staples of American
life once primarily found on radio.
Radio wasn’t dead, however. Especially on the AM band,
radio offered something television could not: an interactive
format. Relatively unhindered by the limits of airtime and
cheap to produce, the idea behind talk radio was simple: give
the host a microphone, hit the switch, and take calls from
people who wanted to talk about the news and express their
own views. With other forms of entertainment gravitating to
television or to the richer sound of FM, it was an obvious
choice for stations looking for affordable programming.

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Talk radio had immense political consequences, and it

provided the foundations for attacks on established knowledge
that flowered later on social media. No one did more to drive
the ascendance of talk radio than the broadcaster Rush
Limbaugh, who in the late 1980s created an alternative to a
still- stodgy world of Sunday- morning television punditry.
Limbaugh wasn’t the first: radio talk shows were scattered
throughout the United States since at least the 1950s, often
relegated to evenings and late nights. Limbaugh, however, did
something unique, by setting himself up as a source of truth in
opposition to the rest of the America media.
Within a few years of his first broadcasts, Limbaugh was
heard on more than six hundred stations nationwide. He told
his listeners that the press and the national television networks
were conspiring in a liberal echo chamber, and especially that
they were in the tank for the new administration of President
Bill Clinton. Not all of these charges were entirely fair, but not
all of them were wrong either, and Limbaugh was able to mine
the established media daily for examples of bias— of which
there were plenty— and run with them. With three solid hours
of uninterrupted airtime, Limbaugh had an advantage television
wouldn’t have until cable.
Limbaugh and other talkers also built a loyal national base
of followers by allowing them to call in and express their
support. The calls were screened and vetted; according to a
manager at one of Limbaugh’s early affiliates, this was because
Limbaugh felt that he was not very good at debate. Debate,
however, was not the point: the object was to create a sense of
community among people who already were inclined to agree
with each other. Later, the Internet would overtake this kind of
network building among people who rejected the mainstream
media, but the phenomenon began on radio.

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The television networks and print media were taken by

surprise to find not only that millions of people were listening
but that these listeners were turning against traditional sources
of news. In 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew charged the
press with liberal bias, hauling off the immortal zinger (penned
by the speechwriter William Safire) that the media was full of
“nattering nabobs of negativism.” Twenty years later, talk radio
made the same case and this time made it stick.
The irony, of course, is that Limbaugh himself, along with
other conservative talkers, soon became the mainstream. By the
early twenty- first century, broadcast radio was again slumping
as a market, but Limbaugh held on to twenty million listeners,
and in 2008 he scored a $400 million contract whose size was
second only to shock- jock Howard Stern’s half- billion dollar
deal with Sirius satellite radio. In the early age of television,
video nearly put radio out of business; soon enough, however,
television and talk radio would become complementary rather
than competing media as radio’s top stars moved to cable, and
vice versa.
Liberal talk radio could not compete in this realm and had
far less of an impact. Liberals might say this is because they
refused to stoop to the level of their competitors. (The
progressive radio host Randi Rhodes, on the now- defunct
progressive network Air America, did call Hillary Clinton “a
big [expletive] whore” on the air in 2008, which suggests that
at least some liberals were willing to go the distance.)
Conservatives, for their part, have argued that liberal talk radio,
in a country dominated by liberal media outlets, was a solution
to a nonexistent problem, because liberals already had plenty of
places to be heard. For whatever reason, left- leaning talkers
never gained traction. The popular progressive talker Alan
Colmes, for example, has a fraction of the audience
commanded by Limbaugh or by Colmes’s own former talk-

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show partner Sean Hannity (who divides his time between

radio and a show on Fox News).
The rise of talk radio challenged the role of experts by
reinforcing the popular belief that the established media were
dishonest and unreliable. Radio talkers didn’t just attack
established political beliefs: they attacked everything, plunging
their listeners into an alternate universe where facts of any kind
were unreliable unless verified by the host. In 2011, Limbaugh
referred to “government, academia, science, and the media” as
the “four corners of deceit,” which pretty much covered
everyone except Limbaugh.
There are many other examples. Glenn Beck once told his
listeners that the Obama White House science adviser John
Holdren was an advocate of compulsory abortion. (He wasn’t,
but the story still makes the rounds.) Hannity and others
latched on to a rumor that the Egyptian government was going
to legalize necrophilia. (Limbaugh asked who might provide
the condoms for such an encounter.) The story, according to
the Christian Science Monitor foreign correspondent Dan
Murphy, was “utter hooey,” but that didn’t matter.
There is a reasonable argument that talk radio in the 1980s
and 1990s was a necessary antidote to television and print
outlets that had become politically complacent, ideologically
monotonous, and too self- regarding. 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. Eventually, talk radio became as dogmatic
and one- sided as the culture it claimed to be supplanting, and
while conservative talkers may have been able to bring forward
debates that major television networks would prefer to have
ignored, they also intensified the voices of people who think

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everything is a lie and that experts are no smarter, and far more
mendacious, than anyone else.

AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE: DAY 15,000

The radio insurgency against the print and electronic media

might not have spread farther than the AM band were it not for
cable television and the Internet. Cable and the Internet, as
alternative sources of news— and as platforms for attacks on
established knowledge— actually reinforced each other
throughout the 1990s. Even Limbaugh, after conquering the
best- seller lists with a foray into book writing, took a stab at
syndicated television for a few years. A previously narrow
media gate was now large enough to accommodate a stampede.
Stories originating in one medium quickly bounced to another
and then returned more loudly, like the ear- splitting feedback
of a microphone held in front of a speaker.
The irony, however, is that neither cable nor the Internet
pioneered the twenty- four- hour news cycle. For that, we can
thank the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.
In November 1979, Iranian revolutionaries overran the US
embassy in Tehran, taking dozens of American personnel as
hostages. The spectacle shocked Americans who saw it all
happen nearly in real time. The Iranian hostage drama was
something new, a story in between a war and a crisis: Vietnam
was a slow- motion debacle that dragged on for a decade, while
the Cuban missile crisis took place in two weeks, faster than
television and newspapers could fully report it. The hostage
taking was fast, and then slow, with a few days of violence
followed by a long grind of waiting and worrying.
The news media were in a jam. On the one hand, Americans
were in grave danger in a foreign country; on the other, nothing

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was actually happening. Like the comedian Chevy Chase

announcing each week on Saturday Night Live that Spain’s
Francisco Franco was still dead, so, too, were network anchors
left with little more to say than that the hostages were still
hostages.
The ABC television network at the time decided to try
something different by moving the daily Iran briefing to the
late evening. This was also a marketing decision: ABC had no
late- night programming against Johnny Carson’s venerable
talk show on its rival NBC, and news programming was, by
comparison, cheap. ABC filled the evening slot with a new
program called Nightline devoted solely to coverage of the
crisis. Each night, ABC would splash the screen with “America
Held Hostage,” followed by the number of days of captivity.
The anchor (usually the veteran ABC newsman Ted Koppel)
would then fill the time by interviewing experts, journalists,
and other figures associated with the crisis.
Over a year later, the hostages came home, but Koppel and
Nightline stayed on and ran for many more years. Cable
provided the technology for later imitators, but Nightline
provided the model. The “breaking” alerts and the chyrons—
those little ribbons of news factoids that now scroll across the
bottom of the screen on news networks— all originated with a
program that was, in effect, created on the fly in response to a
crisis.
Another legacy of the Nightline era and the advent of the
twenty- four- hour news cycle is the devaluation of expert
advice in the media. As the Army War College professor
Steven Metz rightly noted in 2015, in an earlier time, “the
public tended to defer to national security authorities who had
earned their influence through experience and expertise as
elected officials, military leaders, political appointees,

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academics, members of the media or think tank analysts.” And

then things changed:

Hard- earned expertise was unnecessary when there were

hours of radio and television air time or online discussion
boards to fill… . For decades now, deference to authority
has eroded across the political landscape. The profusion of
information and communication technology gave voice,
and self- confidence, to people who previously would defer
to authority.12

“Armed with a bit of information,” Metz concludes, such

people “opined on an ever- expanding array of issues.”
Producers and reporters enabled those would- be experts by
asking them to speak on anything and everything, a temptation
few people can resist. (I am among those who are not without
sin on this.)
Nightline was a success, but broadcast networks still saw no
reason to run news day and night. After all, what viewer
wanted to watch nothing but news? In 1980, the entrepreneur
Ted Turner took a chance that people would, in fact, watch
endless amounts of news when his invention, the Cable News
Network, went on the air. CNN was denigrated by broadcast
news executives as “the Chicken Noodle Network,” an add-w
ater- and- stir porridge of headlines and features. Turner got the
last laugh, as CNN not only became a cable juggernaut but also
later spawned its own competitors, including one— Fox News
— that would eventually overtake it in the ratings.
Instead of older white males reading the news in stentorian
voices, Turner gave CNN a far glossier look. On June 1, 1980,
thirty- nine- year- old David Walker and his thirty- one- year-
old wife, Lois Hart, anchored the first moments of the new

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CNN, delivering a story about President Jimmy Carter visiting

the civil rights leader Vernon Jordan in the hospital. The news
was no longer a half hour of listening to America’s soothing
middle- aged uncles like John Chancellor and Frank Reynolds,
but an ongoing engagement with a roster of younger, more
attractive anchors scattered throughout the day and night.
The twenty- four- hour news cycle had arrived, but it took a
succession of crises and disasters throughout the 1980s and
into the 1990s to capture an audience. The attempted
assassination of President Ronald Reagan, the crash of a jet
into the Potomac River in Washington, and the terrorist
hijacking of a TWA flight, among others, all proved that
Americans would leave their television sets tuned to a news
channel for hours on end. Instead of a ritual where Americans
gathered at a preset time, or rushed to their sets at the heart-
stopping words “we interrupt this broadcast,” news became a
kind of open buffet where viewers could visit and graze all day
long.
The testimony of the law professor Anita Hill and her
allegations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court
nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991 proved that Americans
would not only watch crises and disasters, but also stay riveted
to their sets for political and courtroom dramas as well—
especially if they involved sex or murder or, in the best case,
both. In 1991, after judicial rulings allowed more cameras into
courtrooms, Court TV arrived on cable. Americans became
armchair legal experts by watching endless cases about rape,
murder, and other assorted skulduggery.
CNN was already more news than the average viewer could
reasonably handle in a day, but the proliferation of cable
outlets like Court TV was an expert’s nightmare. In a 1991
review of the new network, Entertainment Weekly called Court
TV “part C- SPAN, part Monday Night Football,” although

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that might have been uncharitable to both. And by the time the
spectacular 1995 murder trial of O. J. Simpson concluded,
millions of laypeople had developed deep views on things they
actually could not understand, from the statistics of DNA
testing to the veracity of shoeprints. It was a ratings treasure
trove, and it proved that what people really wanted from their
news networks was not hours of boring news, but high-t ension
drama.
CNN launched a headlines- only channel in 1982. Devoted
solely to news, it was supposed to be a rotating cycle of top
stories every thirty minutes. Of course, that was too dry for the
average viewer, and sure enough, the celebrity judge Nancy
Grace soon camped out at what came to be renamed HLN.
(Like Kentucky Fried Chicken renaming itself KFC to sidestep
what it was doing to chickens—t hat is, frying them— HLN
apparently needed to get “news” out of the title.)
HLN specialized in lurid stories interspersed with Grace’s
hyperbolic raging about justice. In a ghastly 2008 story, a
mother in Florida named Casey Anthony was accused of
murdering her toddler daughter. It was a disturbing story, a
kind of rerun of the Simpson trial in which millions of people
took sides quickly. HLN, however, didn’t just cover Anthony’s
trial; Grace and others made it a staple of HLN’s “news,”
running some five hundred stories about it.13 By the time
Anthony was acquitted in 2011, HLN’s viewers were likely
more versed in Florida murder statutes than in their own rights
under the US Constitution.
There is no way to discuss the nexus between journalism
and the death of expertise without considering the
revolutionary change represented by the arrival of Fox News in
1996. The creation of the conservative media consultant Roger
Ailes, Fox made the news faster, slicker, and, with the addition
of news readers who were actual beauty queens, prettier. It’s an

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American success story, in every good and bad way that such
triumphs of marketing often are. (Ailes, in what seems almost
like a made- for- television coda to his career, was forced out
of Fox in 2016 after multiple allegations of sexual harassment
were covered in great detail on the medium he helped create.)
Fox’s history intersects with the death of expertise,
however, in an important way: the arrival of Fox was, in its
way, the ultimate expression of the partisan division in how
people seek out sources of news in a new electronic
marketplace. What Limbaugh tried to do with radio and a
syndicated television show, Ailes made a reality with a
network. Had Ailes not created Fox, someone would have,
because the market, as talk radio proved, was already there. As
the conservative author and Fox commentator Charles
Krauthammer likes to quip, Ailes “discovered a niche
audience: half the American people.”
Fox put the last nail in the coffin of the news broadcast as a
nominally apolitical review of the day’s events. The editor of
the conservative journal First Things, R. R. Reno, wrote in
2016 that Roger Ailes was “perhaps the single most influential
person behind the transformation of politics into entertainment
over the last generation,” but that he’s since had plenty of help:

It’s not just Fox. MSNBC and other networks have

developed their own political shout shows— verbal
versions of World Wide Wrestling matches. Talking heads
bluster, interrupt, and otherwise disport themselves in rude
ways. Viewers rejoice in the spectacle. Advertising is sold.
Money is made.14

Fox’s “fair and balanced” motto was a zinger aimed at the

hypocrisy of the traditional media, including by this point

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CNN, who all promoted themselves as above any agenda. Fox,

like the radio talkers, positioned itself to be the alternative to
the mainstream, a watchdog over a club to which it claimed it
did not belong and to whom it owned nothing.
Of course, the idea that Fox was unique, or that the major
networks were somehow apolitical, was always a fiction.
Media bias, of various kinds and in every venue, is real. Fox,
like other networks, tries to draw a line between its hard- news
operations and its opinion programming; like other networks, it
often fails. CNN, Fox, MSBNC, and the major networks all
have excellent news organizations, and yet all of them engage
in bias to some extent, if only to tailor their broadcasts to the
demographic they’re seeking. In the competition for viewers,
simply putting “news” on television isn’t enough.
Fox’s influence is larger because of the sheer size of its
audience, but all of the networks now feature partisan
“infotainment” in their schedules. The bigger problem, on all
of the major networks, is that the transition from news to
entertainment is almost seamless and largely invisible: daytime
fluff moves to afternoon updates and talk, which then gives
way to the evening’s hard news, which in turn then flows into
celebrity programming, all within the space of hours.
As talk radio flourished and then cable stepped in, the
Internet grew in size and speed, opening another arena not only
for established news organizations, but for any would- be
journalists who wanted to break into the game. 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.

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TRuST NO ONE

For nearly thirty years, I’ve opened almost every class I teach
at the college and graduate level by telling my students that no
matter what else they do, they should consume a balanced daily
diet of news. I tell them to follow the major newspapers; to
watch at least two networks; to subscribe (online or otherwise)
to at least one journal with which they consistently disagree.
I doubt I’ve had much success on that score. If my students
are anything like other Americans, they tend to follow sources
with which they already agree. In 2014, for example, a Pew
survey asked Americans which television news sources they
“trust the most to provide accurate information about politics
and current events.” The results are exactly what we would
expect in a fractured media market: people gravitate toward
sources whose views they already share.
Among all Americans, avowedly conservative outlet Fox
News edged traditional broadcast news (that is, the long-
standing evening news broadcasts by ABC, CBS, and NBC) as
the “most trusted” overall, but by only a few points. CNN came
in a close third. Together, Fox and CNN were “most trusted”
by over four in ten respondents, but among self- identified
political conservatives, Fox unsurprisingly was the “most
trusted” source at 48 percent. Self-i dentified moderates split
their choice for “most trusted” evenly between broadcast news
and CNN (25 and 23 percent, respectively), with Fox and
public television taking second and third place. Among self-
identified liberals, network broadcast news led as “most
trusted” at 24 percent, with CNN and public television
essentially tied at 16 and 17 percent, respectively.
What was most startling in this study, however, was the
presence of The Daily Show, a satire about the news hosted for

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many years by the comedian Jon Stewart, among the “most

trusted” sources of news. Seventeen percent of liberal
respondents named The Daily Show as their “most trusted
source,” putting Stewart in a tie with CNN and public
television and surpassing progressive MSNBC by seven points.
MSNBC (whose motto for a time was “lean forward,”
whatever that means) was the least-t rusted source in 2014:
every group surveyed placed it dead last, with even
conservatives choosing Stewart over the progressive network
by one percentage point.
There is a generational difference at work here, as younger
viewers are more likely than their elders to tune to a
nontraditional source of information. But this morphing of
news into entertainment stretches across every demographic.
The whole exercise of staying informed has become a kind of
postmodern exercise in irony and cynicism, with words like
“truth” and “information” meaning whatever people want them
to mean. As a Johns Hopkins professor, Eliot Cohen, wrote in
2016, the difference between a generation that got its news
from Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and one that gets its
information from Jon Stewart and fellow comic Stephen
Colbert “is the difference between giggling with young,
sneering hipsters and listening to serious adults.”15
That kind of complaint, of course, sounds like just the sort
of thing a middle- aged curmudgeon would say. Other critics,
however, counter that the generic nature of television news is
exactly why younger viewers turned to alternatives. As James
Poulos, a writer (and a much younger member of Generation
X) based in Los Angeles, said in 2016, “It is mind bending how
the Baby Boomers went from trusting no one under 30 to
trusting any idiot with a symmetrical face dressed in business
casual.” Stewart may be a comedian, but his younger viewers

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were likely better informed than those among their peers who
watch no news at all.
The problem is not that all these networks and celebrities
exist, but that viewers pick and choose among them and then
believe they’re informed. 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.
There is a huge difference between these two maladies. A
2000 study on public knowledge conducted by the University
of Illinois, as the political scientist Anne Pluta later noted,
found that “uninformed citizens don’t have any information at
all, while those who are misinformed have information that
conflicts with the best evidence and expert opinion.” 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.”16
This is one reason why few Americans trust what little
news, or newslike programming, they watch. 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. In an
earlier time, those other sources were harder to find; when
people had to make do with fewer outlets, they had to contend
with news that was not specifically tailored to their prejudices.
Today, hundreds of media outlets cater to even the narrowest
agendas and biases.
This mindset, and the market that services it, creates in
laypeople a combination of groundless confidence and deep

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cynicism, habits of thought that defeat the best attempts of

experts to educate their fellow citizens. Experts can’t respond
to questions if most people already think they know the
answers, nor does it help them to bring forward messages when
so many people are already prone to shoot— or, at best, to
ignore— the messengers. It’s bad enough that people aren’t
keeping up with the news; it’s worse when they don’t trust
what little news they do read and shop around until they find
what they are looking for.
In part, American distrust of the media is just one symptom
of the larger malady: Americans increasingly don’t trust
anyone anymore. They view all institutions, including the
media, with disdain. Everybody hates the media— or, at least,
everybody claims to hate the media. According to pollsters,
news organizations are among the least trusted institutions in
the United States; a Gallup poll in 2014 found that only four in
ten Americans trust the media to report news “fully, accurately,
and fairly,” an all-t ime low.17
Of course, people don’t really hate the media. They just
hate the media that deliver news they don’t like or transmit
views with which they don’t agree. A Pew study in 2012 noted
that two- thirds of Americans think news organizations in
general are “often inaccurate,” but that same number drops to
less than a third when people are asked the same question
about the news organization “you use most.”18 This, as many
observers have pointed out over the years, is much the same
way everyone claims to hate Congress, when what they really
mean is that they hate all the members of Congress but their
own. Likewise, people who hate “the media” still watch the
“the news” or read “the paper,” as long as it’s one they already
trust.
In a democracy, this level of cynicism about the media is
poisonous. All citizens, including experts, need news.

