text: Climate scientists may suffer from an extreme example of this sort of vilification, but they’re hardly alone. The US has had a long history of mistrust in highly educated professionals, but we seem to have shifted to a situation in which expertise has become both a disqualification and a reason for attack.
  That’s the central argument of Tom Nichols’ recent book, The Death of Expertise, which has recently come out in a paperback edition. Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College and an expert himself, having done graduate studies about the former Soviet Union. While he’s gained some prominence as a never-Trump conservative, the arguments in his book are evenhanded at distributing blame. And they make disturbing reading for anyone in science who’s interested in engaging the public—especially in the science arena.
  The book has an unusual origin story. The Death of Expertise started as a tweetstorm and developed into an op-ed before finally reaching book form. This keeps it relatively light and easy reading, despite the depressing topic. Nichols’ straightforward writing style and highly organized structure makes the ideas in The Death of Expertise easy to digest, although they also make it easy to think of examples and arguments that didn’t make the final cut.
  This isn’t a uniquely US phenomenon; witness a Brexit campaigner saying “people in this country have had enough of experts” in response to said experts suggesting the move could be a disaster for the UK. But Nichols argues that this country has added uniquely American twists to the phenomenon. Less than 50 years after the founding of the US, he points out, de Tocqueville was noting how the US public trusted and celebrated its common sense as being superior to that held by specialists. And, in more recent times, the experts who planned the Second Gulf and Vietnam wars miscalculated badly, heightening mistrust while inflicting national trauma.
  (I’d add that the US has a long history of celebrating athletes at the expense of eggheads, but Nichols points out that athletes possess their own specialized expertise.)
  The book points how the Internet, rather than revealing just how much information is out there, has instead led people to think they can read the Wikipedia entry on epidemiology and tell someone with a Masters in Public Health why they just don’t understand the dangers of vaccines. As an example of the sorts of things Nichols skips in this brief work, I don’t recall him discussing how the Internet also allows these people to self-organize into communities, which helps them reinforce each other’s mis-beliefs.
  Nichols’ brief treatment really only comes up a bit short when he gets around to offering solutions. The public needs to recognize that, while they can be wrong, experts are far more likely to be right than anyone who gets their knowledge on a topic by spending time with a Web browser. Experts need to get better at explaining their degree of confidence in their conclusions and do so using language that the public can understand. And experts have to do so to the public, rather than limiting their conversations to their fellow academics.
  All that is right, of course; The Death of Expertise is just lacking in implementation details. Fortunately, many of the organizations that support the experts on climate science are consulting with the experts they need—behavioral scientists, communications specialists, and more—to find ways of getting the public to respect the scientists’ expert conclusions. Maybe in a few decades, we’ll see whether any of these efforts were affected or whether the public waited for the Earth itself to make believing in climate change a matter of common sense.
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