In his book, Nichols addresses a prevailing tendency in Western nations, lead by Americans. This is the growing tendency of people not only ignoring, but undermining expert opinions. Drawing on recent happenings, Nichols goes to great lengths to discuss recent elections, the rise of Donald Trump, and Brexit. In particular, how a changing sentiment of the general public has played a role in all these pivotal issues.
Although the details, are at times hard to follow for those not familiar with American politics, nevertheless non-Americans can appreciate the failures in the ‘system’ Nichols points to, and why this is important to humanity as a whole. His objective is to, ‘bridge 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'. In the final sections of the book, he emphasises that it is a very political problem, and an abuse of voting rights to be ignorant, calling upon citizens to take more notice, asserting that not only is the entire democratical system at risk, but as a consequence bad decisions may result in issues that will impact the entire society.
Throughout the book Nichols explains reasons for the overall distrust of experts, providing entertaining and relatable examples, compelling us to accept his point of view, and very much so if the reader is a ‘professional service provider’ or so-called ‘expert’ themselves, and have experienced similar animosity from their own clientele.
Among the reasons for the distrust of experts, Nichols explains that humans in their very nature, have certain traits that encourage this attitude. This coupled with the social consequences of the digital age we live in, play a large part in fostering the distrust.
To describe the interactions between experts and non-experts, citizens are distinguished into 3 groups: decision-makers/policymaker, experts, and laypeople. Nichols argues conversations not only amongst experts and laypeople, but among everyone else too, deteriorate towards a 'bad high school debate in which the objective is to win and facts are deployed like checkers on a board'. He puts this down to an inherent tendency for our brains to search for evidence that already meshes with our beliefs, at times ignoring probabilities and reason. Also known as ‘confirmation-bias’. This is compounded by findings of the Dunning-Kruger experiment, which Nichols often draws upon. The Dunning experiment showed that, unskilled or incompetent people lack the skill of ‘metacognition’ or ability to recognise their own incompetence. As a reader, I can’t help feel slightly uncomfortable with this division of people and perhaps the treatment of certain people as somewhat inferior. With these feeling aside, Nichols discusses how in the past we would leave it to the ‘expert’, and not be soo questioning. However due to the abuse of experts, in charging high fees, or providing advice to suit their own interests, the public have grown skeptical, and rightfully so. However the skepticism, may have gone too far, fueled by social media, and the workings of search engines in what they push forward to our eyes.
Another interesting argument put forward, is that unsystematic Googling is making us dumber. Citing Sturgeon’s Law, ‘Ninety percent of everything’, Sturgeon decreed, ‘is crap’, and an age old saying, ‘it ain't what you don't know that'll hurt you, it's what you do know that ain't so’, can’t help recollect times when we’ve been bitten by decisions including business decisions that have been made on incorrect assumptions. Can’t help but look back at times when we’ve hopelessly spent hours Googling a topic and feeling deflated and overwhelmed as a consequence, and most importantly none the wiser. This feeling is well explained by Nichols: ‘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 learnt 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.’ After reading the book, I have continued Googling, but treading much more cautiously than in the past.
Although Nichol doesn’t provide any concrete solutions to the problem, he does a great job of raising our awareness and labelling some of the peculiarities creeping into not only our personal interactions, but our interactions with experts and governing bodies.
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