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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. We have to rely
on their judgment and their objectivity, because their reports
are usually the first encounter the rest of us have with
previously unknown events or facts. Around the world,
journalists do their job amazingly well, often at risk to their
own lives. And yet the majority of Americans distrust the
information they provide.

ARE THE VIEWERS SMARTER THAN THE EXPERTS?

Are the viewers and readers right to be so mistrustful? As a

professional in my own field, my instinct is to believe that
journalists, as professionals in theirs, know what they’re doing.
In general, I trust the reporting and writing of most journalists.
I also believe that the editors and producers who hired them
know what they’re doing. Like everyone else, however, I have
no training in journalism, nor do I have expertise in most of the
subjects about which I’m reading.
The question of competence arises if the journalist lacks
that expertise as well. Journalists, without doubt, can be
experts. Some foreign correspondents are fluent in the
language of their area and have a deep knowledge of other
cultures. Some science reporters are themselves scientists or
have a fair amount of scientific training. There are Capitol Hill
reporters who can explain the legislative process better than
some members of Congress.
And yet there are journalists who think there’s a bridge in
Gaza or that Evelyn Waugh was a woman. This shallowness is
not because journalism attracts unintelligent people, but
because in an age when everything is journalism, and everyone

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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.
This is partly the fault, as so much is these days, of
“academizing” what used to be a trade. Rather than
apprenticeships as part of a career track that includes writing
obituaries and covering boring town meetings, journalism and
communications are now undergraduate majors. These
departments and programs crank out young people with little
knowledge about the subjects of their correspondence. They
are schooled in the structure of a story but not in the habits or
norms of the profession. Many of them, accustomed to posting
their deep thoughts online since high school, do not understand
the difference between “journalism” and “blogging.”
Veteran journalists, meanwhile, are being pushed out of
newsrooms to make room for the youngsters who know how to
generate clicks, as The Nation writer Dale Maharidge described
in 2016.

Old- school journalism was a trade, and legacy journalists

find today’s brand of personality journalism, with its
emphasis on churning out blog posts, aggregating the labor
of others, and curating a constant social- media presence,
to be simply foreign. And the higher- ups share the new
bias. One editor of a major national publication, who
himself is well over 40, confided to me that he’s reluctant
to hire older journalists, that “they’re stuck in the mentality
of doing one story a week” and not willing to use social
media.19

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The market’s focus on form rather than content, the need for
speed, and the fashionable biases of the modern university
combine to create a trifecta of misinformation. Little wonder
that experienced writers like Joel Engel, an author and former
New York Times and Los Angeles Times journalist, have
lamented that America was better served “when ‘journalists’
were reporters who’d often barely graduated high school.”
These inexperienced writers can have a significant impact
on the information available to the sizable number of people
who primarily get their news through social media. Facebook,
for example, uses news curators to decide what shows up in a
reader’s Facebook news feed. According to a 2016 exposé by
Gizmodo.com, Facebook treated these reporters as low- level
contractors while giving them immense power over the news:

The trending news section [at Facebook] is run by people

in their 20s and early 30s, most of whom graduated from
Ivy League and private East Coast schools like Columbia
University and NYU. They’ve previously worked at outlets
like the New York Daily News, Bloomberg, MSNBC, and
the Guardian. Some former curators have left Facebook for
jobs at organizations including the New Yorker, Mashable,
and Sky Sports.
According to former team members interviewed by
Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what
stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly,
what news sites each topic links out to. “We choose what’s
trending,” said one. “There was no real standard for
measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was
up to the news curator to decide.”20

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The obvious answer here is not to rely on Facebook for news.

But many millions of people do, just as many also rely on
Twitter—w hich itself is experimenting with algorithms meant
to alter what appears, and with what priority, in a user’s
Twitter stream.
In fairness to these younger reporters, they’re often put in
an impossible situation by the nature of the market. As the
Slate.com writer Will Saletan told me, complicated stories
require a lot more time than just blurting out whatever
produces a click. Saletan spent a year researching the food
safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), a story that
might exceed even the vaccine debate for the triumph of
ignorance over science.21 “You can’t ask a young person to sort
out this issue on the kind of time frame that’s generally
tolerated these days,” Saletan said after his story—w hich blew
apart the fake science behind the objections to GMOs—a
ppeared in Slate. These kinds of stories require not only time
but a willingness to do research and stay focused on dull
details. As Saletan put it, “You really have to be a willful
bastard to persist in researching a topic like [GMOs], which
feels incredibly technical and boring when you’re deep inside
it, even if it excites passions when it becomes political.”
Sometimes the errors are trivial and amusing. In the great
“chocolate helps you lose weight” hoax, for example, the
hoaxers never thought they’d get as far as they did; they
assumed that “reporters who don’t have science chops” would
discover the whole faked study was “laughably flimsy” once
they reached out to a real scientist. They were wrong: nobody
actually tried to vet the story with actual scientists. “The key,”
as the hoaxers later said, “is to exploit journalists’ incredible
laziness. If you lay out the information just right, you can
shape the story that emerges in the media almost like you were
writing those stories yourself. In fact, that’s literally what

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you’re doing, since many reporters just copied and pasted our
text.”22
A dumb story about chocolate as a weight-l oss gimmick
isn’t going to hurt too many people. (Chocolate junkies don’t
need scientific reasons to indulge.) But when the coverage
turns to more serious issues, journalists who are lost in the
subject matter and weighted down by their ideological biases
can cause more confusion than illumination. The writer Joshua
Foust some years ago zeroed in on the practice of “embedding”
journalists overseas with military forces, creating the illusion
of experience among reporters who in fact had little idea where
they were:

Far too many correspondents know nothing about the

places they go to cover: whether Georgia or Afghanistan,
basic knowledge is critically lacking from media accounts
(one freelance reporter in Georgia told me that staff
reporters were asking officials, “Where is Abkhazia?”).
Personal experience suggests that the situation is largely
the same in Afghanistan: “It’s only a one- week embed,”
the thinking seems to go, “so I don’t have to do too much
work— I can learn as I go.”23

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.”
This kind of outright ignorance or even professional
malpractice can do grievous damage to real people and their
communities. In 2014, for example, Rolling Stone suffered a
massive journalistic failure in its reporting of a now- infamous

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story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia. A

reporter, determined to find a story of sexual assault on an elite
American campus, found one. Her editors published it, in
grotesque detail. The whole story quickly unraveled, however,
and turned out to be a hoax. The result was a smoking wreck of
lawsuits and destroyed reputations.
Rolling Stone ended up retracting the story and asking the
Columbia School of Journalism to conduct an investigation.
The Columbia investigators concluded that the reporter Sabrina
Erdeley and her editors had violated even basic rules of
journalism, all in the name of a story that was, apparently, just
too good to check.24 The case continued to drag on years later,
with one of the university’s administrative deans named in the
story—a woman who supposedly failed to act on the initial
rape claim—w inning a suit against Rolling Stone for
defamation.
The story was in part based on studies that claim that one in
four (sometimes reported as one in five) women in America’s
colleges and universities will be sexually assaulted. Claims like
these helped to enable the Rolling Stone hoax, when the
statistics themselves and the studies on which they were based
should have raised concerns. As Slate’s Emily Yoffe wrote in
2014, “the one- in- four assertion would mean that young
American college women are raped at a rate similar to women
in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.” 25
Another study central to this dire narrative later turned out to
have included “college aged men” who were as old as seventy-
one, whose average age was over twenty- six, and none of
whom actually lived on a college campus. But no matter: the
statistic is out there now more as a slogan than as a fact, and
anyone arguing about it will say, understandably, that “they
saw it in the news.”

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Similar to the “one in four” statistic is the now- common

claim, repeated regularly in the American media, that US
military veterans are killing themselves at an alarming rate
because of the stress of fighting two major wars. “Twenty- two
a day”— meaning twenty-t wo veteran suicides every twenty-
four hours— has become the mantra both of veterans’ service
organizations as well as antiwar groups. Multiple stories have
appeared in electronic and print media about the “epidemic” of
veteran suicide in 2013 and after, with dramatic headlines and
pictures of young men and women in uniform who’d ended
their lives. The implications of the stories were clear: extended
combat service is driving America’s warriors to suicide, and a
heartless government does not care.
When I first saw this statistic, I had a personal interest in
pursuing the underlying studies. I work every day with military
officers, many of whom have seen combat. I am also a former
certified suicide- prevention counselor because of volunteer
work I did briefly in my younger days. As someone with at
least some experience in suicide prevention, I was concerned
about people killing themselves; as someone who works with
military personnel, I was worried about my students and
friends; as a social scientist, I was bothered by a statistical
argument that didn’t seem plausible.
Unfortunately, the media were no help. Indeed, they were a
fundamental part of the problem. It is true, in fact, that veterans
are killing themselves at higher rates in the twenty- first
century than in earlier years. But in part, that’s because
everybody has been killing themselves at higher rates— for
reasons epidemiologists are still debating— and veterans are
part of “everybody.” Adding to the confusion, the studies that
looked at “veteran” suicides also included everyone of any age
who’d ever served in the military in any capacity, from reserve
duty to sustained combat. In other words, a young person just

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home from a combat zone and a middle-a ged man who’d done
a few years in his local National Guard unit thirty years earlier
were both counted as part of this new “epidemic” if they killed
themselves at any point.
A beleaguered Veterans Administration— not exactly the
most popular bureaucracy in America— tried in vain to note
that according to a sizable 2012 study, suicides among veterans
really hadn’t changed all that much since 1999. The New York
Times duly reported on this study with a headline that read “As
Suicides Rise in U.S., Veterans Are Less of Total.” The
Washington Post headline implied an opposite conclusion:
“VA Study Finds More Veterans Committing Suicide.” Both of
these headlines, amazingly, were about the same study, and
both, in a strictly factual sense, were true.
The media, or at least some outlets, interviewed the scientist
who wrote the study, but his answers made no difference to the
narrative. “There is a perception that we have a veterans’
suicide epidemic on our hands. I don’t think that is true,” said
Robert Bossarte, the epidemiologist who conducted the study.
“The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of
it.”26 Most of the stories didn’t bother with this quote, nor did
they include important benchmarks like the overall suicide rate
in America or the suicide rate among men in the same age
cohort as the young combat veterans. Nor were other
occupations compared to the military, perhaps because
relatively high rates among other groups— such as medical
doctors, among others— would have taken some of the
urgency out of the story.
The bad reporting continued with a slew of companion
stories about how suicides among military personnel in 2012
actually outnumbered combat deaths. The message, of course,
was that American soldiers were now more of a danger to
themselves than the enemy. That’s a grim picture, except for a

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small problem: it is statistically meaningless. The assertion that

there were “more suicides than combat deaths” will always be
true by definition in any year where US forces aren’t involved
in a lot of actual fighting.
You can do this statistical trick with any year in which there
isn’t a lot of combat: compare military suicides in, say, the late
1950s to combat deaths. To its credit, TIME ran a piece that got
it right, even titling it “Military Suicides Top Combat Deaths—
But Only Because the Wars Are Ending.” 27 But, again, this
should have been obvious to anyone who took even a moment
to think about it, and it is remarkable that TIME or anyone else
had to run such a story in the first place.
The point in all of this is that people genuinely concerned
about veterans and suicide don’t really know any more about
what’s going on with veterans today than they did before they
read these stories. But they think they do, and heaven help the
expert in any field who casts doubt on this public outrage or
who even tries to explain the subject with a bit more nuance.
Veterans are going crazy and killing themselves, and that’s
that. After all, I read it in the paper.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE

In the end, the question is whether journalists can ever be

experts on the subject of their reporting; if not, how can experts
do a better job helping them? I cannot, and will not, make
recommendations here beyond hoping that younger journalists
somehow acquire a background in the subject on which they
write. That’s generic advice and as far as I am willing to go in
telling other professionals how to do their jobs. I say this while
realizing fully that nothing can stop people from cherry-p

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icking their sources, no matter how high quality the

information available to them.
But I have one admonition for experts, and several for the
consumers of journalism.
To experts, I will say, know when to say no. Some of the
worst mistakes I ever made were when I was young and I could
not resist giving an opinion. Most of the time, I was right to
think I knew more than the reporter or the readers, but that’s
not the point: I also found myself out on a few limbs I should
have avoided. In fairness to journalists, I have found that they
will respect and report your views accurately— only on a few
occasions did I ever feel ambushed or misquoted— but they
will also respect your principled refusal to go too far out of
your lane. It is your obligation, not theirs, to identify that
moment.
The consumers of news have some important obligations
here as well. I have four recommendations for you, the readers,
when approaching the news: be humbler, be ecumenical, be
less cynical, and be a lot more discriminating.
Be humble. That is, at least begin by assuming that the
people writing the story, whatever their shortcomings, know
more about the subject than you do. At the least, try to
remember that in most cases, the person writing the story has
spent more time with the issue than you have. If you approach
any story in the media, or any source of information already
assuming you know as much as anyone else on the subject, the
entire exercise of following the news is going to be a waste of
your time.
Be ecumenical. Vary your diet. You wouldn’t eat the same
thing all day, so don’t consume the same sources of media all
day. When I worked in national politics, I subscribed to a half-
dozen journals at any given time, across the political spectrum.
Don’t be provincial: try media from other countries, as they

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often report stories or have a view of which Americans are

completely unaware. And don’t say you “don’t have the time.”
You do.
Be less cynical— or don’t be so cynical. It’s extremely rare
that anyone is setting out intentionally to lie to you. Yes, the
people writing the stories often have an agenda, and there will
always be another Sabrina Erdeley out there. And yes, the
journalists you’re reading or watching will get some things
wrong, often with an astonishing lack of self- awareness. None
of them have a monopoly on the truth, but they’re not all liars.
They’re doing the best they can, by their lights, and most of
them would be glad to know you’re keeping tabs by reading
other sources of news and information.
Be more discriminating. If you see something in a major
media outlet that doesn’t seem right to you, finding some half-
baked website isn’t the answer. Websites that are outlets for
political movements, or other, even worse enterprises that cater
specifically to zealots or fools, will do more harm than good in
the search for accurate information. Instead, ask yourself
questions when consuming media. Who are these writers? Do
they have editors? Is this a journal or newspaper that stands by
its reporting, or is it part of a political operation? Are their
claims checkable, or have other media tried to verify or
disprove their stories?
Conspiracy theorists and adherents of quack medicine will
never believe anything that challenges their views, but most of
us can do better. 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.
I’ve been unsparing in my criticism of the low level of
foundational knowledge among Americans, about the
narcissism and bias that prevents them from learning, about a

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college industry that affirms ignorance rather than cures it,

about media who think their job is to entertain, and about
journalists who are too lazy or too inexperienced to get their
stories right. I’ve shaken my fist at most of the groups I think
bear a great responsibility for the death of expertise and for
undermining established knowledge just when we need it most.
I’ve let only one group off the hook so far: experts.
What happens when experts are wrong, and who should be
responsible for deciding when to listen to them and when to
ignore them? We’ll confront this question in the next chapter.

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Wrong
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.
Bertrand Russell

NO EXPERTS NEED APPLY

In 2002, a distinguished historian wrote that the widely told

tales of “No Irish Need Apply” signs in late nineteenth- century
America were myths. The University of Illinois professor
Richard Jensen said that such signs were inventions, “myths of
victimization,” passed down from Irish immigrants to their
children until they reached the unassailable status of urban
legends. For over a decade, most historians accepted Jensen’s
scholarship on the matter. Opponents of Jensen’s thesis were
dismissed— sometimes by Jensen himself— as Irish-
American loyalists.
In a 2015 story that seemed to encapsulate the death of
expertise, an eighth grader named Rebecca Fried claimed that
Jensen was wrong, not least because of research she did on
Google. She was respectful, but determined. “He has been
doing scholarly work for decades before I was born, and the
last thing I want to do was show disrespect for him and his

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work,” she said later. It all seemed to be just another case of a

precocious child telling an experienced teacher— an emeritus
professor of history, no less— that he had not done his
homework.
As it turns out, she was right and he was wrong. Such signs
existed, and they weren’t that hard to find.
For years, other scholars had wrestled with Jensen’s claims,
but they fought with his work inside the thicket of professional
historiography. Meanwhile, outside the academy, Jensen’s
assertion was quickly accepted and trumpeted as a case of an
imagined grievance among Irish- Americans. (Vox, of course,
loved the original Jensen piece.)
Young Rebecca, however, did what a sensible person
would: she started looking through databases of old
newspapers. She found the signs, as the Daily Beast later
reported, “collecting a handful of examples, then dozens, then
more. She went to as many newspaper databases as she could.
Then she thought, somebody had to have done this before,
right?” As it turned out, neither Jensen nor anyone else had
apparently bothered to do this basic fact- checking.
Jensen later fired back, trying to rebut the work of a grade-
schooler by claiming that he was right but that he could have
been more accurate in his claims. Debate over his thesis, as the
Smithsonian magazine later put it, “may still be raging in the
comments section” of various Internet lists, but Fried’s work
proves “that anyone with a curious mind and a nose for
research can challenge the historical status quo.” 1 Miss Fried,
for her part, has now entered high school with a published
piece in the Journal of Social History.
In the 1970s, America’s top nutritional scientists told the
United States government that eggs, among many other foods,
might be lethal. There could be no simpler application of
Occam’s Razor, with a trail leading from the barnyard to the

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morgue. Eggs contain a lot of cholesterol, cholesterol clogs

arteries, clogged arteries cause heart attacks, and heart attacks
kill people. The conclusion was obvious: Americans need to
get all that cholesterol out of their diet.
And so they did. Then something unexpected happened:
Americans gained a lot of weight and started dying of other
things.
Eggs, it turned out, weren’t so bad, or at least they weren’t as
bad as other things. In 2015 the government decided that eggs
were acceptable, perhaps even healthy. As the columnist (and
resident of egg- laden Vermont) Geoffrey Norman wrote at the
time,

A lot of [obese] people who got that way thought that they
were following a government- approved diet. Egg
consumption declined by over 30 percent when the
government put them on its dietary blacklist. People have
to eat, so they substituted other things for eggs. Things that
helped to make them fat. The eggs they did not eat would
not, it turns out, have clogged their arteries and killed
them. The stuff they substituted for those eggs, however,
might well have caused them to suffer from type 2 diabetes
and worse.2

The egg scare was based on a cascade of flawed studies, some

going back almost a half century. People who want to avoid
eggs may still do so, of course. In fact, there are studies now
that suggest that skipping breakfast entirely— which scientists
also have long warned not to do— isn’t as bad as anyone
thought either.3
In 1982, one of the top experts on the Soviet Union,
Seweryn Bialer, delivered a stern warning to readers of the

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prestigious journal Foreign Affairs that the USSR was a lot

stronger than it looked at the time.

