Tom Nichols, "The Death Of Expertise"
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- Опубликовано: 11 апр 2017
- www.politics-prose.com/book/97...
From movie reviews to medical advice, it’s easier than ever to get information. But it’s harder, Nichols shows, to know what kind of information we’re getting; new media platforms, for instance, level the playing field, making it difficult to distinguish facts from opinions or speculations. Worse, such distinctions no longer seem to matter much. In his impassioned cautionary tale about the perils of un-vetted information, Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College whose previous books include Sacred Cause and No Use, argues that credentials are still important, and that giving experts their due is not undemocratic. Rather, to keep democracy working, he argues that leaders need experts to educate and advise them, that journalists must inform rather than entertain, and that voters have a duty to question and learn, not merely assert and argue.
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Produced by Tom Warren
@21:30 "Nothing will shut down anti-vaxxers quicker than a pandemic."
If he only knew....
Would be super interested in a follow up now 3 years later.
I went to the comments as soon as I heard this part lol
@@Duffzig Me too. That they occupied the capital (Ottawa) of a supposedly advanced social democracy does not bode well.
Well it is only a year later and still the only thing Tom Nichols is an expert on is stuffing his fat face while labeling everyone who disagrees with his myopic views as racists, bigots, fascists and conspiracy theorists.
Oh the irony of authoritarian statists who simp for the biggest, most corrupt mega corporations on the planet, labeling others as fascist is hilarious. It is surprising to no sane and rational people that those who are confused by basic human biology, namely concerning gender, are confused by such simple concepts of what fascism actually entails.
"A pandemic puts a stop to that stuff pretty fast ..." You wish, man. Darn future.
I think he might be the one who jinxed us.
Oooof if he only knew how far people were willing to go
Another expert takes an L
I'm watching this on April 19th, 2020, and it seems like a prophecy.
Absolutely!
Tom NIchols is bona fide pseudo-intellectual. Not an intelligent person.
@@gmx1100 Sounds like you may be an example of what he was talking about.
@@deweyboshers1986 Tom Nichols is a self-proclaimed expert on politics, yet he confidently predicted: 1. Hillary would win in 2016; 2. Trump would be thrown out of office after impeachment; 3. Evidence would surface that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian gov't in 2016. He was wrong on all of these. Just a couple of examples. For a so-called expert, he gets a lot of things wrong.
Amen. May 24, 2020!
His least favourite phrase is 'Agree to disagree' - Mine is "I'm not telling you how to your job BUT...."
What a SUPERB introduction, to a STELLAR book. Tom Nichols' work continues to nail it.
SMH, no
Fast forward to April 2020...This guy is a genius.
This guy is a swamp creature very comfortable in the academic quicksand.
Drew Black it has electrolytes
David ZZ did you mean acolytes?
@@drewblack749 Exactly. Nichols is a clown.
@@gmx1100 congrats on being confidently braindead but he's literally right
I briefly worked at a newspaper and once at an airline. I used to have people calling me up -- at the newspaper -- to tell me how our weather predictions sucked, yada, yada. I was never certain how to respond. When I was at the airline and had to tell people their flights would be delayed due to head winds, I'd get passengers saying things like "It's not windy outside!!!". Again I never knew how to respond. I should have asked "So where did you get your meteorology degree?" Did these few passengers think we were lying to them?
"thankfully sir the plane doesnt fly at ground level and it is windy up where they do fly" 😂
Though im not sure that wouldve helped 😅
A book on a topic like this can never be perfect, but it's an important one to cover. Definitely guilty of thinking I know more than I probably do :) Thank you for the humility check.
I'm so glad Nichols wrote this book. When reading theinitial pages, I thought I already knew this topic fairly well. But by the end of the book, I really appreciated just how much he targeted so many groups of people, how we are all to blame, and we all have our responsibilities. IMO our current situation is not hopeful for all of the reasons he goes into But it's s no excuse for not trying our best. One important thing is to listen to what credible people who have differing points of view have to say.
Wow! An expert who can pronounce nuclear. How refreshing.
