Expertise is a 4 Letter Word

Tom Nichols wrote this article on how expertise is increasingly become a reviled word. And this is a fairly recent phenomenon, he says:

“Once upon a time — way back in the Dark Ages before the 2000s — people seemed to understand, in a general way, the difference between experts and laymen.”

But today things are different:

“Today, any assertion of expertise 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 “real” democracy.”

It’s that last part about democracy that gets on to Nichols:

“Equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge.”

But that’s not what more and more feel nowadays, which is why:

“I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.”

While Nichols acknowledges the dangers of only letting the experts debate the issues, he says that participants must have “a certain baseline of competence” and insists that:

“In any discussion, you have a positive obligation to learn at least enough to make the conversation possible. The University of Google doesn’t count.”

But he accepts that this is a “cultural and generational issue that will take a long time come right, if it ever does”.

The issue is definitely generational; it is also a (over?) reaction to the control wielded by the gatekeepers of the past (newspaper editors and TV show hosts); and a consequence of what the Internet allows (free, anonymous speech).

Has the pendulum swung too far in the other direction?