The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be in the next

decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts
enormous unused reserves of political and social stability
that suffice to endure the deepest difficulties. The Soviet
economy, like any gigantic economy administered by
intelligent and trained professionals, will not go bankrupt.
It may become less effective, it may stagnate, it may even
experience an absolute decline for a year or two; but, like
the political system, it will not collapse.4
A year later, Bialer won a Macarthur Foundation “genius
grant.” Two years after that, the Soviet Communist Party—
obviously facing the throes of a true systemic crisis— chose
Mikhail Gorbachev as its new leader. Less than eight years
after Bialer’s finger- wagging lecture, the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics ceased to exist.
In the final months of the Soviet collapse, an MIT
professor, Stephen Meyer, testified before the US Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. American political leaders
watching events in the USSR were concerned about the
security of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons pointed at the
United States. Meyer, one of his generation’s leading experts
on Soviet military affairs, told everyone to calm down:
Gorbachev was in control. “Hints of military coups” in the
Soviet Union, he assured the assembled senators, were “pure
flights of fancy.”5
Meyer gave his testimony on June 6, 1991. Nine weeks
later, Gorbachev was deposed in a coup led by a group that
included the Soviet defense minister and the head of the feared
security apparatus, the KGB. Chaos descended as tanks entered
the streets of Moscow. But no matter: a year after the Soviet

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collapse, Meyer left the study of Russia and nuclear arms

completely and worked instead on biodiversity issues, serving
on various committees for the Massachusetts Department of
Fisheries and Wildlife until his untimely death in 2006. Bialer
and Meyer were hardly a minority. As the historian Nick
Gvosdev observed some years later, many Soviet experts
substituted what they believed, or wanted to believe, about the
USSR in place of “critical analysis of the facts on the ground.”
Two scholars of international relations noted that everyone else
got it wrong, too. “Measured by its own standards, the
[academic] profession’s performance was embarrassing,”
Professors Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse Kappen
wrote in 1995. “None of the existing theories of international
relations recognized the possibility that the kind of change that
did occur could occur.”6
Experts get things wrong all the time. The effects of such
errors range from mild embarrassment to wasted time and
money; in rarer cases, they can result in death and even lead to
international catastrophe. And yet experts regularly ask citizens
to trust their judgment and to have confidence not only that
mistakes will be rare, but that the experts will identify those
mistakes and learn from them.
Day to day, laypeople have no choice but to trust experts.
We live our lives embedded in a web of social and
governmental institutions meant to ensure that professionals
are in fact who they say they are, and can in fact do what they
say they do. Universities, accreditation organizations, licensing
boards, certification authorities, state inspectors, and other
institutions exist to maintain those standards. In general, these
safeguards work well. We are shocked, for example, when we
read a story about an incompetent doctor who kills a patient
exactly because such stories, in a country where nearly a

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million physicians practice medicine safely every day, are so

unusual.
This daily trust in professionals, however, is a prosaic
matter of necessity. It is much the same way we trust everyone
else in our daily lives, including the bus driver we assume isn’t
drunk or the restaurant worker we assume has washed her
hands. This is not the same thing as trusting professionals when
it comes to matters of public policy: 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. To say
that we trust a college professor to teach our sons and
daughters the history of World War II is not the same thing as
saying that we therefore trust all academic historians to advise
the president of the United States on matters of war and peace.
For these larger decisions, there are no licenses or
certificates. There are no fines or suspensions if things go
wrong. Indeed, there is very little direct accountability at all,
which is why laypeople understandably fear the influence of
experts. In a democracy, elected officials who may have
accepted— or rejected— expert advice provide accountability,
a subject to which we’ll return in the next and last chapter. But
accountability is something that happens after the fact. It might
be morally satisfying to hold someone responsible, but
assigning blame doesn’t heal the injured or restore the peace.In
general, how do experts go wrong? “It is remarkable,” as the
journalist Salena Zito has said, “to witness experts not
understanding the field in which they are experts,” and for
laypeople, it is more than a little unsettling. What can citizens
do when they are confronted with expert failure, and how can
they maintain their trust in expert communities? Likewise,
what responsibilities do experts incur when they make

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mistakes, and how can they repair their relationship with their
client, society?

THE MANY FACES OF FAILuRE

There are several kinds of expert failure. The most innocent

and most common are what we might think of as the ordinary
failures of science. Individuals, or even entire professions, get
important questions wrong because of error or because of the
limitations of a field itself. They observe a phenomenon or
examine a problem, come up with theories and solutions, and
then test them. Sometimes they’re right, and sometimes they’re
wrong. The process usually includes a lot of blind alleys and
failed experiments along the way. Sometimes errors are
undiscovered or even compounded by other experts.
This is how a generation of Americans got fat avoiding
eggs. It’s why the first US attempt to launch a satellite ended in
a gigantic explosion on the launch pad. It’s why top experts in
foreign policy assumed for decades that the peaceful
reunification of Germany was unlikely but then had to
reconsider their views as celebratory fireworks filled the skies
over a free Berlin.
Science is also learning by doing. The United States
invented the nuclear bomb in 1945, but it took another decade
of exploding test devices before scientists and researchers
around the world gained a better understanding of the
“electromagnetic pulse,” or EMP, an invisible effect of nuclear
detonations that plays havoc with electrical systems. The
public, for their part, became more aware of EMP when a US
test in the Pacific in 1962 blew out streetlights and shut down
telephones hundreds of miles away in Hawaii, an effect the

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scientists had suspected but whose scale they had

underestimated.
There isn’t much anyone, including experts, can do about
this kind of failure, because it is not so much a failure as it is an
integral part of science and scholarship. Laypeople are
uncomfortable with ambiguity, and they prefer answers rather
than caveats. But science is a process, not a conclusion.
Science subjects itself to constant testing by a set of careful
rules under which theories can only be displaced by better
theories. Laypeople cannot expect experts never to be wrong; if
they were capable of such accuracy, they wouldn’t need to do
research and run experiments in the first place. If policy
experts were clairvoyant or omniscient, governments would
never run deficits and wars would only break out at the
instigation of madmen.
Sometimes, too, expert error comes with beneficial effects,
but these are rarely treated the same way as mistakes that cost
lives or money. When scientists invented oral contraceptives,
for example, they were trying to figure out how to help women
prevent unwanted pregnancies. They were not directly trying to
lower the risk of ovarian cancer— but apparently some kinds
of birth control pills do exactly that, and by significant rates.
For some women, oral contraceptives have risks; for others, the
same pills might extend their lives. Of course, if birth control
pills only increased cancer risks, we’d be lamenting yet
another failure of science, but this positive side effect was just
as unknown as many others a half century ago.
Likewise, experts who predicted an all- out international
arms race in nuclear weapons at the end of the 1950s were
wrong. But they were wrong at least in part because they
underestimated the efficacy of their own efforts to limit the
spread of nuclear weapons. President John F. Kennedy feared a
world of as many as twenty- five nuclear armed powers by the

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1970s. (As of 2017, only ten nations have crossed this

threshold, including one— South Africa— that has renounced
its arsenal.)7 Kennedy’s prediction, based on the best expert
advice, was not impossible or even unreasonable; rather, the
number of future nuclear powers was lowered with the
assistance of policies advocated by those same experts.
In the end, experts cannot guarantee outcomes. They cannot
promise that they will never make mistakes or that they will
not fall prey to the same shortcomings that govern all human
deliberations. They can only promise to institute rules and
methods that reduce the chance of such mistakes and to make
those errors far less often than a layperson might. If we are to
accept the benefits of a profession’s work, we have to accept
something less than perfection, perhaps even a certain amount
of risk.
Other forms of expert failure, however, are more
worrisome. Experts can go wrong, for example, when they try
to stretch their expertise from one area to another. This is not
only a recipe for error, but is maddening to other experts as
well. In some cases, the cross- expertise poaching is obvious,
as when entertainers— experts in their own fields, to be sure—
confuse art with life and start issuing explanations of
complicated matters.
In other cases, the boundaries are less clear, and the issue is
not expertise but relative expertise. A biologist is not a medical
doctor, but in general terms, a biologist is likely to be relatively
better able to understand medical issues than a layperson. Still,
this does not mean that anyone in the life sciences is always
better informed than anyone else on any issue in that area. A
diligent person who has taken the time to read up on, say,
diabetes could very well be more conversant in that subject
than a botanist. A professional whose expertise is deep but
narrow might not be any better informed than anyone else on

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matters outside his or her own field. Education and credentials

in one area do not guarantee expertise in all areas.
Yet another problem is when experts stay in their lane but
then try to move from explanation to prediction. While the
emphasis on prediction violates a basic rule of science—
whose task is to explain, rather than to predict— society as a
client demands far more prediction than explanation. Worse,
laypeople tend to regard failures of prediction as indications of
the worthlessness of expertise.
Experts face a difficult task in this respect, because no
matter how many times scholars might emphasize that their
goal is to explain the world rather than to predict discrete
events, laypeople and policymakers prefer prediction. (And
experts, even when they know better, often gladly oblige.) This
is a natural but irresolvable tension between experts and their
clients; most people would prefer to anticipate problems and
avoid them, instead of explaining them in retrospect. The
promises of a diagnosis, even if speculative, are always more
welcome than the absolute certainties of an autopsy.
Finally, there is outright deception and malfeasance. This is
the rarest but most dangerous category. Here, experts for their
own reasons (usually careerist defenses of their own shoddy
work) intentionally falsify their results. They hope on the one
hand that laypeople will not be capable of catching them, and
on the other that their colleagues will not notice or will
attribute their fraud to honest error.
This most extreme category is the easiest to deal with, so
we will start there.

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WHEN EXPERTS GO BAD

The early twenty- first century has seen some rough years for
scientists. Retractions from scientific journals have reached
record proportions. Cases of fraud or misconduct now seem
almost routine.
Expert deception is not hard to define, but it can be hard to
identify. Obvious misconduct occurs when researchers or
scholars falsify their results or when would- be experts lie
about being credentialed or licensed to practice in their field.
(Scientists describe this using the catch- all shorthand “FFP,”
meaning “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism.”) Such
misconduct can be hard to detect specifically because it
requires other experts to ferret it out; laypeople are not
equipped to take apart scientific studies, no more than they are
likely to look closely at a credential hanging on a wall to see if
it is real.
Sometimes experts aren’t experts. People lie, and lie
brazenly, about their credentials. This is the kind of bravura
fakery that the real- life “Great Pretender,” Frank Abagnale,
pulled off in the 1960s (later popularized in the movie Catch
Me If You Can), including his impersonation of an airline pilot
and a medical doctor. A more common but subtler kind of
deception occurs when people who are actual experts augment
their credentials with false honors or exaggerations. They
might claim to be members of professional associations, or to
have attended panels or symposia, or to be honorees or
prizewinners, or other embellishments that are in fact
fraudulent. Usually, such people are only caught when
something happens that causes others to scrutinize their
records.

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When actual experts lie, they endanger not only their own
profession but also the well- being of their client: society. Their
threat to expertise comes in both the immediate outcome of
their chicanery and the erosion of social trust such misconduct
creates when it is discovered. This is why (aside from any legal
sanctions that may exist for lying and fraud) professional
organizations, scholarly foundations, think tanks, journals, and
universities reserve some of their harshest punishments for
willful misconduct.
Such punishments, contrary to the popular imagination, do
exist. 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. While many professors have “moral
turpitude” clauses in their contracts, the social norms of the
twenty- first century have lowered that bar to the point that
almost nothing a professor does in his or her classroom or
personal life can move a school to the point of revoking tenure.
Obvious firing offenses like physically threatening a student or
outright refusing to show up for work can still trigger a
dismissal, but almost anything else in the category of personal
conduct is usually overlooked.
Academic misconduct, however, is still a red line for many
schools. Academic freedom guarantees the right to express
unpopular or unconventional ideas, but it is not a license to
produce sloppy or intentionally misleading research. When the
University of Colorado, for example, fired Ward Churchill—
an instructor who compared the victims of the 9/ 11 attacks in
New York to Nazis— they fired him not for being an
insensitive jerk, but because his comments generated new
attention to his “scholarship,” sections of which turned out to
be plagiarized. Churchill, of course, claimed that he was a
victim of political bias. He appealed his dismissal as a

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Colorado state employee all the way up to the Colorado

Supreme Court and lost.
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. But this in itself is a disturbing
position: does it take calling the people who died in the Twin
Towers “little [Adolf] Eichmanns,” as Churchill did, before
anyone takes a close look at a professor’s scholarly work? 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 Churchill case was in some ways unique, not least
because of the publicity it attracted. Most cases of professional
misconduct in academia go unnoticed by the public. The 2014
gay- marriage study, which represented wholesale falsification
of data, was an exception, and gained significant attention
largely because of the potential political impact of the
conclusion. Most academic studies are not nearly as interesting
as one that claims people can be talked out of homophobia, and
so they do not generate the same level of interest.
Less publicized cases, however, are no less serious. In 2011,
a postdoctoral researcher working on a US government grant at
Columbia University was found to have falsified cell biology
research related to Alzheimer’s disease. The researcher agreed
not to accept any federal grants for three years, but by the time
the misconduct was discovered, his article had been cited by
other scientists at least 150 times. In 2016, a Spanish researcher
was dismissed from her institution as well for alleged fraud
related to her work on cardiovascular disease.
In a more dramatic case, Andrew Wakefield, a doctor who
published a controversial study linking vaccines and autism,

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had his medical license revoked in the United Kingdom in

2010. British medical authorities claimed that they pulled his
license not because he argued for a controversial thesis, but
because he broke a lot of basic rules of scientific conduct to do
it. The UK General Medical Council found that Wakefield
“had done invasive research on children without ethical
approval, acted against the clinical interests of each child,
failed to disclose financial conflicts of interest, and
misappropriated funds.”8
Like Ward Churchill, Wakefield’s supporters argued that he
was the victim of a witch- hunt. But discredited research is not
the same as misconduct. For example, Peter Duesberg, one of
the leading AIDS denialists, remains at Berkeley despite
accusations from critics that he engaged in academic
misconduct, charges against him that his university
investigated and dismissed in 2010.
Still, there is no way around it: a non-negligible amount of
published scientific research is shaky at best and falsified at
worse. It might be a small consolation to laypeople, but the
reason we know any of this misconduct is happening at all is
because scientists across all fields admit it. When a 2005 study
asked scientists if they personally had committed questionable
research practices, about 2 percent of scientists self- reported
fabrication, falsification, or “modifying” data at least once; 14
percent said they witnessed this behavior in colleagues. When
asked about serious misconduct that falls short of hanging
offenses like outright falsification, a third of the respondents
admitted they had engaged in less obvious but still shady
practices, such as ignoring findings that contradicted their own.
More than 70 percent claimed to have witnessed these same
behaviors in their colleagues.9
Most of this misconduct is invisible to laypeople because it
is so dull. Unlike the dramatic stories of massive fraud people

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see in well-k nown movies like Erin Brockovich or The Insider,

most of the retractions in scientific journals are over small-
bore mistakes or misrepresentations in studies on narrow
topics. The natural sciences seem to be more trouble-p rone,
but that is likely because their studies are easier to test.
Indeed, natural scientists could point out that retractions in
themselves are signs of professional responsibility and
oversight. The scientific and medical journals with the highest
impact on their fields— the New England Journal of Medicine,
for example—t end 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
—a lthough there’s that, too— but so that their peers can
follow in their footsteps to see if they would reach the same
conclusions. If scientists are cooking the books, then this
would make their conclusions difficult to replicate, thus
undermining or even falsifying their studies.
This kind of verification assumes, however, that anyone is
bothering to replicate the work in the first place. Ordinary peer
review does not include re- running experiments; rather, the
referees read the paper with an assumption that basic standards
of research and procedure were met. They decide mostly if the
subject is important, whether the data are of sufficient quality,
and whether the evidence presented supports the conclusions.

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Of course, the replicability requirement seems to

recommend greater confidence in the hard sciences like
chemistry or physics. The social sciences, like sociology and
psychology, rely on studies that often depend on human
subjects and thus are therefore more difficult to reproduce. At
the least, the natural scientists can claim to have clearer
standards: if someone asserts that a certain plastic melts at 100
degrees, then everyone else with a sample of the same material
and a Bunsen burner can check the finding. When one hundred
student volunteers are asked to participate in a survey or
exercise, things get a lot more difficult. The results might be a
snapshot in time, or of a particular region, or skewed in some
other way. The research design is supposed to account for these
issues, but the only way to know is to try to replicate the
experiments.
This is exactly what a team of researchers set out to do in
the field of psychology. The results were surprising, to say the
least. As the New York Times reported in 2015, a “painstaking”
effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading
psychology journals found that more than half of the findings
did not hold up when retested.

The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of

whom volunteered their time to double- check what they
considered important work… . The vetted studies were
considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists
understand the dynamics of personality, relationships,
learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on
such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so
many of the studies were called into question could sow
doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.11

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This outcome is cause for concern, but is it fraud? Lousy

research isn’t the same thing as misconduct. In many of these
cases, the problem is not that the replication of the study
produced a different result but that the studies themselves were
inherently “irreproducible,” meaning that their conclusions
may be useful but that other researchers cannot re- run those
human investigations in the same way over and over.
Actually, the psychology studies might not even be poor
research. Another group of scholars subsequently examined the
investigation itself—t his is how science works, after all—and
concluded that it was, in the words of the Harvard scholar
Gary King, “completely unfair— and even irresponsible.” King
noted that while reproducibility is an “incredibly important”
question that should “obsess” scholars, “it isn’t true that all
social psychologists are making stuff up.”12 The whole
business, including a rebuttal to the rebuttal, is now where it
belongs: in the pages of the journal Science, where experts can
continue to evaluate all of the arguments and subject them to
further analysis.
Are the natural sciences, then, just catching more of their
own shoddy or faked work than the social sciences? Perhaps
not. When cancer researchers tried to replicate studies in their
field, they ran into the same problems as the psychologists and
others. Daniel Engber, a writer for Slate.com, reported in 2016
on a group of biomedical studies that suggested a “replication
crisis” much like the one in psychology, and he noted that by
some estimates “fully half of all results rest on shaky ground,
and might not be replicable in other labs. These cancer studies
don’t merely fail to find a cure; they might not offer any useful
data whatsoever.”13 The obstacles to replication were much the
same as those that bedeviled the social scientists: sloppiness,
the passage of time, the inability to reproduce exact conditions
from the first trials, and so on.

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Here, we move from work that is fraudulent to work that

might merely be slipshod. This is too complicated a subject to
engage here, but the “replication crisis” in the scholarly
community is not based on pure fraudulence. In addition to the
physical and temporal constraints on perfect replicability, other
problems include poor oversight of grants, intense pressure
from academic institutions to come up with publishable results
(no matter how trivial), and the tendency among scholars to
box up their previous work and throw it away once the paper or
study is published.
Research in the social sciences and humanities is especially
difficult to replicate because it is based not on experimental
procedure but rather on expert interpretation of discrete works
or events. A book of literary criticism is exactly what it sounds
like: criticism. It is not science. It is, however, an expert
judgment that requires a deep knowledge of the subject.
Likewise, a study of the Cuban missile crisis is not the same as
an experiment in the natural sciences. We cannot re- run
October 1962 over and over again, and so an author examining
the outcome of the crisis is presenting an expert analysis of one
historical case. Such a study might be full of flawed
conclusions, but it is the raw material for further discussion
rather than a case of professional malfeasance.
Still, there have been some remarkable cases of outright
fraud in the social sciences and humanities. In 2000, a historian
at Emory University named Michael Bellesiles won Columbia
University’s prestigious Bancroft Prize in history for a book
called Arming America, in which Bellesiles claimed to debunk
the idea that American ideas about gun ownership were rooted
not in the early colonial experience but in other influences
nearly a century later. The study was instantly polarizing,
because it argued that private gun ownership was uncommon in
early America.