What I haven't heard from Tom that I would like to hear, is that education no longer seems to focus on critical thinking and critical analysis skills. This was considered a normal part of a liberal arts education. Then came the skepticism of liberal institutions. (more like a decades-long assault followed the disastrous, standards of learning initiative).
It's critical thinking and analysis that allows someone to capably parse through the disinformation cloud on the internet and figure out useful information from echo-chamber propaganda.
Stop being pompous ! 99.0% of institutes of knowledge throughout history have NEVER taught 'Critical Thinking" or "Critical analysis skills" .... what they relied upon to create educated students was the students willingness to sit down ,say nothing and learn from their expert professors and teachers .... the ONLY Class in Universities that teach Critical analysis skills has always been "Logic " for debaters ....what's different now is what Nichols is talking about ..we live in an age of bigmouth know nothings and because of that you can't teach those types of people 'Critical Thinking" or "Critical analysis skills" .
He talks all about that in the book!
I love these videos, so much to learn from these brilliant speakers.
Tom isn't brilliant
@@j.warburton5269 Well I obviously lookforward to you presenting your latest book, Iam sure it will be excellent.
@@akumar7366 Tom, the self-professed "expert" on politics, destroyed his own premise by being wrong about nearly everything in the last 4 years. Tom is such a clown, I can't even express what an intellectual joke he is.
@@j.warburton5269 Well like I said, I eagerly await your book release, let me know when it's coming out.
@@akumar7366 Thank you. My ten-year-old nephew could produce more intellectually compelling work than this poser Tom Nichols.
Let me tell you a little something about the nature of expertise.
Over the last few decades, we've stopped respecting the teaching of critical thinking and the liberal arts and social sciences, in favor of specialization and the STEM fields, with the consequence that we no longer have cultural critics, the likes of Dwight Macdonald, Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley, who society trusts to critique culture as a whole as well-educated generalists. Everyone can only speak from their own silo of scientific expertise. That territory having been left fallow by the educated class, it's been left to regular people to fill the void. Start teaching history, literature, sociology, etc, in schools again, and this problem might go away.
P.S. We're both a representative democracy and a constitutional republic.
STEM fields study reality, social "science" specialises in feminist jazz hand. Teach taxes in schools
@@bloodaxe5028 there is the so-called death of expertise and there is the death of imagination with people like you
People don't respect the STEM field experts either. They think that they know your expertise too. This is a real large problem.
@@bloodaxe5028 hurr durr me smarter den expert if expert feminist me big smart logic boy
Expert opinions can be purchased. Drug companies fund whole departments at universities. Corrupted expertise is worse than none at all. No one can trust that the expertise is authentic and not given in the service of some self serving aim. The tragedy is not only the loss of respect in experts, but also the lack of respect experts have for their expertise.
And influenced studies still have to run the gauntlet that is peer review (and gets ecposed that way) you simplifying is showing exactly the problem described
Yes business interests pay for research but the solution isnt dismissing those but to advocate for more funding to be available for those fields so researchers dont have to take those tainted funds.
Understand the scientific process, stop just paroting media snippets and most important seek out oposing arguments, thats the road to being an informed person
@TheGahta A perfect example is the fact that a doctor will give you a drug for a problem and never mention diet. They were trained to use drugs by the medical school. They may know better, but the accepted protocol is to prescribe a drug and avoid nutritional counseling. I'm a great supporter of scientific methods, but we will never hear the truth unless there is a vested interest promoting it.
@@beekool78 your doctors perhaps, here in germany thats not the case.
@TheGahta Good for you Germany. This book isn't about Germans' distrust of experts
and my comment wasnt about the book but about someone making a logical misstep described by the book.
If you cant add anythign perhaps next time consider not jumping into a dead conversation and making yourself look foolish?
Thank you so much for this video. As a horticulturalist, I'm so sick of people giving me their opinion. It's exhausting having to justify every professional decision I make to people who don't understand what I'm even talking about.
@@jackmellon8801 because when arrogants know it all want to lecture about your fields...the best way is to get another job. Yeah sure....
