The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols
The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols
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The Death of Expertise
The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

Author: Tom Nichols

Narrator: Sean Pratt

Unabridged: 8 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/23/2017


Synopsis

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

Tom Nichols shows this rejection of experts has occurred for many reasons, including the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement.

Nichols notes that when ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy-or in the worst case, a combination of both.

About Tom Nichols

Tom Nichols is professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, a columnist for USA Today, and a contributing writer at the Atlantic. He is the author of The Death of Expertise, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and US National Security, and Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War. He is also an instructor at the Harvard Extension School and an adjunct professor at the US Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies. He is a former aide in the US Senate and has been a Fellow of the International Security Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Valeriu

3, 5. Declinul încrederii în experți e general. De ce s-a ajuns la situația în care ignoranța trece drept virtute, iar știința drept elitism și fanfaronadă? Iată cîteva dintre răspunsurile lui Tom Nichols: 1. În universitățile americane, profesorii (și așa timorați de rigorile absurde ale corectitudin......more

Goodreads review by Melora

As Nichols would be quick to point out, I was likely to enjoy this book about “the death of expertise” (more accurately, “the death of the acknowledgment of and respect for expertise”) due to the fact that it fits with my existing beliefs. Tom Nichols' book, based on his astonishingly prescient 2014......more

Goodreads review by Pavol

Our public debates lack intellectual rigor, our scientists no longer enjoy the respect of their authoritative position in a given field, common people ignore facts and asserts their know-nothing opinions as equally valuable. We are living, Nichols says, the age of the death of expertise. Paradoxical......more