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Once again, a study that might have gone unnoticed

attracted closer scrutiny because of its subject matter, with gun
control advocates and gun ownership groups immediately
taking sides on the Bellesiles argument. As other scholars tried
to find the sources on which Bellesiles relied, however, they
concluded that he had either misused them or invented them.
Columbia withdrew the Bancroft Prize. Emory conducted its
own investigation and found that while some of Bellesiles’s
errors might be ascribed to incompetence, there were
unavoidable questions about his scholarly integrity. Bellesiles
resigned his post shortly thereafter. His book was dropped by
its original publisher, although it was later reissued by a small
commercial press.
In 2012, a writer named David Barton published a book on
Thomas Jefferson. Barton had no background as a professional
historian; his public prominence, was largely due to his stature
in the evangelical movement. (In 2005, TIME called him one of
the twenty- five most influential evangelicals in America.) His
book attracted kudos and endorsements from leading
conservatives, including 2012 presidential contenders Mike
Huckabee and the historian-t urned- politician Newt Gingrich.
Like the Bellesiles gun study, Barton’s work attracted
considerable attention because of its political implications as
well as the prominence of its author. The book minced no
words even in its title, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths
You’ve Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson. Barton’s
book argued that modern historians not only had smeared
Jefferson’s private life but also had ignored how many of his
beliefs were actually supportive of modern conservative views.
Considering Jefferson’s admiration of revolutionary France and
his later association with liberalism (in contrast to his
conservative nemesis John Adams), this was a bold claim.

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Most professional scholars ignored the book, coming as it

did from an amateur historian and a non-a cademic religious
publishing house. The book was not, in any case, aimed at
scholars, but at an audience already eager to read it. Barton hit
the mark: The Jefferson Lies quickly made the New York Times
best- seller list.
The accuracy of the book was soon called into question not
by godless liberals at a research university but by two scholars
at Grove City College, a small Christian school in
Pennsylvania. Under closer scrutiny, many of Barton’s claims
collapsed. The readers of the History News Network later voted
it “the least credible book in print,” but even more damning,
the book’s publishers agreed that the book was so flawed that
they withdrew it from circulation. The Atlantic writer and law
professor Garret Epps, in a scathing review of the matter, said,
“Most of [Barton’s] books are self-p ublished and will never be
withdrawn. But the rebuke from Christian scholars and a
Christian publishing house is a mark of shame he will carry
from now on.”14
In all of these cases, the fraud and misconduct were found
out. To a layperson, however, the eventual reckoning over such
work is understandably irrelevant. The bedrock issue is
whether studies, in any field, can be trusted.
In a way, this is the wrong question. Rarely does a single
study make or break a subject. The average person is not going
to have to rely on the outcome of any particular project, say, in
cell research. When a group of studies is aggregated into a drug
or a treatment of which that one study might be a part, this
itself triggers successive studies looking at safety and efficacy.
It is possible to fake one study. To fake hundreds and thus
produce a completely fraudulent or dangerous result is another
matter entirely.

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Likewise, no one study in public policy establishes an

expert’s credentials. Even when a scholar comes to the
attention of the policy community because of a book or an
article, his or her influence does not rest on the scientific
replicability of the work but on the ideas it puts forward. In the
social sciences, as in the hard sciences, it is rare that any single
study can influence the life of the average citizen without at
least some reconsideration by other experts.
What fraud does in any field, however, is to waste time and
to delay progress. Much in the same way an error buried early
in a complex set of equations can bog down later calculations,
fraud or misconduct can delay an entire project until someone
figures out who screwed up— or intentionally fudged—t he
facts. When such cases are revealed to the public, of course,
they have legitimate questions about the scope and impact of
misconduct, especially if they’re paying for it with public
money.

I THOuGHT YOu WERE PRE- MED?

There are other sources of expert failure beyond willful fraud

or staggering incompetence. One of the most common errors
experts make is to assume that because they are smarter than
most people about certain things, they are smarter than
everyone about everything. They see their expert knowledge as
a license to hold court about anything. (Again, I cannot cast the
first stone here.) Their advanced education and experience
serve as a kind of blanket assurance that they know what
they’re doing in almost any field.
These experts are like Eric Stratton in the classic comedy
Animal House. When he rises to defend his unruly college
fraternity in student court, his friends ask him if he knows what

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he’s doing. “Take it easy, I’m pre- law,” he assures his

brothers. “I thought you were pre- med?” one of them asks.
“What’s the difference?” Stratton answers.
This overconfidence leads experts not only to get out of
their own lane and make pronouncements on matters far afield
of their expertise, but also to “over- claim” wider expertise
even within their own general area of competence. Experts and
professionals, just as people in other endeavors, assume that
their previous successes and achievements are evidence of their
superior knowledge, and they push their boundaries rather than
say the three words every expert hates to say: “I don’t know.”
No one wants to appear to be uninformed or to be caught out
on some ellipsis in their personal knowledge. Laypeople and
experts alike will issue confident statements on things about
which they know nothing, but experts are supposed to know
better.
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. (And, yes, in
their field, they are experts. Acting schools are not run by
chemical engineers.) 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.
Talking with celebrities, however, is not the same thing as
educating them. This creates bizarre situations in which experts
in one field— entertainment— end up giving disquisitions on
important questions in other fields. This bizarre phenomenon
has a relatively recent history in the United States, but it began
well before celebrities could bloviate at will on Twitter or on
their own websites.

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In 1985, for example, a California congressman, Tony

Coelho, invited the actresses Jane Fonda, Sissy Spacek, and
Jessica Lange to testify before the House Agriculture
Committee on farm problems. Their qualification? They had
played farmers’ wives in three popular movies of the decade.
The whole business was a stunt, of course, and when asked
why he did it, Democrat Coelho took a shot at Republican
President Ronald Reagan: “They probably have a better
understanding of the problems of agriculture than the actor in
the
White House,” he said at the time.15
This was not, however, an isolated incident. Over the years,
celebrities have steeped themselves in disputes about which
they have very little knowledge. They push fads, create false
alarms, and change the daily habits of millions of gullible fans.
Timothy Caulfield, a Canadian health policy expert, is one
of many experts who has had enough. He wrote a book
criticizing assaults on established knowledge from celebrities,
and by one celebrity in particular: Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong
about Everything? When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash.
(I discussed some of Paltrow’s feminine- care
recommendations— reluctantly— in chapter 4.) As
Caulfield put it in a 2016 interview,

If you ask someone, is Gwyneth Paltrow a credible source

of information about breast cancer risk? Most people are
going to say no. The science of nutrition? Most people will
be skeptical. But because she has such a huge cultural
footprint, and because she has made this brand for herself,
people will identify with it.
There’s the availability bias, too: Celebrities are just
everywhere. And the mere fact that they’re everywhere,

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that influences in the impact they have. It’s easy to call up
a picture of [Paltrow] on People magazine talking about
gluten- free as opposed to what the data actually says. And
that allows celebrities to have a huge impact on our lives.16

This is not harmless. People are actually reluctant to vaccinate

their children because of advice given by the actress Jenny
McCarthy, a Playboy pinup who says she studied it all deeply
at the “University of Google.” More people will see Paltrow
and McCarthy and be exposed to their inane ideas than will
ever see— or have the patience to listen to— a far less
attractive oncologist or epidemiologist.
Activism is the right of every person in an open and
democratic society. There is a fundamental difference,
however, between activism and a celebrity abusing his or her
fame. Activism among laypeople requires taking sides among
experts, and advocating for preferred policies. When celebrities
substitute their own judgment for that of experts, however—i n
effect demanding to be trusted merely by the fact of their own
fame—t hey are no better than a microbiologist weighing in on
modern art, or an economist arguing about pharmacology.
In some cases, experts overextend themselves because their
trespass is into an area of expertise close enough to their own
that a stretch of professional judgment seems reasonable. This
is especially likely among experts who have already been
lauded for the achievements in their own field. As society has
become more complex, however, the idea of geniuses who can
hit to any and all fields makes less sense: “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.”17

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The Nobel Prize– winning chemist Linus Pauling, for

example, became convinced in the 1970s that Vitamin C was a
wonder drug. He advocated taking mega- doses of the
supplement to ward off the common cold and any number of
other ailments. There was no actual evidence for Pauling’s
claims, but Pauling had a Nobel in chemistry, and so his
conclusions about the effect of vitamins seemed to many
people to be a reasonable extension of his expertise.
In fact, Pauling failed to apply the scientific standards of his
own profession at the very start of his advocacy for vitamins.
He began taking Vitamin C in the late 1960s on the advice of a
self- proclaimed doctor named Irwin Stone, who told Pauling
that if he took three thousand milligrams of C a day— fifty
times the recommended daily amount— that he would live
twenty- five years longer. “Doctor” Stone’s only degrees,
however, were two honorary awards from a nonaccredited
correspondence school and a college of chiropractic
medicine.18
Pauling wanted to believe in the concept, and he started
gobbling the vitamin. Immediately, he felt its miraculous
effects. A more impartial observer might suspect a “placebo
effect,” in which telling someone a pill will make them feel
better makes them think they feel better, but because of
Pauling’s illustrious contributions to science, his colleagues
took him seriously and tested his claims.
None of these examinations of Vitamin C panned out, but
Pauling would not hear of it. As Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician
and a specialist in infectious diseases at the University of
Pennsylvania, later wrote, “Although study after study showed
that he was wrong, Pauling refused to believe it, continuing to
promote vitamin C in speeches, popular articles, and books.
When he occasionally appeared before the media with obvious
cold symptoms, he said he was suffering from allergies.”

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Throughout the 1970s Pauling expanded his claims. He

argued that vitamins could treat everything, including cancer,
heart disease, leprosy, and mental illness, among other
maladies. He later went on to suggest looking into the uses of
Vitamin C in the fight against AIDS. Vitamin manufacturers,
of course, were happy to have a Nobel Laureate as their patron
saint. Soon, vitamin supplements (including “antioxidants,” a
term that became the “gluten- free” and “non- GMO” of its
day) were big business.
Except, as it turns out, big doses of vitamins can actually be
dangerous, including increasing the chance of certain kinds of
cancers and strokes. Pauling, in the end, hurt not only his own
reputation but also the health of potentially millions of people.
As Offit put it, a “man who was so spectacularly right that he
won two Nobel Prizes” was “so spectacularly wrong that he
was arguably the world’s greatest quack.” To this day, there are
people who still think a vitamin- laden horse pill can ward off
illness, despite the fact that science worked exactly the way it’s
supposed to work by testing and falsifying Pauling’s claims.
Pauling himself died of cancer at age ninety-t hree. Whether
he got the extra twenty- five years “Doctor” Stone promised
him, we’ll never know.
Sometimes, experts use the luster of a particular credential
or achievement to go even further afield of their area, in order
to influence important public policy debates. In the fall of
1983, a New York City radio station broadcast a program about
the nuclear arms race. The early 1980s were tense years in the
Cold War, and 1983 was one of the worst. The Soviet Union
shot down a civilian Korean airliner, talks between the United
States and the USSR about nuclear arms broke down in
Geneva, and ABC’s docudrama on a possible nuclear war, The
Day After, debuted as the most-w atched television program up
until that time. It was also soon to be an election year.

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I was one of the listeners, as a young graduate student in

New York at the time studying the Soviet Union and looking
ahead to a career in public policy. “If Ronald Reagan is re-
elected,” the voice on my radio said in a sharp Australian
accent, “nuclear war is a mathematical certainty.” The
declaration that nuclear war was inescapable got my attention,
especially as there were no serious predictions that Reagan was
in any electoral danger in 1984. Who was this person who was
so definite— to the point of mathematical certainty— that we
were therefore headed for Armageddon?
The speaker was a woman named Dr. Helen Caldicott. She
was not a doctor of physics or government or international
affairs, but a pediatrician from Australia. Her concern about
nuclear weapons, by her own recollection, stemmed from
reading Nevil Shute’s 1956 postapocalyptic novel On the
Beach (which was set in her native country). As she later put it,
she saw no point in treating children for their illnesses when
the world around them could be reduced to ashes at any
moment. In short order, she became a prominent voice in
debates on arms control and nuclear policy, despite her almost
complete lack of credentials or experience with the subject
matter.
Caldicott was prone to making definitive statements about
highly technical matters. She would discourse confidently on
things like the resilience of US missile silos, civil defense
measures, and the internal workings of the Soviet foreign
policy apparatus. She resided in the United States for almost a
decade, and she became a regular presence in the media
representing the antinuclear activist community.
She reached the apex of her cross- expertise influence when
she published her 1985 book Missile Envy, a book replete with
medical terminology as a “diagnosis” of the arms race. (The
chapters include “Etiology,” “Physical Examination,” “Case

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Study,” and so on.) The title of the book is a spoiler: the

pediatrician found a psychological grounding for the Cold War
in the psyches of old Soviet and American men. She noted that
American women, having won the right to vote, “have done
virtually nothing with it”; women in government like then-
British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Caldicott said, did
not “represent the true attributes of the large majority of
sensible, wise women.”19 (When I heard Caldicott on New
York radio, she was even more blunt: “Margaret Thatcher,” the
doctor declared, “is not a woman.”) Caldicott went back to
Australia in the late 1980s to run for political office. She was
defeated.
The expert community is full of such examples. The most
famous, at least if measured by impact on the global public, is
the MIT professor Noam Chomsky, a figure revered by
millions of readers around the world. Chomsky, by some
counts, is the most widely cited living American intellectual,
having written a stack of books on politics and foreign policy.
His professorial post at MIT, however, was actually as a
professor of linguistics. Chomsky is regarded as a pioneer,
even a giant, in his own field, but he is no more an expert in
foreign policy than, say, the late George Kennan was in the
origins of human language. Nonetheless, he is more famous
among the general public for his writings on politics than in his
area of expertise; indeed, I have often encountered college
students over the years who are familiar with Chomsky but
who had no idea he was actually a linguistics professor.
Like Pauling and Caldicott, however, Chomsky answered a
need in the public square. 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. It may well be that
doctors should look closely at the role of vitamins in the human

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diet. It is certain that the public should be involved in an

ongoing reconsideration of the role of nuclear weapons. But a
degree in chemistry or a residency in pediatrics does not make
advocates of those positions more credible than any other
autodidact in those esoteric subjects.
The public is remarkably tolerant of such trespasses, and
this itself is a paradox: while some laypeople do not respect an
expert’s actual area of knowledge, others assume that expertise
and achievement are so generic that experts and intellectuals
can weigh in with some authority on almost anything. The
same people who might doubt their family physician about the
safety of vaccines will buy a book on nuclear weapons because
the author’s title includes the magic letters “MD.”
Unfortunately, when experts are asked for views outside
their competence, few are humble enough to remember their
responsibility to demur. I have made this mistake, and I have
ended up regretting it. In a strange twist, I have also actually
argued with people who have insisted that I am fully capable of
commenting on a subject when I have made plain that I have
no particular knowledge in the matter at hand. It is an odd
feeling indeed to assure a reporter, or especially a student, that
despite their faith in me, it would be irresponsible of me to
answer their question with any pretense of authority. It is an
uncomfortable admission, but one we can only wish linguistics
professors, pediatricians, and so many others would make as
well.

I PREDICT!

In the early 1960s, an entertainer known as “The Amazing

Criswell” was a regular guest on television and radio shows.
Criswell’s act was to make outrageous predictions, delivered

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with a dramatic flourish of “I predict!” Among his many

pronouncements, Criswell warned that New York would sink
into the sea by 1980, Vermont would suffer a nuclear attack in
1981, and Denver would be destroyed in a natural disaster in
1989. Criswell’s act was pure camp, but the public enjoyed it.
What Criswell did not predict, however, was that his own
career would fizzle out in the late 1960s and end with a few
small roles in low- budget sexploitation films made by his
friend, the legendarily awful director Edward D. Wood, Jr.20
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. And yet predictions, like
cross- expertise transgressions, are catnip to experts.
Experts and laypeople alike believe that because experts
have a better handle on a subject than others, they will have a
better track record of prediction. For experts in the hard
sciences, this is always a stronger claim, because they use
experimental methods to determine the conditions under which
the physical world will behave as they would expect. When
unpredictable things happen, scientists have a new starting
point for investigation. 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.”
Some experts, however, embrace prediction and even
charge a handsome fee for it. Pollsters, for example, sell their
services to political candidates and to media subscribers, while
marketing experts test the waters for new services and
products. Polling has come a long way since 1936, when
Literary Digest predicted that Alf Landon would defeat
Franklin Roosevelt (mostly by surveying its own readers).
Today, research on public opinion is a science, with its own

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experts and journals. Some pollsters are partisans who slant

their results toward a preferred outcome, but most have an
academic background in statistics and methods that allows
them, in the main, to make reasonably accurate calls.
When polls and market research get something wrong,
however, they can get it very wrong. The Coca- Cola
Corporation’s introduction of “New Coke” in the mid- 1980s
was such a disaster that the term “New Coke” itself has
become a meme for a failure to read public opinion accurately.
More recently political pollsters and experts missed several
important calls in the early twenty- first century, including the
results of the 2014 midterm election in the United States and
the 2015 general election in the United Kingdom.
In fact, a survey of pollsters in 2015 found that they
believed their reputations had been tarnished by this string of
misses. Some felt that this was a result of media bias (which
favors covering failure more than success), while others
admitted that technological and demographic changes were
making accurate polling a more challenging endeavor. “Polls
are wrong is a more interesting story than when the polls do
well,” the polling expert Barbara Carvalho told
FiveThirtyEight (itself a site dedicated to polling). But the
pollster Matthew Towery admitted in 2015 that, “obviously,
there were several high- profile calamities in the past three
years.”21
The problem here is not so much with polling— whose
accuracy is limited by the involvement of actual human beings
— as it is with what people expect from polling. Polls are not a
written guarantee of future results. Many things, from
unforeseeable events to advertising, can change minds. As in
every other expert endeavor, the measure of competence is in
the overall trend and in whether the experts examine their own
failures carefully. Likewise, for every New Coke, there are

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thousands of successful product launches and accurate

campaign forecasts. As is always the case, however, people
tend to remember the bad calls— especially if they didn’t like
the results—w hile ignoring the more numerous successes.
People expect too much from expert prediction, but at least
some experts are also willing to stand on their clairvoyance
strongly enough to sell it. For decades, the political science
professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has been using “propriety
software” to make predictions about world events for both
public and private customers. His firm’s clients over some
thirty years have included the US Central Intelligence Agency,
which in a 1993 study said that in hundreds of predictions he
“hit the bullseye” twice as often as its own analysts did.
Other experts have not been able to test Bueno de
Mesquita’s claims, since his methods and models are protected
as business property rather than presented in published studies.
As a New York Times profile noted in 2009,

While Bueno de Mesquita has published many predictions

in academic journals, the vast majority of his forecasts
have been done in secret for corporate or government
clients, where no independent academics can verify them.
“We have no idea if he’s right 9 times out of 10, or 9 times
out of a hundred, or 9 times out of a thousand,” [Harvard
professor Stephen] Walt says.
Walt also isn’t impressed by [the] C.I.A. study showing
Bueno de Mesquita’s 90 percent hit rate. “It’s one midlevel
C.I.A. bureaucrat saying, ‘This was a useful tool,’ ” Walt
says. “It’s not like he’s got Brent Scowcroft saying, ‘Back
in the Bush administration, we didn’t make a decision
without consulting Bueno de Mesquita.’ ”22