This is such a great thing which needs discussion urgently! I'm a registered nurse in the UK and many people are polite and trust me but there is an ever growing number that are very aggressive and are intent on arguing with me until I agree with them (which I wont). It is exhausting in an already mentally draining job. Since the pandemic I have resigned and will be embarking on another career. It concerns me the direction we are going in...
I agree with the prof who said he has no idea what the educational baseline is with his students. I get college students who can’t tell me what a noun is.
I'm a musician. Fortunately, that's one area where people aren't inclined to lecture you if they aren't an accomplished musician (conductors notwithstanding. zing). The only potential problem, and I've not encountered it myself, but I've seen it in athletics, people will attribute a high level of skill (achieved through consistent, hard work, over a long period of time) as a "god-given talent." This would be annoying because god had nothing to do with doing the work. Doubly annoying for when such comments are made to atheists, so it seems.
Although you blew the pandemic shaking us out of it, great talk. Citizen initiatives, side stepping the government, is scary these days for the reasons you speak about.
The scariest five words in the English language... "I do my own research".
Yes that and when people say fake news
3 years later and it all happens lol. Cant find toilet paper anywhere smh
Funny we are here to see this..lol..on this day
elreytriton, Evidence for the case there's more feces around than we ever realized...
Gore Vidal demolished Buckley... but, at least there was some kind of civilized debate. Something was revealed, and both men knew it, and so did the audience.
Now that it's 2019, Tom Nichols was on to something which has gotten even worse. The modern awareness of an informed reality has reached lethal proportions for civil debate and for democracy itself.
Today, we watched Boris Johnson win the election in G.B. There you have it.
Wow! Prescient considering we are now in the middle of a pandemic.
+1 for referencing "Rollerball," though.
Oh, and it seems ironic an Epoch Times ad popped up in the middle of this video...
" We're NOT a democracy, we're a REPUBLIC!!!" I'll have to research that concept.
Check out the Thomas Jefferson Hour talks ...i listen Sindays on Prairie Public Radio.
Last week was Adams/Jefferson on the "republic" topic
America is not a democracy......majority Americans have no idea about this fact.
The problem is there is entirely too much group think in policy circles... there are few actual professionals there are a lot of people who call themselves and their peers professionals however the only thing they have ever done is professionally go to seminars and read books perform studies... nothing which contributes to the GDP or to the betterment of society, used to be the policy wonks had 30 years of private business experience then went into politics now it is lawyers by large and they have no practical business experience.
Interesting talk. Liked the tip to read wider, the things that really annoy you, and call it intel. This can also show blindspots and information or news you don't otherwise get to see.
I enjoyed the book immensely. I'm curious is there a phenomenon in which experts can get it wrong more often than right and still be embraced by the intelligencia as an "expert"? How often have numerous "experts" have to admit that they were wrong yet still draw a healthy income? Any idea why the common people who live in a different social, religious and economic zip codes are muting the TV when an "expert" is on TV pontificating?
Love this guy! I could listen to him all day...just ordered the book.
It's excellent!
"...what I say to you is Repent."
I wish I knew that line when I was teaching undergraduates when I was a graduate student :(
:)
Tom Nichols: "Boohoo, poor poor pitiful me, the internet is educating people on a plethora of subjects and now nobody listens to us experts, boohoo, listen to me and I'll tell you what to think."
It's NOT an education. I left the medical field due to the plethora of uneducated fools who thought they knew more than the licensed medical professionals. You, are arrogant.
Excellent book, and quite witty!
Well, now we have the pandemic (7/17/20) and everything he says is true and 100 times worse than he predicts!
Asadullah, Thanks!
First - I found most of the points in the book consistent with my experience; however, I am terrified that, as a teaching physician (residents in residency) that our medical system is not an outlier in the exact points you make. The client status of residents makes teaching incredibly difficult - and it is not (as they frequently tell me) an issue of "wellness" - I have had residents refuse to see patients who experience a status change, go back and complete parts of the exam they fabricated in their note, or consider other possibilities for treatment or diagnosis. These skills are imperative to providing quality patient-centered care. The for-profit medical schools which are on the rise, I think, may be partly responsible for this - these residents did not learn what they should have during medical school. Accreditation standards for residencies have dropped as well. This is terrifying as well because these people will be teaching the next generation of physicians - the US already spends more than any other country per capita on medical care and without quality providers, our outcomes will continue to drop.