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While Bueno de Mesquita’s accuracy is unknowable, the more

important point is that there is a healthy market for his
predictions. Organizations with a great deal at stake—l ives,
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.
Pollsters and consultants like Bueno de Mesquita are paid to
predict things, and the value of their work is up to their clients.
But other experts and public intellectuals make predictions,
too, and the many failures of expert predictions have done
much to undermine public confidence in scholars and
professionals. When people who didn’t foresee the end of the
Soviet Union— or who promised that a major war with Iraq
would be an easy win— return to provide yet more advice on
life- and- death decisions, the public’s skepticism is
understandable.
If we leave aside the issue of whether experts ought to
predict, we’re still left with the problem that they do predict,
and their predictions often are startlingly bad. 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.23

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Taleb’s warning about the permanence of uncertainty is an

important observation, but his insistence on accepting the
futility of prediction is impractical. Human beings will not
throw their hands up and abandon any possibility of applying
expertise as an anticipatory hedge.
The question is not whether experts should engage in
prediction. They will. The society they live in and the leaders
who govern it will ask them to do so. Rather, the issue is when
and how experts should make predictions, and what to do about
it when they’re wrong.
In 2005, the scholar Philip Tetlock gathered data on expert
predictions in social science, and he found what many people
suspected: “When we pit experts against minimalist
performance benchmarks— dilettantes, dart- throwing chimps,
and assorted extrapolation algorithms— we find few signs that
expertise translates into greater ability to make either ‘well-
calibrated’ or ‘discriminating’ forecasts.” 24 Experts, it seemed,
were no better at predicting the future than spinning a roulette
wheel. Tetlock’s initial findings confirmed for many laypeople
a suspicion that experts don’t really know what they’re doing.
But this reaction to Tetlock’s work was a classic case of
laypeople misunderstanding expertise. As Tetlock himself
noted, “radical skeptics welcomed these results, but they start
squirming when we start finding patterns of consistency in who
got what right. Radical skepticism tells us to expect nothing… .
But the data revealed more consistency in forecasters’ track
records than could be ascribed to chance.”25
Tetlock, in fact, did not measure experts against everyone in
the world, but against basic benchmarks, especially the
predictions of other experts. The question wasn’t whether
experts were no better than anyone else at prediction, but why
some experts seemed better at prediction than others, which is

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a very different question. 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—i t 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.”26
What Tetlock actually found was not that experts were no
better than random guessers, but that certain kinds of experts
seemed better at applying knowledge to hypotheticals than
their colleagues. 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, 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. “The foxes’ self- critical,
point- counterpoint style of thinking,” Tetlock found,
“prevented them from building up the sorts of excessive
enthusiasm for their predictions that hedgehogs, especially
well- informed ones, displayed for theirs.”27
Technical experts, the very embodiment of the hedgehogs,
had considerable trouble not only with prediction but with
broadening their ability to process information outside their
area in general. People with a very well- defined area of

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knowledge do not have many tools beyond their specialization,

so their instinct is to take what they know and generalize it
outward, no matter how poorly the fit is between their own area
and the subject at hand.28 This results in predictions that are
made with more confidence but that tend to be more often
wrong, mostly because the scientists, as classic hedgehogs,
have difficulty accepting and processing information from
outside their very small but highly complicated lane of
expertise.
There are some lessons in all this, not just for experts, but
for laypeople who judge— and even challenge— expert
predictions.
The most important point is that failed predictions do not
mean very much in terms of judging expertise. Experts usually
cover their predictions (and an important part of their anatomy)
with caveats, because the world is full of unforeseeable
accidents that can have major ripple effects down the line.
History can be changed by contingent events as simple as a
heart attack or a hurricane. Laypeople tend to ignore these
caveats, despite their importance, much as they ignore their
local weather forecaster when told there is a 70 percent chance
of rain. If the three in ten possibility of a sunny day arrives,
they think the forecaster was wrong.
This isn’t to let experts, especially expert communities, off
the hook for massive failures of insight. While no one Soviet
expert in the 1970s could predict the fall of the USSR by 1991,
the hardening of expert opinion around the opposite view—
that the collapse of the Soviet state was practically impossible
—i s a sizable error in judgment that should haunt that field.
(Unfortunately, it does not; for twenty years, most Russia
specialists have shied away from examining each other’s
mistakes.)

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Predictive failure, however, does not retroactively strip

experts of their claim to know more than laypeople. Laypeople
should not jump to the assumption that a missed call by the
experts therefore means all opinions are equally valid (or
equally worthless). The polling expert Nate Silver, who made
his reputation with remarkably accurate forecasts in the 2008
and 2012 presidential elections, has since admitted that his
predictions about Republican presidential nominee Donald
Trump in 2016 were based on flawed assump-
tions.29 But Silver’s insights into the other races remain solid,
even if the Trump phenomenon surprised him and others. As
the columnist Noah Rothman later wrote, “Trump has
demonstrated that so many of the rules that political
professionals spent their careers studying were not predictive
this year. But ‘everything we knew about politics was wrong’
does not yield to ‘we know nothing about politics.’ 30
Calling experts to account for making worse predictions
than other experts is a different matter. But to phrase questions
as raw yes- or- no predictions, and then to note that laypeople
can be right as often as experts, is fundamentally to
misunderstand the role of expertise itself. Indeed, to ask such
undifferentiated questions is also to let experts off the hook.
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.
The goal of expert advice and prediction is not to win a coin
toss, it is to help guide decisions about possible futures. To ask
in 1980 whether the Soviet Union would fall before the year

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2000 is a yes- or- no question. To ask during the previous

decades how best to bring about a peaceful Soviet collapse and
to alter the probability of that event (and to lessen the chances
of others) is a different matter entirely.
Given my own background in Russian studies, an alert
reader at this point might be wondering if I was part of the
community of Soviet experts who got it wrong, and whether I
am just throwing spitballs from the back of the classroom. It’s
a fair question.
I did not get the Soviet collapse wrong— but only because I
never had the chance to be wrong in the first place. I finished
graduate school in late 1988, when it was already clear that the
fissioning of the USSR was under way. Instead, I waited
another ten years before making my own howlingly wrong
prediction about Russian politics. I know the dangers of
making bad predictions, because I have my own for which I
must answer.
In early 2000 I wrote that the emergence of a new Russian
leader, an unknown bureaucrat named Vladimir Putin, might
actually be a step along the way toward further democracy in
Russia. I could not have been more wrong, of course; Putin
turned out to be a dictator and he remains a continuing threat to
global peace. Why I was wrong is still a question that absorbs
my own work and my discussions with my colleagues,
especially those who shared my view. Were we fooled by Putin
in 2000? Or were we right to be optimists, but Putin himself
changed along the way and we missed it? Or did something
happen inside the Kremlin, so far invisible to outsiders, that
took the entire Russian leadership down the path of autocracy
and international aggression?
To a layperson, this does not matter much— nor should it.
When pressed to reach a judgment about Putin (as many of us
in Russian affairs were), I rendered a definite opinion rather

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than taking the more patient, but less interesting, view that it
was too early to tell. In trying to unravel today’s Russia,
however, does my trainwreck of a prediction nearly twenty
years ago now invalidate my analysis and advice? Am I no
more capable of discussing Putin’s motivations than a well-
read layperson?
I was wrong about Putin, but the fact remains that the
average person would be in over his or her head trying to
explain the complexity of Russian politics, or even to teach an
introductory course on the subject. Why I and others were
wrong is an important question, not least because it forces us to
revisit our assumptions and engage in the debate and self-
correction that is the duty of an expert community. A great
many people were pessimistic about Putin, but some of that
was no more than reflexive Russophobia or a mere guess,
neither of which is useful in policymaking. 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.

REPAIRING THE RELATIONSHIP

Both experts and laypeople have responsibilities when it comes

to expert failure. Professionals must own their mistakes, air
them publicly, and show the steps they are taking to correct
them. Laypeople, for their part, must exercise more caution in
asking experts to prognosticate, and they must educate
themselves about the difference between failure and fraud.
In general, experts do examine their mistakes but not in
places the public is likely to look. 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

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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.
Public intellectuals are often derided within their own fields
as mere “popularizers,” and there’s some truth to the charge.
The world probably does not need another Bill Nye (“The
Science Guy”) weighing in on global climate change. Nor does
the foreign policy community need one more former bureaucrat
or relatively junior retired military officer crowding the
airwaves with deep thoughts merely because there is now too
much time and bandwidth to fill. 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.
Citizens, however, have the most important role here. They
must educate themselves not only about issues that matter to
them but about the people to whom they’re listening. Tetlock,
for one, has advocated looking closely at the records of pundits
and experts as a way of forcing them to get better at giving
advice, so that they will have “incentives to compete by

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improving the epistemic (truth) value of their products, not just

by pandering to communities of co- believers.”31
Outing the track records of bad pundits, however, will only
matter if people bother to pay attention. If they remain passive
recipients of information on a television screen, or if they
actively search only for information they want to believe,
nothing else will matter very much. Instead, laypeople have to
ask themselves some important questions, including how much
they want to learn about a subject, and whether they’re really
willing to encounter facts that undermine their own beliefs.
They have to ask better questions about the sources of their
information, and they must consider the background of the
experts to whom they listen.
If a layperson really wants to believe that Vitamin C can
cure cancer, experts with sterling records of research and
prediction will have less effect than a website with a picture of
a pill on it. If an uninformed citizen really believes that
invading a foreign country (or building a wall with one) will
solve America’s problems, reams of expert writings will not
matter to them. 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.
The public also needs to approach expert advice with a
certain combination of skepticism and humility. 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

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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.

It is not enough to know what the experts agree upon. It is

equally important to accept the limits of that agreement and not
to draw more conclusions than the weight of expert views can
support.
Moreover, laypeople must accept that experts are not
policymakers. Experts advise national leaders and their voices
carry more impact than those of laypeople, but they do not
make the final decisions. In a democracy, even a highly
regulated and bureaucratized republic like the United States,
few experts are sole policymakers. Politicians, from city
councils up through the White House, have the final say on
many of the most important decisions in our lives, from drugs
to deterrence. 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.
For laypeople to use expert advice and to place
professionals in their proper roles as servants, rather than
masters, they must accept their own limitations as well.
Democracy cannot function when every citizen is an expert.
Yes, it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a
democracy while ignoring its voters; it is also, however,
ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can
maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the
voices of those more educated and experienced than
themselves.

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How to find that balance, and thus to mitigate the

increasingly worrisome collisions between experts and their
clients in society, is the subject of the next and final chapter.

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Conclusion
Experts and Democracy

A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm

themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison

I reserve the right to be ignorant. That’s the Western way of

life.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

“THE EXPERTS ARE TERRIBLE”

During the 2016 “Brexit” debate over whether the United

Kingdom should leave the European Union, advocates of
leaving the EU specifically identified experts— most of whom
were warning that Brexit was a terrible idea— as enemies of
the ordinary voter. 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.”
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—l ike
Gove, I imagine, who graduated from Oxford and spent

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CONCLuSION

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.1

Nigel Farage, the leader of the nativist United Kingdom

Independence Party, even suggested that the “experts” were
actually on the take, working for the British government or in
the pay of the European Union itself.2 In July 2016, the “leave”
vote won with just under 52 percent of the vote in a national
referendum.
The attack on the experts was part of a strategy meant to
capitalize on the political illiteracy of a fair number of British
voters and their instinctive mistrust of the intellectual elites
who overwhelmingly opposed Brexit. Within days— but with
the votes safely counted— the Brexiteers admitted that many
of their claims had been either exaggerated or even wrong.
“Frankly,” the British politician and Brexit advocate Daniel
Hannan said on British television, “if people watching think
that they have voted and there is now going to be zero
immigration from the EU, they are going to be disappointed.”
Hannan’s comments provoked a backlash from voters who,
apparently, thought that such a policy was exactly what they
had chosen. “There really is no pleasing some people,” Hannan
said, and he then announced that he would “take a month off
Twitter.”3
Britain’s actual exit from the EU is still years in the future.
Anti- intellectualism and the consequent distrust of expertise,
however, played a more immediate and central role in the
United States during the 2016 presidential campaign. At a
Wisconsin rally in early 2016, Republican candidate Donald
Trump unleashed an attack on experts. In earlier debates,

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Trump had often been caught at a loss for words over basic
issues of public policy, and now he was striking back. “They
say, ‘Oh, Trump doesn’t have experts,’ ” he told the crowd.
“You know, I’ve always wanted to say this… . The experts are
terrible. They say, ‘Donald Trump needs a foreign policy
adviser.’… But supposing I didn’t have one. Would it be worse
than what we’re doing now?”4
Trump’s sneering at experts tapped into a long- standing
American belief that experts and intellectuals are not only
running the lives of ordinary people, but also doing a lousy job
of it. Trump’s rise in 2016 was the result of many factors, some
of them (like a crowded field that produced only a plurality
winner) purely matters of circumstance. Trump’s eventual
victory, however, was also undeniably one of the most recent
—a nd one of the loudest—trumpets sounding the impending
death of expertise.
Consider the various ways in which Trump’s campaign
represented a one- man campaign against established
knowledge. He was one of the original “birthers” who
demanded that Barack Obama prove his American citizenship.
He quoted the National Enquirer approvingly as a source of
news. He sided with antivaccine activism. He admitted that he
gets most of his information on foreign policy from “the
shows” on Sunday morning television. He suggested that
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died from natural
causes in early 2016, might have been murdered. And he
charged that the father of one of his opponents (Ted Cruz) was
involved in the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, the
assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Outright mistakes in stump speeches are an occupational
hazard for political candidates—a s when then- senator Barack
Obama claimed to have visited all fifty- seven states— but

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Trump’s ignorance during the campaign was willful and

persistent. He had no idea how to answer even rudimentary
questions about policy; rather than be shamed by his lack of
knowledge, he exulted in it. Asked about the nuclear triad, the
massive arsenal that would be at his disposal as president of the
United States, Trump said, “We have to be extremely vigilant
and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear
changes the whole ballgame.” Pressed about what he meant, he
added, “I think— I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the
devastation is very important to me.”
These were not missteps. Asked to clarify Trump’s
comments later, one of Trump’s spokespeople waved away the
entire matter as irrelevant. Trump, Katrina Pierson told Fox
News, was tough, and that’s all that mattered. “What good does
it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” she
asked. Pierson’s fellow guest was the attorney and political
commentator Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel whose
military specializations included chemical and nuclear issues,
and who by any standard is an ultra- conservative. Schlichter
was visibly astonished. “The point of the nuclear triad is to be
afraid to use the damn thing,” he said emphatically.
Trump survived all of this, seized the Republican
nomination, and won, because in the end, he connected with a
particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things
like America’s nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy- headed
claptrap.
Worse, voters not only didn’t care that Trump is ignorant or
wrong, they likely were unable to recognize his ignorance or
errors. The psychologist David Dunning—w ho 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

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work among the electorate and perhaps even central to

understanding the bizarre nature of the 2016 election:

Many commentators have pointed to [Trump’s] confident

missteps as products of Trump’s alleged narcissism and
egotism. My take would be that it’s the other way around.
Not seeing the mistakes for what they are allows any
potential narcissism and egotism to expand unchecked.
In voters, lack of expertise would be lamentable but
perhaps not so worrisome if people had some sense of how
imperfect their civic knowledge is. If they did, they could
repair it. But the Dunning- Kruger Effect suggests
something different. It suggests that some voters, especially
those facing significant distress in their life, might like
some of what they hear from Trump, but they do not know
enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he
makes.5

In other words, it’s not that Trump’s supporters were excusing

him when he blurted out his most ignorant claims, but rather,
as Dunning says, “They fail to recognize those gaffes as
missteps.”
Trump’s strongest support in 2016, unsurprisingly, was
concentrated among people with low levels of education. “I
love the poorly educated,” Trump exulted after winning the
Nevada caucuses, and that love was clearly reciprocated. 6 In
Trump, Americans who believe shadowy forces are ruining
their lives and that any visible intellectual ability is itself a
suspicious characteristic in a national leader found a champion.
But where would people get such ideas, such as believing that
the political elite and their intellectual allies are conspiring
against them?

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In part, they get these ideas by observing the behavior of the

political elite and their intellectual allies. A month after Trump
decried the uselessness of experts, for example, one of
President Obama’s top foreign policy advisers validated
exactly the kind of suspicions that fuel attacks on expert
participation in national policy. Describing the Obama
administration’s press for Congress and the American public to
accept a deal with Iran on its nuclear weapons program,
Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told the New
York Times Magazine that the administration knew it would
have to “discourse the [expletive] out of this.”
Rhodes gave the interview to a Times reporter, David
Samuels, whose own objectivity (on the Iran deal as well as
about some of the people named in the piece) was called into
question when the story appeared.7 Still, the Rhodes admissions
were remarkably blunt: he proudly identified think tanks,
experts, and journalists who he claimed were part of the
administration’s press for the deal.

“We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked

him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts
cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that
validated what we had given them to say.”
When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of
far- reaching spin campaign being run by a different
administration is something that scares him, he admitted
that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public
debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a
vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”8

It is not unusual for senior government officials to assert that

some matters, especially in national security, are too important

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and complicated to be left to uninformed public debate. Secret

diplomacy and campaigns to win public opinion are part and
parcel of the history of every democratic government,
including the United States.
What Rhodes said, however, was different, and far more
damaging to the relationship between experts and public
policy. In effect, he bragged that the deal with Iran was sold by
warping the debate among the experts themselves, and by
taking advantage of the fact that the new media, and especially
the younger journalists now taking over national reporting,
wouldn’t know any better. “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.”
Rhodes’s implication was clear. Not only did he think the
public was too stupid to understand the deal— which was not
wrong, although Rhodes did nothing to make them any smarter
— but that everyone else, including Congress, was too stupid
to get it as well. For Rhodes, contaminating the debate with
misinformation was just a requirement for the greater good.
Trump and Rhodes, in different ways, used the public’s
ignorance to serve their own interests. They differed only in
tactics: Trump sought power during the 2016 election by
mobilizing the angriest and most ignorant among the
electorate, while Rhodes stage- managed the Iran deal by
throwing a fictional narrative out for public consumption and
bypassing the electorate entirely while he and others did as
they thought best in secret.
Both of these situations are intolerable. There is plenty of
blame to go around for the parlous state of the role of expertise
in American life, and this book has apportioned much of it.
Experts themselves, as well as educators, journalists, corporate
entertainment media, and others have all played their part. In

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the end, however, there is only one group of people who must
bear the ultimate responsibility for this current state of affairs,
and only they can change any of it: the citizens of the United
States of America.

EXPERTISE AND DEMOCRACY: THE DEATH SPIRAL

Expertise and government rely upon each other, especially in a

democracy. The technological and economic progress that
ensures the well- being of a population requires the division of
labor, which in turn leads to the creation of professions.
Professionalism encourages experts to do their best in serving
their clients, to respect their own boundaries, and to demand
their boundaries be respected by others, as part of an overall
service to the ultimate client: society itself.
Dictatorships, too, demand this same service of experts, but
they extract it by threat and direct its use by command. This is
why dictatorships are less efficient and less productive than
democracies, despite the historical myths many Americans
continue to believe about the putative efficiency of Nazi
Germany and other such regimes. 9 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.
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

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rule by the mob or toward elitist technocracy. Both are

authoritarian outcomes, and both threaten the United States
today.
This is why the collapse of the relationship between experts
and citizens is a dysfunction of democracy itself. The abysmal
literacy, both political and general, of the American public is
the foundation for all of these problems. It is the soil in which
all of the other dysfunctions have taken root and prospered,
with the 2016 election only its most recent expression. As the
writer Daniel Libit described it, the nation’s public policy
experts found the 2016 presidential race “an increasingly
demoralizing lesson in the imperviousness of the American
voter.”10 The warning signs, however, were present long before
then.
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.11

Ordinary Americans might never have liked the educated or

professional classes very much, but until recently they did not
widely disdain their actual learning as a bad thing in itself. It
might even be too kind to call this merely “anti- rational”; it is

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almost reverse evolution, away from tested knowledge and

backward toward folk wisdom and myths passed by word of
mouth— except with all of it now sent along at the speed of
electrons.
This plummeting literacy and growth of willful ignorance is
part of a vicious circle of disengagement between citizens and
public policy. People know little and care less about how they
are governed, or how their economic, scientific, or political
structures actually function. Yet, as all of these processes thus
become more incomprehensible, citizens feel more alienated.
Overwhelmed, they turn away from education and civic
involvement, and withdraw into other pursuits. This, in turn,
makes them into less capable citizens, and the cycle continues
and strengthens, especially when the public appetite for escape
is easily fed by any number of leisure industries.
Awash in gadgets and conveniences that were once
unimaginable even within their own lifetimes, Americans (and
many other Westerners, if we are to be fair about it) have
become almost childlike in their refusal to learn enough to
govern themselves or to guide the policies that affect their
lives. This is a collapse of functional citizenship, and it enables
a cascade of other baleful consequences.
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.”12

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Even the most intellectually minded thinkers across the

American spectrum would agree with Hayek. Unelected
bureaucrats and policy specialists in many spheres exert
tremendous influence on the daily lives of Americans. Today,
however, this situation is by default rather than by design.
Populism actually reinforces this elitism, because the
celebration of ignorance cannot launch communications
satellites, negotiate the rights of US citizens overseas, or
provide for effective medications, all of which are daunting
tasks even the dimmest citizens now demand and take for
granted. Faced with a public that has no idea how most things
work, experts likewise disengage, choosing to speak mostly to
each other rather than to laypeople.
Meanwhile, Americans have increasingly unrealistic
expectations of what their political and economic system can
provide. This sense of entitlement is one reason they are
continually angry at “experts” and especially at “elitists,” a
word that in modern American usage can mean almost anyone
with any education who refuses to coddle the public’s mistaken
beliefs. When told that ending poverty or preventing terrorism
is a lot harder than it looks, Americans roll their eyes. Unable
to comprehend all of the complexity around them, they choose
instead to comprehend almost none of it and then sullenly
blame experts, politicians, and bureaucrats for seizing control
of their lives.

THE KNOWERS AND THE DECIDERS

This underscores another problem motivating the death spiral

in which democracy and expertise are caught: citizens do not
understand, or do not choose to understand, the difference
between experts and elected policymakers. For many

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Americans, all elites are now just an undifferentiated mass of

educated, rich, and powerful people. This is patent silliness.
Not all rich people are powerful, and not all powerful people
are rich. Intellectuals and policy experts are seldom rich or
powerful. (Trust me on that one.)
Whatever else George W. Bush may have gotten wrong
during his presidency, he was right when he reminded
Americans that when it came to the actions of his
administration, he was “the decider.” Experts can only propose;
elected leaders dispose. In fact, policymaking experts and
elected leaders are almost never the same group, and it cannot
be otherwise: there are simply not enough hours in the day for
a legislator, even in a city council or a small US state (and
much less for a president) to master all of the issues modern
policymaking requires. This is why policymakers engage
experts— the knowers— to advise them.
Sometimes, this partnership between advisers and
policymakers fails. Experts get things wrong, and they counsel
political leaders to take courses of action that can result in
disaster. Critics of the role of expertise point to national
traumas like the Vietnam War as one such example. With the
benefit of hindsight, these criticisms are often made as though
such painful choices could have been avoided by consulting the
wisdom of the common citizen.
This call to fall back on the knowledge and virtue of
laypeople, however, is romanticized nonsense. Evan Thomas, a
journalist and biographer of Richard Nixon, admitted that the
“best and the brightest,” among them academics like Henry
Kissinger and “corporate titans” like Secretary of Defense
Robert S. McNamara, “were far from perfect” and that they
“bear the blame for Vietnam and the 58,000 American soldiers
who died there, not to mention the millions of Vietnamese.” 13
But as Thomas points out, those same experts and elites

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“strengthened a world order balanced precariously on the edge

of nuclear war. They expanded trade, deepened alliances and
underwrote billions in foreign aid.”
None of these policies would have been popular in and of
themselves, but they helped the United States and the West to
survive the Cold War and to reach its peaceful end. More
important, what kinds of policies would nonexperts or
populists have chosen? Thomas challenged readers to “contrast
the mistakes of the 1960s to times when
Washington allowed foreign policy to be set by public
consensus.”

In the 1930s, Congress closed off free trade to protect

American industry and listened to voters who wanted a
smaller, less costly military with no entangling alliances.
The results? The Smoot- Hawley tariff contributed to the
Great Depression, and the failure of the League of Nations
allowed the rise of fascism and global war.

This illustrates an important point: then as now, 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.
The question nonetheless remains whether America really
needs all these experts, especially when their advice becomes
so spread out over so many people that no one seems
responsible when disaster strikes. Andrew Bacevich, for one,
has called for vanquishing the modern expert class, at least in
public policy:

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Policy intellectuals— eggheads presuming to instruct the

mere mortals who actually run for office—a re a blight on
the republic. Like some invasive species, they infest
present- day Washington, where their presence strangles
common sense and has brought to the verge of extinction
the simple ability to perceive reality.
A benign appearance— well- dressed types testifying
before Congress, pontificating in print and on TV, or even
filling key positions in the executive branch— belies a
malign impact. They are like Asian carp let loose in the
Great Lakes.14

The irony here is that Bacevich himself is a prolific author, a

former senior military officer, and a retired professor who
regularly proposes very specific instructions for the same group
of mortals. Still, he has a point: in addition to the five or six
hundred visible policymakers at the top levels of the US
government, there are thousands of experts behind them who
may, in fact, not be very good at what they do.
Experts cannot dodge their own responsibilities here. The
Knowers cannot merely hide behind elected officials every
time something goes wrong, telling the public to leave them
alone and instead to go and punish the Deciders. When the
experts screw up, the leaders who trusted their advice on behalf
of the public need to adjudicate their failures and to decide
what kind of correction is needed.
Sometimes, the remedy for expert failure is the time-
honored blue- ribbon panel and its recommendations.
Sometimes the answer is just to fire somebody. 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

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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. Whether this would work is another
matter, and Tetlock acknowledges the many barriers to such
solutions.
The most daunting barrier, however, is the public’s own
laziness. None of these efforts to track and grade experts will
matter very much if ordinary citizens do not care enough to
develop even a basic interest in such matters. Tetlock points
out that laypeople, unfortunately, are not usually interested in
finding experts with excellent track records: they are mostly
interested in experts who are accessible without much effort
and who already agree with their views. As Tetlock rightly
notes, it is not enough to encourage accountability among the
“providers of intellectual products” if the “consumers are
unmotivated to be discriminating judges of competing claims
and counterclaims.” These consumers may well be less
interested in “the dispassionate pursuit of truth than they are in
buttressing their prejudices,” and when this happens, laypeople
approach the role of expertise with “the psychology of the
sports arena, not the seminar room.”15
Experts need to own their advice and to hold each other
accountable. For any number of reasons— the glut of academic
degrees, the lack of interest on the part of the public, the
inability to keep up with the production of knowledge in the
Information Age—t hey have not lived up to this duty as
conscientiously as their privileged position in society requires.
They can do better, even if those efforts might, in the main, go
unnoticed.

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There are measures that experts can take to improve their

accountability. There are other issues in the relationship with
the public, however, that are beyond their control. Laypeople
need to think about the ways in which they misunderstand the
role of expert advice in a democratic republic. Among the
many misconceptions the public has about experts and
policymakers, five are especially worth considering.
First, experts are not puppeteers. They cannot control when
leaders take their advice. Even in the closest relationships
between an elected politician and an expert adviser, there is not
a complete fusing of beliefs. Whether Nixon and Kissinger—
or Obama and Rhodes— no leader is merely the vessel by
which experts implement ideas.
Any expert worth his or her salt has stories of defeat in the
policy game. I was many years ago an aide to a senior US
senator who treated me as a trusted adviser but who also once
threw me out of his office in a fusillade of curses during a
principled disagreement in the tense days leading up to the
1991 Gulf War. While there is usually a close identity of
interests and views between a political leader and the expert
staff, the policymaker or elected official has pressures and
responsibilities the expert will never feel, and conflict is
inevitable.
Second, experts cannot control how leaders implement their
advice. There is a kind of “monkey’s paw” problem here for
experts. (“The Monkey’s Paw,” readers might recall, is a
famous early twentieth- century story about a magic talisman
that granted wishes in the worst way: when the main character
in the tale wishes for money, it comes in the form of
compensation for the death of his son.) Experts can advise
policymakers on what to do, but they may find their advice
taken in ways that were never intended. An economist who is
also an environmentalist might believe that lowering taxes is a

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good idea, for example, only to find later that her advice was
indeed taken— by a Congress wanting to lower taxes on
gasoline.
Third, no single expert guides a policy from conception
through execution, a reality that the public often finds
bewildering and frustrating. This is why policy analysis is an
entire scholarly discipline in itself, especially in the study of
large organizations like governments and businesses. The
Knowers and the Deciders may have settled on what they want,
but the institutions below them, like players in a huge game of
“telephone,” can mangle intended policies and turn them into
something else, with perverse effects, by the time the whole
project comes to fruition.
Fourth, experts cannot control how much of their advice
leaders will take. Experts can offer advice, but often political
leaders will often hear only the parts they want to hear—
specifically, the parts that will be popular with their respective
constituencies. They will then mobilize experts that emphasize
the message they prefer. Some experts might, for example,
advocate cutting taxes; others might call for increased spending
on pet projects ranging from the social safety net to national
defense. Both positions— cutting taxes and increasing
spending— may have a logical foundation, but they cannot
usually be adopted at the same time. The experts, however,
cannot control the fact that politicians might well choose all of
the options anyway, even if they conflict with each other. (The
next set of experts called in will then be asked to help solve the
mystery of a massive budget deficit.)
The public, unfortunately, is much the same way. When
nutritional scientists took eggs off the list of dietary culprits,
they did not intend for people to order fast- food egg
sandwiches every morning as part of a healthy breakfast.
People hear what they want to hear and then stop listening.

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And when their incomplete adoption of an expert’s advice

produces poor results, they blame the experts for being
incompetent, because everybody has to blame somebody.
Finally, experts can only offer alternatives. They cannot,
however, make choices about values. They can describe
problems, but they cannot tell people what they should want to
do about those problems, even when there is wide agreement
on the nature of those challenges.
Is the earth’s climate changing? Most experts believe it is,
and they believe they know why. Whether their models,
extrapolated out for decades and centuries, are accurate is a
legitimate area for debate. What experts cannot answer is what
to do about climate change. It might well be that Boston or
Shanghai or London will be underwater in fifty years, but it
might well also be that voters— who have the right to be
wrong— will choose to shift that problem to later generations
rather than to risk jobs (or comfort) now.
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. Letting Boston slide
into the harbor is not my preferred outcome, but it is not a
failure of expertise if people ignore the experts and let it
happen anyway: it is instead a failure of civic engagement. If
Boston is to become Venice, it should be by choice, not by
accident. When voters remain utterly unwilling to understand
important issues because they are too difficult or discomfiting,
it is unsurprising that experts will give up talking to them and
instead rely on their positions in the policy world to advocate
for their own solutions.
Experts sometimes give poor advice or make mistakes, but
an advanced society and its government cannot do without
them, no matter what an increasing number of Americans seem
to believe. To ignore expert advice is simply not a realistic

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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. Moreover, when the public no longer makes a
distinction between experts and policymakers and merely
wants to blame everyone in the policy world for outcomes that
distress them, the eventual result will not be better policy but
more politicization of expertise. Politicians will never stop
relying on experts; they will, however, move to relying on
experts who will tell them—a nd the angry laypeople banging
on their office doors—w hatever it is they want to hear.
This is the worst of all worlds, in which both democracy
and expertise are corrupted because neither democratic leaders
nor their expert advisers want to tangle with an ignorant
electorate. At that point, expertise no longer serves the public
interest, but the interest of whatever political clique is taking
the temperature of the public at any given moment. We are
already perilously close to this outcome in modern America.

A REPuBLIC, IF YOu KNOW WHAT ONE IS

The challenges of expert accountability are compounded by the

fact that most Americans do not seem to understand their own
system of government. 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

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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.
Classical American thought might be rooted in the glory
that was Athens, but the United States is not, nor was it ever
meant to be, anything like the Athenian marketplace. And for
that, Americans should be grateful. 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?16

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This is one of many challenges republican government was

designed to overcome. Even when most people know what
they’re doing in their own area of competence, they cannot
agglomerate their decisions into coherent public policy the
same way as if they are guessing the weight of a bull or trying
to pin down the target price of a stock. The republican solution
allows a smaller group of people to aggregate the public’s often
irresolvable demands.
Determining what the public actually wants, however, is
exponentially more difficult when the electorate is not
competent in any of the matters at hand. Laypeople complain
about the rule of experts and they demand greater involvement
in complicated national questions, but many of them only
express their anger and make these demands after abdicating
their own important role in the process: namely, to stay
informed and politically literate enough to choose
representatives who can act on their behalf. In the words of Ilya
Somin, “When we elect government officials based on
ignorance, they rule over not only those who voted for them
but all of society. When we exercise power over other people,
we have a moral obligation to do so in at least a reasonably
informed way.”17
This is not the place for a meditation on the American form
of representative democracy, especially since there are already
plenty of copies of The Federalist Papers still available. But
the death of expertise and its associated attacks on knowledge
fundamentally undermine the republican system of
government. Worse, these attacks are campaigns conducted by
those least capable of supplanting that system. The most poorly
informed people among us are those who seem to be the most
dismissive of experts and are demanding the greatest say in
matters about which they have exerted almost no effort to
educate themselves.

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CONCLuSION

Consider the fact that people change what they say they
want based on who they think is advocating a position. The
comedian Jimmy Kimmel was once again the prankster here:
he stopped people on the street, and asked them which of the
tax plans offered by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump they
preferred. 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: “Sure enough, one by
one, the Clinton voters were stunned to discover that they were
vouching for the proposal of her archrival.” One man, when
told he was supporting Trump’s plan rather than Clinton’s,
decided to go for broke: “Well, I support Donald Trump,
then.”18
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. The Huffington Post’s polling director,
Ariel Edwards- Levy, put it this way:

Americans, regardless of their political views, don’t have a

solid opinion about every single issue of the day,
particularly when it concerns a complicated or obscure
topic. People tend, reasonably, to rely on partisan cues— if
a politician they support is in favor of a bill, they’re likely
to think it’s a good idea, or vice versa.19

When Levy and her colleagues conducted a more formal

version of the Kimmel ambush, they found the same thing:
Republicans who strongly disagree with Democratic Party
positions on health care, Iran, and affirmative action objected
far less if they thought the same policies were those of Donald

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Trump. Democrats, for their part, went in the other direction:

they were less supportive of their own party’s policies if they
thought they were Trump’s positions.
At least tax policy and health care are real issues with real
positions attached to them. In 2015, Public Policy Polling, a
liberal polling group, asked both Republicans and Democrats
whether they would support bombing the country of Agrabah.
Nearly a third of Republican respondents said they would
support such action. Only 13 percent were opposed, and the
rest were unsure. Democrats were less inclined to military
action: only 19 percent of self- identified Democrats supported
bombing while 36 percent decisively voiced their opposition.
Agrabah doesn’t exist. It’s the fictional country in the 1992
animated Disney film Aladdin. Liberals crowed that this poll
was evidence of the ignorance and aggressiveness of
Republicans, while conservatives countered that it only showed
how Democrats were reflexively against military action no
matter how little they knew about the situation. For experts,
however, there was no way around the overall reality captured
in the poll, even if only accidentally: 43 percent of Republicans
and 55 percent of Democrats had an actual, defined view on
bombing a place in a cartoon.20
Some of these games are unfair to the public. Ordinary
people are busy living their lives, not trying to figure out if
they’re being manipulated by pollsters or pranked by
comedians like Kimmel (or the Fox News personality Jesse
Watters, who conducts similar pop quizzes on the street). This
is especially true when voters are presented with “all sides” of
the issues in the media without any indication of which views
are more authoritative than another. As the psychologist Derek
Kohler put it,

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CONCLuSION

Government action is guided in part by public opinion.

Public opinion is guided in part by perceptions of what
experts think. But public opinion may— and often does—
deviate from expert opinion, not simply, it seems, because
the public refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of
experts, but also because the public may not be able to tell
where the majority of expert opinion lies.21
A talk show, for example, with one scientist who says
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are safe and one
activist who says they are dangerous looks “balanced,” but in
reality that is ridiculously skewed, because nearly nine out of
ten scientists think GMOs are safe for consumption. At some
point, in the midst of all the bickering, the public simply gives
up and goes back to relying on simpler sources of information,
even if it is a meme on Facebook.
This is no excuse, however, for citizen ignorance and
disengagement— and especially for hyper- partisan
attachments that make people change their minds about policy
only because of who advocated them. If the public has no idea
about the substance of an issue, and will vote based on who
they like rather than what they want, it is difficult to put too
much blame on policymakers and their expert advisers for
being confused themselves. How can a republic function if the
people who have sent their representatives to decide questions
of war and peace cannot tell the difference between Agrabah,
Ukraine, or Syria?
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?”
When laypeople disregard expertise and declare themselves
fed up with everything and everyone, they forget that the
people they elected still have to make decisions, every day,
about an ongoing blizzard of issues. These officials do not have

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the luxury of casting a pox upon the experts and the polls and
then retreating to their televisions and computer screens and
game controllers. They have to make commitments, sometimes
of lives and always of money, on everything from navigation
rights to child care. These decisions, and how they are
implemented, will affect the lives of all citizens, the informed
as well as the ignorant, the involved and the detached.
The breakdown of trust between the public, experts, and
elected officials in a republic goes in all directions. The public,
especially, needs to be able to trust leaders and their expert
advisers. This relationship becomes impossible to sustain,
however, when laypeople have no idea what they’re talking
about or what they want.
When that trust breaks down, public ignorance can be
turned by cynical manipulation into a political weapon. 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.
Most laypeople, already suspicious of the educated classes,
need little prodding to rebel against experts— even when such
rebellions are cynically led by other intellectuals.
In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked radio
listeners to go and purchase maps so they could follow along as
he narrated the progress of World War II. Maps quickly sold
out across the country. In 2006, fewer than sixty- five years
later, a national study found that nearly half of Americans
between the ages of eighteen and twenty- four— that is, those
most likely to have to fight in a war— did not think it was
necessary to know the location of other countries in which
important news was being made.22 A decade later, during the
2016 election, Donald Trump raised cheers when he summed
up his approach to terrorists in the Middle East: “I would bomb
the shit out of them. I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the

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CONCLuSION

refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be

nothing left.”
A republic, if you can keep it. Or if you can find it on a
map.

I’M AS GOOD AS YOu

Finally, and most disturbing, 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. 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.
And this, sadly, is the state of modern America. 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, Americans now think of democracy as a state of actual
equality, in which every opinion is as good as any other on
almost any subject under the sun. 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.
This problem is not new, nor is it unique to the United
States. The British writer C. S. Lewis warned long ago of the
danger to democracy when people no longer recognize any
difference between political equality and actual equality, in a
vivid 1959 essay featuring one of his most famous literary
creations, a brilliant and evil demon named Screwtape.