Epidemic of narcisism......wow......
Tom is a prime example of it.
Here from english class -_-
Mixed bag here. I agree with Tom Nichols that respect for expertise is dying, but he doesn’t seem to sufficiently acknowledge that alleged experts are themselves guilty of having played a role in that death. Yes he mentions it, but I think the death of expertise began when experts themselves failed way too often to be the experts they claimed to be. When scholars are protected by other scholars out of bias for scholars, they betray scholarship. Nonetheless, Nichols is correct that average Americans are radically uninformed and have no respect for truly learned people.
He does address that in his book. But fundamentally I think this is incorrect. It's clear experts cannot be correct about everything all the time. We're all subject to cognitive biases and he points that out. It's the ability to adapt, and correct mistakes that is most important.
Yes, there was that as well.
We've reached a point where there are too many experts, many being so in such esoteric and useless areas, that it cheapens the label of expert generally. Plus within a particular domain that might even be useful, one has to strive for greater and greater outrageousness just to be heard above all the noise...this too devalues expertise further as well.
Can anyone explain why Nichols (in tweets, etc.) says he doesn't care about global warming? Very odd position for someone who claims to respect experts. I suspect his Republican background took over his morality on that issue. He's too smart to deny climate change but needs an angle to not seem too "liberal" - as if respecting the laws of physics makes one so.
Your comment is 100 percent correct
I know, right? "I don't need to care about climate change." Like, wtf? 99% of the people who have studied say this is it's a massive issue we ALL need to care about!!!!
He is a neocon/neoliberal. Their only goal is to preserve the old order and stop the revolution.
I am an enviornmentalist and a communist and I DO NOT believe in global warming - it just does not pass the rigorous probabalistic reasoning test
@mdfouru The whole movement has a scent of religiion !
"Culture" is important ?!
Whose culture? Many people i work with and know immigrated to the U.S. as adults. Their kids are bi or multicultural.
Tom Nichols fails to mention that these experts can be biased to the lobbyists, which at times might be harmful to the Republic.
Paul Cottrell he's not arguing against skeptisim.He's arguing against rejection of expertise.
It would be helpful if you pointed out which lobbyists specifically because you are painting with a broad brush.
Lobbyists, or at least the way they are supposed to be defines, lobby the Legislative Branch and elected representitives. Tom isn't talking about legislators! So to acknowledge this supposed dynamic seems pretty off base.
This why we need a grand army of Republic Lord Palpatine....
That was SUPER Robert Reich. Yes...They all love you. Think of all the bonus rewards you will experience in the hereafter. Yes, I know because I'm older than you and I get IT.
The clergy is done. Your gate is week and you cannot keep it anymore. Information is freedom
I don't think you actually listed to the video
hurr durr disonfirmation doesn]'t exist!1!!1 Me big smart cuz me read a 4chan post that say bill gate is a lizard!!! expain dat exprtt!
My mother Vesta Margaret Irwin Trawick had one vessel burst in her brain. You cannot know what is happening in your brain. 40,000 cells and a trillion connections.
I came here cz gothamchess vs dewa kipas
Disappointing. I do not find this attitude prevalent in everyday life. I am a physician and am well aware that many "directives" on practice are flawed and subject to politics and undisclosed financial interests.
A couple of glaring examples are the saturated fat causing heart disease hypothesis which was crammed down our throats for years and has been shown to be completely untrue. Also, the recommendation to give lots of people statins. The latter is riddled by financial conflicts yet many are not aware of this. Overall I find it difficult to believe that someone oh his stature makes six figures at a prestigious university.
When I was listening to this video the question came to mind was 'who owns the experts?'
I'd have to agree with you.
Experts??? Haha. They tell us whatever they’re told to tell us. Pharmacy companies want our money, not our health
Tom “no problem”
]Hes thinking is very conventional.
22:00. Wha?...