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

As one of the Inferno’s most senior bureaucrats, Screwtape

is invited to give the commencement address at Hell’s training
college for new tempters. During his speech, Screwtape leaves
aside what, for him, is the dull business of individual
temptation and instead surveys the global landscape. While he
is repulsed by human progress (including the French and
American revolutions, and the abolition of slavery, among
other moments), he sees great hope— for Hell, not for human
beings— in capturing the concept of democracy and wresting it
away from its noble meaning.
“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.23

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CONCLuSION

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.”24
“I’m as good as you,” Screwtape chortles at the end of his
address, “is a useful means for the destruction of democratic
societies.”
And so it is. 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. An outbreak of
whooping cough because an ignoramus would not vaccinate a
child is a sign of tolerance; the collapse of a foreign alliance
because a provincial isolationist can’t find other nations on an
atlas is a triumph of egalitarianism.
Democracy, as practiced in the United States in the early
twenty- first century, has become a resentful, angry business.
The fragile egos of narcissistic college students jostle against
the outraged, wounded self- identity of talk- radio addicts, all
of whom demand to be taken with equal seriousness by
everyone else, regardless of how extreme or uninformed their
views are. Experts are derided as elitists, one of many groups
putatively oppressing “we the people,” a term now used by
voters indiscriminately and mostly to mean “me.” Expert
advice or any kind of informed deliberation by anyone whom
laypeople perceive as an elite— which is to say almost
everyone but themselves— is rejected as a matter of first
principles. No democracy can go on this way.

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THE REVOLT OF THE EXPERTS

I do not intend to end this book on such a note of pessimism,

but I am not sure I have much choice. 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.
Traditional solutions no longer work. Education, instead of
breaking down barriers to continued learning, is teaching
young people that their feelings are more important than
anything else. “Going to college” is, for many students, just
one more exercise in personal self- affirmation. The media,
mired in competition at every level, now asks consumers what
they’d like to know instead of telling them what’s important.
The Internet is a mixed blessing, a well of information
poisoned by the equivalent of intellectual sabotage.
Faced with the public’s resolute ignorance, experts are
defeated. “Many of us feel powerless against it,” said David
Autor, a labor economist at MIT. “We feel we can train our
students, but our students aren’t the public and we don’t know
how to school the public.” 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.”25
One hopeful sign is that experts seem to be rebelling against
attacks on their expertise. In decrying the Brexit outcome, for
example, James Traub bluntly said that it was time for the
defenders of classical Western liberalism “to rise up against the
ignorant masses.”26 Of course, to do so is to risk the dread

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CONCLuSION

accusation of “elitism,” a charge that has always had more

impact in egalitarian America than in more stratified cultures in
Europe and elsewhere, as Traub himself recognized: “It is
necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of
leadership is to un- delude them. Is that ‘elitist’? Maybe it is;
maybe we have become so inclined to celebrate the
authenticity of all personal conviction that it is now elitist to
believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history.”
Nonetheless, professionals across a spectrum of fields in a
number of countries seem fed up. Anecdotally, I was struck
that after my original article on the “death of expertise”
appeared, I was contacted by scientists, doctors, lawyers,
teachers, and many other professionals in America and around
the world. They told me not only of their frustration, but of
their anger and sadness over ruptured relationships with
patients, clients, and students, and even the cooling of close
personal friendships, all because they are finally demanding an
end to ill-i nformed lectures about their own area of
competence.
Medical doctors, especially, seem to have had enough. To
take a humorous recent example, in 2015, Kimmel— yet again
— ran a satirical public service announcement in which actual
doctors engaged in expletive- filled rants against recalcitrant
patients who feared vaccinations. “Remember that time you got
polio?” asked one of the physicians. “No, you don’t. Because
your parents got you [expletive] vaccinated.” Another said, “I
have to use my only day off to talk to you idiots about
vaccines?” as another chimed in: “Because you listened to
some moron who read a forwarded email?”
The Kimmel spot went viral, reported in major media and
replayed (as of this writing) more than eight million times on
YouTube alone. The reaction, of course, was swift. Sites like
Infowars.com and a host of antivaccination bloggers (of

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course) called the doctors ignorant, tools of a corrupt system,

and the other usual insults. But the antivaccination wave seems
to have crested for now, in part because professionals and their
supporters have decided to use the media and the Internet in the
same way as the conspiracy theorists.
These kinds of efforts in the media will save the lives of
some children, but they are not enough to defeat the campaign
against established knowledge or to reverse its effects on
American democracy. 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.
Tragically, I suspect that a possible resolution will lie in a
disaster as yet unforeseen. It may be a war or an economic
collapse. (Here, I mean a major war that touches America even
more deeply than the far- away conflicts fought by brave
volunteers, or a real depression, rather than the recession of the
early twenty- first century.) It may be in the emergence of an
ignorant demagoguery, a process already underway in the
United States and Europe, or the rise to power of a technocracy
that finally runs out of patience and thus dispenses with voting
as anything other than a formality.
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.
I still have faith in the American system, and I believe the
people of the United States are still capable of shrugging off

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their self- absorption and isolation and taking up their

responsibilities as citizens. They did it in 1941, and again after
the trials of Vietnam and Watergate, and yet again after the
attacks of 9/ 11. Each time, however, they slid back into
complacency, and each time, the hole of ignorance and
disaffection they dug for themselves got deeper. At some point,
they might no longer see daylight.
We can only hope that before this happens, citizens,
experts, and policymakers will engage in a hard (and so far
unwelcome) debate about the role of experts and educated
elites in American democracy. Recoiling from Donald Trump’s
march to the GOP nomination, the writer Andrew Sullivan
warned in 2016 that “elites still matter in a democracy.”

They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but

because they provide the critical ingredient to save
democracy from itself. The political Establishment may be
battered and demoralized, deferential to the algorithms of
the web and to the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue,
but this is not the time to give up on America’s near-
unique and stabilizing blend of democracy and elite
responsibility.
It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this
democratic age— especially with vast inequalities of
wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them
precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own
destabilizing excesses.27

Democracy, as Lewis’s Screwtape knew, denotes a system of

government, not an actual state of equality. Every single vote
in a democracy is equal to every other, but every single opinion
is not, and the sooner American society reestablishes new

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THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE

ground rules for productive engagement between the educated

elite and the society they serve, the better.
Experts need to remember, always, that they are the
servants and not the masters of a democratic society and a
republican government. 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. Laypeople cannot do without
experts, and they must accept this reality without rancor.
Experts, likewise, must accept that their advice, which might
seem obvious and right to them, will not always be taken in a
democracy that may not value the same things they do.
Otherwise, when democracy is understood as an unending
demand for unearned respect for unfounded opinions, anything
and everything becomes possible, including the end of
democracy and republican government itself.
That, at least, is my expert opinion on the matter. I could be
wrong.

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NOTES
Introduction

1. Pride Chigwedere et al., “Estimating the Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral

Drug Use in South Africa,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency
Syndromes 49 (4), December 1, 2008.
2. Kyle Dropp, Joshua D. Kertzer, and Thomas Zeitzoff, “The Less
Americans Know about Ukraine’s Location, the More They Want U.S. to
Intervene,” Monkey Cage Blog, Washington Post online, April 7, 2014.

Chapter 1

1. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1993), 16– 18.
2. Richard Hofstadter, Anti- Intellectualism in American Life (New York:
Vintage, 1963), 34.
3. Ilya Somin, “Political Ignorance in America,” in Mark Bauerlein and
Adam Bellow, eds., The State of the American Mind (West
Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2015), 163–1 64.
4. Dana Goodyear, “Raw Deal: California Cracks Down on an
Underground Gourmet Club,” New Yorker, April 30, 2012.
5. Olga Khazan, “27% of Surgeons Still Think Obamacare Has Death
Panels,” Atlantic online, December 19, 2013.
NOTES TO PAGES 27–65

6. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2013 Survey of Americans on the US Role in

Global Health.
7. Henry Blodget, “Here’s What Day Traders Don’t Understand,” Business
Insider, March 29, 2010.

Chapter 2

1. See David Dunning, “We Are All Confident Idiots,” Pacific Standard
online, October 27, 2014.
2. Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How
Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated
Self- Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
77(6), December 1999, 1121– 1122.
3. Dunning, “We Are All Confident Idiots.”
4. John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its
Consequences (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 9.

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5. Michael Crichton, “Panic in the Sheets,” Playboy, December 1991;

archived at MichaelCrichton.com.
6. There’s an entire subject in statistics, called “Bayesian analysis,” named
for an eighteenth- century English mathematician, which deals with this
question.
7. Social scientists, no less than any other, are aware of this problem. See
Charles O. Jones, “Doing before Knowing: Concept Development in
Political Research,” American Journal of Political Science 18(1),
February 1974.
8. Maria Konnikova, “How a Gay- Marriage Study Went Wrong,” New
Yorker online, May 22, 2015.
9. Jonathan Kay, “Has Internet- Fueled Conspiracy Mongering Crested?,”
in Mark Bauerline and Adam Bellow, eds., The State of the American
Mind (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2015), 138–1 39.
10. Indeed, the scholar Ross E. Cheit has argued that the poorly handled
cases in the 1980s and 1990s backfired tragically, as the pendulum of
public opinion swung from always believing small children to being
highly skeptical of any claims of abuse at all. Still, the Satanic element
was part of a hysteria, and later studies by academics and law
enforcement found no evidence of such networks in day- care centers or
anywhere else. See Ross E. Cheit, The Witch- Hunt Narrative (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
11. Jef Rouner, “Guide to Arguing with a Snopes- Denier,” Houston Press,
April 2, 2014.
12. Ali Mahmoodi et al., “Equality Bias Impairs Collective Decision-
Making across Cultures,” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, March 24, 2015.
NOTES TO PAGES 65–87

13. Chris Mooney, “The Science of Protecting People’s Feelings: Why We

Pretend All Opinions Are Equal,” Washington Post online, March 10,
2015.
14. Karl Taro Greenfield, “Faking Cultural Literacy,” New York Times
online, May 24, 2014.
15. Quoted in Chris Mooney, “Liberals Deny Science, Too,” Washington
Post online, October 28, 2014.
16. The one difference was that conservatives reacted more intensely to data
that contradicted their beliefs, but the researchers suggest that this is
because “issues that challenge conservatives are the issues currently
more polarizing in society today.” The authors made these and the
following comments in a press release from Ohio State University titled
“Both Liberals, Conservatives Can Have Science Bias,” February 9,
2015.

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Chapter 3

1. Daniel W. Drezner, “A Clash between Administrators and Students at

Yale Went Viral,” Washington Post online, November 9, 2015.
2. A study by the Educational Testing Service, the group that administers
the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, to college- bound students, found
that there was no associated increase in ability connected to the
explosion of college attendance. See Educational Testing Service,
America’s Skills Challenge: Millennials and the Future (Princeton, NJ:
Educational Testing Service, 2015).
3. Ben Casselman, “Shut Up about Harvard,” FiveThirtyEight.com, March
30, 2016.
4. James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley, “Remedial Finance: The
Outsized Cost of Playing Academic Catch- Up,” Weekly Standard
online, May 9, 2016.
5. Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint (New York: Time Warner, 1993),
68.
6. Valerie Strauss, “I Would Love to Teach, But …,” Washington Post
online, December 31, 2013.
7. Emma Brown, “Former Stanford Dean Explains Why Helicopter
Parenting Is Ruining a Generation of Children,” Washington Post
online, October 16, 2015.
8. Megan McArdle, “Sheltered Students Go to College, Avoid Education,”
BloombergView.com¸ August 13, 2015.
9. Jeffrey J. Selingo, “Helicopter Parents Are Not the Only Problem.
Colleges Coddle Students, Too,” Washington Post, October 21, 2015.
10. Robby Soave, “Yale Students Tell English Profs to Stop Teaching
English: Too Many White Male Poets,” Reason.com, June 1, 2016.
11. Jonathan D. Glater, “To: [email protected] Subject: Why It’s
All about Me,” New York Times online, February 22, 2006.
12. James V. Schall, Another Sort of Learning (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1988), 30– 37.
NOTES TO PAGES 87–116

13. David Dunning, “We Are All Confident Idiots,” Pacific Standard
online, October 27, 2014.
14. Tiny Castleton State College in Vermont, now a “university,” is one of
many examples in New England alone. Lisa Rathke, “Switching from a
College to a University Could Mean More Money, More Students,”
Huffington Post, July 12, 2015.
15. Catherine Rampell, “The Rise of the ‘Gentleman’s A’ and the GPA
Arms Race,” Washington Post online, March 28, 2016.

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16. Richard Arum, “College Graduates: Satisfied, but Adrift,” in Mark

Bauerlein and Adam Bellow, eds., The State of the American Mind
(West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2015), 68.
17. The 2016 data were an extension of studies previously done by
Professors Stuart Rojstaczer and Chris Healy, who continued to gather
data on grades after writing papers on the subject in 2010 and 2012.
They maintain a database of their work at www.gradeinflation.com.
18. For just two of many reports and reactions from both conservatives and
liberals, see Katy Waldman, “Yale Students Erupt in Anger over
Administrators Caring More about Free Speech Than Safe Spaces,”
Slate, November 7, 2015; and Shoshanna Weismann, “How Babies Are
Made,” Weekly Standard, November 10, 2015.
19. Mará Rose Williams, “Race Protests at Mizzou Could Stunt Freshmen
Enrollment,” Kansas City Star online, January 13, 2016.
20. Conor Friedersdorf, “The New Intolerance of Student Activism,”
Atlantic online, November 9, 2015.
21. Glenn Reynolds, “After Yale, Mizzou, raise the voting age—to 25,”
USA Today online, November 16, 2015.

Chapter 4

1. Adrienne LaFrance, “Raiders of the Lost Internet,” Atlantic online,

October 14, 2015.
2. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Atlantic online, July/
August 2008.
3. Caitlin Dewey, “What Was Fake on the Internet This Week: Why Do
We Even Bother, Honestly?,” Washington Post online, October 30,
2015.
4. Caitlin Dewey, “What Was Fake on the Internet This Week: Why This
Is the Final Column,” Washington Post online, December 18, 2015.
5. Damian Thompson, Counterknowledge (New York: W. W. Norton,
2008), 11.
6. Allen West, “Obama’s America: Look What Our Troops Are Being
FORCED to Do for Islam’s Holy Month,” allenbwest.com, June 29,
2015.
7. Michael Miller, “Gwyneth Paltrow’s No Vagina Expert, Doctors Say,”
People online, January 29, 2015. Dr. Gunter’s blog is at
drjengunter.wordpress.com.
NOTES TO PAGES 116–135

8. Laura Hooper Beck, “I Went to a Spa for My Uterus and This Is My

Story,” FastCompany.com, January 27, 2015.
9. Frank Bruni, “California, Camelot and Vaccines,” New York Times
online, July 4, 2015.

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10. “ ‘Stop Googling Your Symptoms,’ Teenage Cancer Victim Told before
Death,” Daily Telegraph, June 16, 2015.
11. Matthew Fisher et al., “Searching for Explanations: How the Internet
Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge,” Journal of Experimental
Psychology 144(3), June 2015, 674– 687.
12. Tom Jacobs, “Searching the Internet Creates an Illusion of Knowledge,”
Pacific Standard online, April 1, 2015.
13. This and subsequent references are from the University College of
London CIBER Briefing Paper “The Google Generation: The
Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future,” January 11,
2008.
14. Robert Epstein, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election,” Politico,
August 19, 2015.
15. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor, 2005),
xii– xiii.
16. Quoted in Tom Simonite, “The Decline of Wikipedia,” MIT Technology
Review, October 22, 2013.
17. Ibid.
18. Andrea Peterson, “Liberals Are More Likely to Unfriend You over
Politics— Online and Off,” Washington Post online, October 21, 2014.
19. A. O. Scott, “Everybody’s a Critic. And That’s How It Should Be,”
New York Times Sunday Review online, January 30, 2016.
20. Andrew Sullivan, “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic,”
New York online, May 1, 2016.
21. A Dartmouth College researcher, Brendan Nyhan, among others, has
been leading investigations for some years into why people double-
down in the face of being proven wrong. Joe Keohane, “How Facts
Backfire: Researchers Discover a Surprising Threat to Democracy: Our
Brains,” Boston Globe online, July 11, 2010.
22. David Dunning, “We Are All Confident Idiots,” Pacific Standard
online, October 27, 2014.
23. Megan McArdle, “Your Assessment of the Election Is Way Off,”
Forbes online, April 14, 2016.

Chapter 5

1. Sarah Kaplan, “How, and Why, a Journalist Tricked News Outlets into
Thinking Chocolate Makes You Thin,” Washington Post online, May
28, 2015.
2. Mollie Hemingway, “Vox’s Motto Should Be ‘Explaining the News
Incorrectly, Repeatedly,’ ” TheFederalist.com, July 17, 2014.
NOTES TO PAGES 136–163

263
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3. Elisabetta Povoledo, “Pope Calls for ‘Peace in All the World’ in First
Easter Message,” New York Times online, March 31, 2013.
4. Pew Research Center, “The Age of Indifference: A Study of Young
Americans and How They View the News,” June 28, 1990, 1.
5. Richard Arum, “College Graduates: Satisfied, but Adrift,” in Mark
Bauerlein and Adam Bellow, eds., The State of the American Mind
(West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2015), 73.
6. James E. Short, “How Much Media? Report on American Consumers.”
2013. Institute for Communication Technology Management, Marshall
School of Business, University of Southern California, http://
classic.marshall.usc.edu/ assets/ 161/ 25995.pdf.
7. Jan Zverina, “U.S. Media Consumption to Rise to 15.5 Hours a Day—
Per Person— by 2015,” UC San Diego News Center, November 6,
2013.
8. Quoted in Benjamin Mullen, “Buyouts Hit the Dallas Morning News,”
Poynter. org, July 7, 2015.
9. Quoted in Jeremy Peters, “Some Newspapers, Tracking Readers Online,
Shift Coverage,” New York Times online, September 5, 2010.
10. Peters, “Some Newspapers, Tracking Readers Online, Shift Coverage.”
11. National Journal Group, Washington in the Information Age, 2015,
Washington, DC.
12. Steven Metz, “As Celebrity Pundits Rise, U.S. National Security Policy
Suffers,” World Politics Review, August 14, 2015.
13. Mindich in Bauerlein and Bellow, State of the American Mind, 101.
14. R. R. Reno, “Trumpageddon!,” First Things online, February 20, 2016.
15. Eliot Cohen, “The Age of Trump,” American Interest online, February
26, 2016.
16. Anne Pluta, “Trump Supporters Appear to Be Misinformed, Not
Uninformed,” FiveThirtyEight.com, January 7, 2016.
17. Justin McCarthy, “Trust in Mass Media Returns to All- Time Low,”
Gallup.com, September 17, 2014.
18. Paul Farhi, “How Biased Are the Media, Really?,” Washington Post
online, April 27, 2012.
19. Dale Maharidge, “People’s Stories: What Happens When No One
Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?,” Nation online, March 2, 2016.
20. Michael Nunez, “Want to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of
Journalists?
Here’s What Happened When It Hired Some,” Gizmodo.com, May 3,
2016.
21. Will Saletan, “Unhealthy Fixation,” Slate.com, July 15, 2015.
22. John Bohannon, “I Fooled Millions into Thinking Chocolate Helps
Weight Loss. Here’s How,” io9.Gizmodo.com, May 27, 2015.
23. Joshua Foust, “The Birth (and Death) of a Meme: Embedded Reporters
Don’t Always Get the Story,” Columbia Journalism Review online,
September 10, 2008.

264
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NOTES TO PAGES 163–182

24. Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll, and Derek Kravitz, “Rolling Stone’s
Investigation: ‘A Failure That Was Avoidable,’ ” Columbia Journalism
Review online, April 5, 2015.
25. Emily Yoffe, “The College Rape Overcorrection,” Slate.com, December
7, 2014.
26. Quoted in Greg Jaffe, “VA Study Finds More Veterans Committing
Suicide,” Washington Post online, February 1, 2013.
27. Brandon Friedman, “Military Suicides Top Combat Deaths— But Only
Because the Wars Are Ending,” TIME online, January 16, 2013.

Chapter 6

1. Helen Thompson, “Teen Schools Professor on ‘No Irish Need Apply’

Signs,” Smithsonian.com, August 5, 2015.
2. Geoffrey Norman, “Do I Dare to Eat an Egg,” The Weekly Standard
online, March 16, 2015.
3. Peter Whoriskey, “The Science of Skipping Breakfast: How
Government Nutritionists May Have Gotten It Wrong,” Washington
Post online, August 10, 2015.
4. Seweryn Bialer and Joan Afferica, “Reagan and Russia,” Foreign
Affairs, Winter 1982– 1983, 263.
5. Stephen M. Meyer, “Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee,” in Theodore Karasik, ed., Russia and Eurasia Armed
Forces Review Annual 15, 1991 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic
International Press, 1999), 348.
6. Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse Kappen, “Introduction,” in
Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse Kappen, eds., International
Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 2.
7. The ten are the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, the
People’s Republic of China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel
(undeclared), and South Africa (renounced). The South African arsenal
was dismantled when the apartheid regime that created it fell from
power.
8. W. Ian Lipkin, “Anti- Vaccination Lunacy Won’t Stop,” Wall Street
Journal online, April 3, 2016.
9. See Richard Van Noorden, “Political Science’s Problem with Research
Ethics,” Nature online, June 29, 2015; Brian C. Martinson, Melissa S.
Anderson, and Raymond de Vries, “Scientists Behaving Badly,” Nature
435 (June 9, 2005): 737– 738.
10. Carl Zimmer, “A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform,”
New York Times online, April 16, 2012.

265
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NOTES TO PAGES 184–206

11. Benedict Carey, “Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed,

Study Says,” New York Times online, August 27, 2015.
12. Quoted in Rachel Gross, “Psychologists Call Out the Study That Called
Out the Field of Psychology,” Slate.com, March 3, 2016.
13. Daniel Engber, “Cancer Research Is Broken,” Slate.com, April 19,
2016.
14. Garret Epps, “Genuine Christian Scholars Smack Down an Unruly
Colleague,” Atlantic online, August 10, 2012.
15. “Actresses’ Role in Farm Issue Stirs Criticism,” Los Angeles Times
online archive, May 3, 1985.
16. Jessica Goldstein, “Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong about Everything? This
Scientist Thinks So,” ThinkProgress.com, April 21, 2016.
17. Alexandra Petri, “Dr. Carson, This Is Not Brain Surgery,” Washington
Post online, November 5, 2015.
18. This account is drawn from Paul Offit, “The Vitamin Myth: Why We
Think We Need Supplements,” Atlantic online, July 19, 2013.
19. Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy (New York: Bantam, 1985), 235; Helen
Caldicott, If You Love This Planet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992),
156.
20. There is a claim that has circulated in various articles about Criswell
over the years that he got one prediction within shouting distance of
something like creepy accuracy. He apparently told the television host
Jack Paar in March 1963 that President Kennedy would not run for
reelection in 1964 because of something that would happen to him in
November 1963. This, however, might yet be an urban legend, at least
until someone turns up an old videotape or kinescope (if any exists).
21. Carl Bialik, “Most Pollsters Say Their Reputations Have Worsened,”
FiveThirtyEight.com, December 28, 2015.
22. Clive Thompson, “Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the
Bomb?” New York Times Magazine online, August 12, 2009.
23. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House,
2010), xxiv– xxv.
24. Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 20.
25. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 20.
26. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor, 2005),
31.
27. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 21.
28. See Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 101– 103.
29. See, for example, Tina Nguyen, “How Nate Silver Failed to Predict
Trump,” Vanity Fair, February 1, 2016.
30. Noah Rothman, “Why They Think Trump Can Win in Nov?,”
Commentary online, April 27, 2016.

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31. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, 23.

NOTES TO PAGES 210–221

Conclusion

1. See James Traub, “First, They Came for the Experts,” Foreign Policy,
July 7, 2016.
2. Quoted in Michael Deacon, “Michael Gove’s Guide to Britain’s
Greatest Enemy … the Experts,” Telegraph online, June 10, 2016.
3. Quoted in Stephen Castle, “Having Won, Some ‘Brexit’ Campaigners
Begin Backpedaling,” New York Times online, June 26, 2016.
4. Quoted in Nick Gass, “Trump: ‘The Experts Are Terrible,’ ”
Politico.com, April 4, 2016.
5. David Dunning, “The Psychological Quirk That Explains Why You
Love Donald Trump,” Politico.com, May 25, 2016.
6. See, for example, Jennifer Kerr, “Educational Divide in GOP White
House Race: What’s behind It,” Associated Press, April 3, 2016; Max
Ehrenfreund, “The Outlandish Conspiracy Theories Many of Donald
Trump’s Supporters Believe,” Washington Post online, May 5, 2016;
Scott Clement, “Donald Trump Is Splitting the White Vote in Ways
We’ve Never Seen Before,” Washington Post online, May 31, 2016.
7. The journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, for one, claimed that Samuels was
using the piece to settle a personal score with him. See Jeffrey
Goldberg, “Ben Rhodes and the ‘Retailing’ of the Iran Deal,” Atlantic
online, May 9, 2016.
8. David Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s
Foreign- Policy Guru,” New York Times Sunday Magazine online, May
5, 2016.
9. A classic episode of the original Star Trek series, first aired in 1968,
featured a misguided attempt by a well- meaning professor— of course
— to base an entire planet on the Nazi experience. It all ends in disaster,
but the dying professor still calls Nazi Germany “the most efficient state
Earth ever knew,” with the show’s voice of reason, Mr. Spock, chiming
in to say, “Quite true.” In reality, Nazi Germany was deeply corrupt and
inefficient, and many of its leading scientists and intellectuals fled the
country after 1933. Many Americans, however, still believe in the myth
of Nazi efficiency.
10. Daniel Libit, “How the Expert Class Got Trumped and Berned,”
CNBC.com, May 12, 2016.
11. Susan Jacoby, “The Dumbing of America,” Washington Post online,
February 17, 2008.
12. Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 378.
13. Evan Thomas, “Why We Need a Foreign Policy Elite,” New York Times
online, May 8, 2016.

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14. Andrew Bacevich, “Rationalizing Lunacy: The Intellectual as Servant of

the State,” Huffington Post, May 8, 2015.
NOTES TO PAGES 222–237

15. Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2005), 231– 232.
16. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be
Tweeted,” New Yorker, October 4, 2010.
17. Ilya Somin, “Political Ignorance in America,” in Mark Bauerlein and
Adam Bellow, eds., The State of the American Mind (West
Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2015), 166.
18. Neetzan Zimmerman, “Kimmel Fools Hillary Supporters into Backing
Trump’s Tax Plan,” The Hill, September 30, 2015.
19. Ariel Edwards- Levy, “Republicans Like Obama’s Ideas Better When
They Think They’re Donald Trump’s,” Huffpost Politics, September 1,
2015.
20. Nick Saffran, “Wipe That Grin Off Your Smug Faces, Progressive
Pollsters,” TheFederalist.com, December 29, 2015.
21. Derek Kohler, “Why People Are Confused about What Experts Really
Think,” New York Times online, February 14, 2016.
22. Jacoby, “Dumbing Of America.”
23. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters with Screwtape Proposes a Toast
(New York: Image, 1981), 136–1 39 (emphases in the original).
24. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1993), 18.
25. See Libit, “How the Expert Class Got Trumped and Berned”; and Julie
Beck, “Americans Believe in Science, Just Not Its Findings,” Atlantic
online, January 29, 2015.
26. James Traub, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up against the Ignorant
Masses,” Foreign Policy, June 28, 2016.
27. Andrew Sullivan, “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic,”
NYMag.com, May 1, 2016.

INDEX

9/ 11 see United States of America, 2001 Afghanistan, 162

terrorist attacks Agnew, Spiro, 146
AIDS, 1, 2, 49, 50, 181, 192 denial of
Abagnale, Frank, 179 HIV as cause, 1, 2, 181
Adams, Scott, 14 Ailes, Roger, 153
Affleck, Ben, 38 Animal House (1978 film), 188
Affordable Care Act (United States Arizona State University, 81
legislation), 26 Armstrong, Neil, xii

268
269

Asimov, Isaac, 1, 196

Assad, Bashar, 128
Australia, 2, 48, 114, 193, 194

Bacevich, Andrew, 220, 221

Barton, David, 186, 187
Bayesian analysis, 240n Beck,
Glenn, 148
Bellesiles, Michael, 186
Bialer, Seweryn, 172, 173 blogging, 3,
108, 114, 160, 236 Bohannon, John,
135
Brown University, 73
Brown, Henry Billings, 31
Bruni, Frank, 105, 117
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, 198, 199 Bush,
George W., 57, 113, 123, 219

Cable News Network, 144, 151, 152, 154,

155, 156
Caldicott, Helen, 193– 195
Carrey, Jim, 3, 117
Carter, Jimmy, 34, 151
Casey Anthony trial (2011), 152
Centers for Disease Control, 22, 117
Challenger disaster (1986), 10
Chancellor, John, 151
Cheers (television show), 13, 106
China, 62, 65, 245n
Chomsky, Noam, 39, 194, 195
Christopher, Warren, 19
Churchill, Ward, 180, 181
Clinton, Bill, 146
Clinton, Hillary, 147, 228
CNN see Cable News Network
Coelho, Tony, 189
Colbert, Stephen, 156
Cold War, xi, 2, 28, 193, 194, 220
Columbia University, 34, 51, 52, 161, 163,
181, 186
Harriman Institute, 34

269
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INDEX
confirmation bias, 8, 47, 50– 55, 60– 68, 167, 188– 195
118, defined, 28– 37
123, 157 conspiracy theories, prediction, 196– 204
55– 60, 108, 112
Cornell University, 43, 45 Facebook, 115, 129, 130–1 32, 142, 160,
Court TV, 152 161, 230
Crichton, Michael, 49 Fleming, Ian, 58
Criswell (Jeron Criswell Konig), 196 Fonda, Jane, 189
Fox News, 147, 151– 155, 212, 229
possibly predicts JFK assasination, France, 245n Franklin,
246n Cronkite, Walter, 141, 156 Benjamin, 191, 226
cultural literacy, 66
generalization, 61– 63
Damon, Matt, 38 Genetically Modified Organisms see
Dartmouth College, 82, 84, 243 GMOs
Dawkins, Richard, 102 Georgetown University, 85, 86
democracy, x, 1, 5, 6, 11, 17, 19, 20, Germany, 107, 175, 216, 247n
28, 30, GMOs, 161, 162, 192, 230
69, 114, 122, 129, 158, 174, 204–2 Goldberg, Jeffrey, 247n
08, Good Will Hunting (1997 film), 38
215– 218, 225– 238 Google, ix, 3, 84, 102, 105, 118, 121,
republic as a form of, 225– 170, 191
238 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 173
Denmark, 65 Gove, Michael, 209, 210
Dewey, Caitlin, 112, 113 Gvosdev, Nick, 173
Drezner, Dan, 73
Duesberg, Peter, 1, 2, 181 Harvard University, 2, 24, 31, 95, 96,
Dunning, David, 43– 46, 64, 67, 87, 131, 184, 198
212, 213 Extension School, 96
Dunning- Kruger Effect, 43, 44, 64, 119, Medical School, 24
212, 213 School of Public Health, 2 Heinlein,
“metacognition” as a crucial aspect, 45 Robert, 14 higher education, 42, 71, 72,
76, 80, 88, 90, 95
Ebola, 50 as a client service, 71– 82
eggs, debate over, 10, 22, 23, 171, grade inflation, 93, 95, 98
172, 175, 224 Erdeley, Sabrina, 163, Hill, Anita, 151
168 experts and expertise, x– xv, 3– Hofstadter, Richard, 18, 19
20, 22– 24, Holdren, John, 148
27– 37, 39, 40, 42, 45– 48, 51, 54, House, MD (television show), 51
58, 60– 70, 71, 72, 82, 84, 106, 107, Hughes, Robert, 5, 78 human
110, immunodeficiency virus (HIV), 1, 2
115, 118, 121– 128, 131– 137, 139,
144, Internet, xii, 6, 9, 15, 41, 42, 105–1 33,
145, 147– 159, 166– 179, 184, 188– 137,
238 acting outside their competence, 139, 142– 146, 148, 149, 154, 155, 171,
150, 206, 234, 236

270
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INDEX
Iran, 65, 149, 213–2 15, 228 1979 MSNBC, 153, 156, 161
revolution, 149 nuclear
agreement with, 213–2 15 Nightline (television news program),
Iraq, 199, 223 149– 151
Isaiah Berlin, 201 Nixon, Richard, 219, 222
Israel, 245n North Korea, 3, 245n
Norway, 63
Jastrow, Robert, 82, 83 Jefferson, nuclear weapons, 2, 27, 173, 177, 193,
Thomas, 70, 186, 187 195, 211–213, 245n Nye, Bill, 206
journalists, 9– 11, 102, 123, 133, 135, Nyhan, Brendan, 243n
137,
140, 143, 150, 154, 159, 160– 163, 166, O’Reilly, Bill, 110
167, 168, 205, 214, 215 Obama, Barack, 57, 113, 114, 132, 148,
Kaszeta, Dan, 83, 84, 127 211,
Keillor, Garrison, 44 213, 222
Kennan, George, 195 Occam’s Razor, 56, 171
Kennedy, John F., 59, 177, 211 OJ Simpson trial (1995), 152
Kennedy, Robert F., Jr., 117 On the Beach (1956 novel), 193
Kerry, John, 123 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 17, 233
Kimmel, Jimmy, 45, 228, 229, 235, 236
Konnikova, Maria, 52, 67 Pakistan, 245n
Koppel, Ted, 150 Palin, Sarah, 26
Krauthammer, Charles, 153 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 115, 116, 117, 190,
Kruger, Justin, 43– 46, 64, 212, 213 191
Pauling, Linus, 191– 195 Paulos, John
Landon, Alfred, 197 Allen, 48 peer review, 35, 52, 53, 135,
Lange, Jessica, 189 183
law of parsimony, 56, Pelosi, Nancy, 26
57 lawyers, 4, 30, 33, physicians, 1, 2, 4, 21– 24, 29, 49, 118,
235 122,
League of Nations, 165, 174, 177, 179, 195, 205, 235
220 plagiarism, 179, 181, 183, 188 polling
Lewis, Clive Staples, 40, 232 and public opinion, 138, 158, 197, 198,
literary creation “Screwtape,” 202, 214, 226, 228, 229, 240
232, Princeton University, 52, 95
233, 238 Putin, Vladimir, 204, 205
Lewis, Jeffrey, 83
Limbaugh, Rush, 146– 148, 153 Rain Man (1988 film), 47
Lincoln, Abraham, 31, 43, 105 Rather, Dan, 123, 124 raw milk
low- information voter, 25– 28 movement, 21, 22 Reagan,
Ronald, 82, 151, 190, 193
Madison, James, 209 Reasoner, Harry, 141
Mbeki, Thabo, 1, 2 Reddit, 131
McCarthy, Jenny, 3, 190 Reynolds, Frank, 151
McNamara, Robert, 219 Rhodes, Ben, 213, 222
moral panics, 60, 240n Rolling Stone, 163

271
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INDEX
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 57, 197, 231 The Spy Who Came In From from the
Russell, Bertrand, 170, 207 Cold
Russian Federation, 2, 22, 59, 63, 92, (1965 film), 209
173, Thomas, Clarence, 151
202– 204, 245n Thucydides, 16
Rwanda, 19 Tocqueville, Alexis, 17, 18
Trump, Donald, 203, 210– 213, 228, 231,
Safire, William, 146 237
Saletan, Will, 161, 162 Twitter, 3, 83, 84, 102, 129, 131, 132,
Sanders, Bernie, 76 142,
Saturday Night Live (television show), 161, 189, 210
149
Schall, James, 86, 87 Ukraine, 2, 230
Scholastic Aptitude Test, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 28,
241n scientific method, 53 34, 137, 141, 172, 173, 193, 194,
Shulman, Marshall, 34 199,
Silver, Nate, 202 202– 204
So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993 1991 collapse, 173, 202– 204
film), 134 social media, xii, 15, 40, 41, United Kingdom, 59, 181, 197, 209,
66, 81– 85, 112, 210, 245n
114, 128, 129, 130, 132, 142, 146, 160 2015 Brexit debate, 209, 210, 235
South Africa, 1, 2, 177, 245n Conservative Party, 210
Spacek, Sissy, 189 UKIP (United Kingdom Independence
Star Trek (television series), Party), 210
247n United States of America, ii, ix, xiv, 1, 2,
stereotypes, 20, 61, 62 4,
Stern, Howard, 147 11, 16, 17, 18, 27, 48, 60, 62, 72,
Stewart, Jon, 156 74, 94,
Sturgeon, Theodore, 107 Sturgeon’s 98, 137, 140, 141, 146, 158, 171,
Law, 105, 107, 108, 119, 140 173,
superstitions, 54, 55 Surowiecki, 174, 176, 189, 193, 194, 197, 207,
James, 122, 201 210,
211, 214– 216, 220, 226, 232, 233,
Syria, 127, 128, 230 236,
237, 245n
Taleb, Nassim, 199, 200 2001 terrorist attacks, 57, 113, 180,
talk radio, 145– 148, 153, 237
154 Ted Turner, 151 2014 midterm election, 197
Tetlock, Philip, 200, 201, 206, 221, 2016 election, 14, 212, 216, 231, 236
222 Central Intelligence Agency, 198
thalidomide, 10, 23, 24 Congress, 26, 43, 158, 159, 213– 215,
Thatcher, Margaret, 3, 194 220– 223
The Big Lebowski (1998 film), 40 Democratic Party, 28, 228, 229
The Brothers Karamazov, 58 Food and Drug Administration,
The Graduate (1967 film), 70 22
foreign aid, 27, 220, 232

272
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INDEX
Republican Party, 28, 228, 229
Veteran’s Administration, 165
United States Naval War College, 37, 96
University College of London, 120
University of California at Berkeley, 182
University of Chicago, 94, 138
University of Colorado, 180
University of Missouri, 101, 102
University of Southern California,
92 University of Virginia, 163
urban legends, 16, 112, 113, 170

vaccines, 3, 13, 21, 28, 117, 161, 181,

195, 232, 235, 236
Vietnam War, xiii, 10, 100, 145, 149,
219, 237
Vox.com, 135, 171, 243

Wakefield, Andrew, 181

Waugh, Evelyn, 136, 159
Wellesley College, 95
West, Allen, 114
Wikipedia, 3, 124– 127
Wood, Edward D., 196

X- Files (television show), 57, 59

Yale University, 31, 82, 95, 101, 102,

119, 120, 234
2015 Halloween controversy, 101–
102

Zinn, Howard, 39

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