Do I have to watch Tucker Carlson? What about American Conservative? Bret Bart?
This guy should fill out a form I.D. 10T
Plebesites work best for blessing new constitutions or at least something that the legislators have worked out over time. Like a Peace Treaty. BREXIT was a disaster with iredimable consequences for Britain... and the EU.
She said “nukyulur weapons.”
The fundamental issue is “Every single aspect of our life has been evaluated economically, Money controls everything!” We are living in a dangerous material world, which has not only led to unending destroy of the nature but also unavoidable corruption of our human minds. Celebrities make much more money overnight than experts in his life time. So people look up to them, listen to them, trust them......it’s one of reasons why Trump could get elected as President of USA......populism......also some experts are bought up by money and power, so people have lost their faith to experts or fake experts who appeared as real experts......American politicians have been using/abusing experts as excuses for their own agendas, so experts become the scapegoat of all wrongdoings.
Ok. Four years later, this goof is trying to link the botched Afghanistan exit with Kristi Noem’s waving a flag at a parade.
According to Tom Nichols, 2 + 2 equals fish.
Almost pulled me in with the seductive, hopeful idea that someone close to power knows something, then progressively more enraging.
Then Toms nock alternative media. This guy is not being scholarly by not seeing both sides of the issue.
Experts that differ are more to the point.
I find his lack of faith is disturbing....
He was too optimistic regarding the effect of a pandemic.
We are listening to Tom Nichols.
Something is very strange about this
Experience.
When he was on Amanpour I thought he said he was a Conservative?!?
If he is a Conservative why does he sound sensible?
I think I will have to get his book
And see what gives.
Ok. My comment is this.
Back in the 1960s an American President was murdered in cold
blood in Dallas.
He was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson
who was supposed to be investigated in something called the Billy Sol Estes affair.
Somehow Johnson was not taken to task on that issue. But Johnson makes the huge blunder of the escalation of the Viet Nam War.
This angered students somewhat and led to sizeable demonstrations against the war. It changed the attitude of students vis a vis those in power.
This negative attitude is quite possible still evident today.
The moral of the story: If you try to get a class of citizens sent to a place where they can either be killed and be forced to murder others they can develop bad feelings toward authority.
This may be exacerbated if dark forces in league with the current major jerk President were in command of an operation to murder his predecessor.
I believe these attitudes began a while ago but morphed into the situation today.
Nichols' book is such a joke.
Care to explain why?
omg at 21 min talk about pendemic - USA just hit 100,000 dead from covid 19
Wow, so lacking in self-awareness or class perspective. Meriticracy is oligarchalism. He says people not trusting experts threatens the underpinnings of our democracy, then by way of supporting argument to that assertion, describes a form of oligarchy. "We have to protect democracy, but we're not a democracy, we're a republic, in which people are ruled by those who know better". Hmm. Yeah, _so_ not democracy. That kind of "democracy" needs its underpinnings to be destroyed. The reason people hate "experts" is because the professional class has become an interest in itself, which presumes the right to rule, and rules in its own collective self-interest, primarily through control of the Democratic party, at the expense of the working class and non-professional middle class, and embraces neo-liberalism reflexively, regardless of how much neo-liberalism has ravaged the traditional working class base of the Democratic party, because neo-liberalism mandates technocrats and economists and bankers to determine policy instead of the democratically expressed will of the people, and mandates ever greater removal of electors from what has become the privilege of voting, because in any case the "experts" should be making these political decisions for us, not politicians or the electorate. "Experts", especially in economics, are products of a rigged academia from which other approaches to economics and the history of economic ideas have been driven, as part of the Koch led long-term takeover, which rewards conformity and group-think, and have been well and expensively trained to believe that only minor and incremental change is possible and that the system as it is is essentially fine, especially as it rewards "expertise". "Experts" therefore are not only a selfish and prideful class-in-itself working against the poor and working clas, but strongly small-c conservative and elitist, and strongly conformist and resistant to different ideas.
Historically what is best for society as a whole never comes from the client "experts" of the wealthy and powerful, who provide intellectual (but fraudulent) bona fides for the status quo, but have come from inspired amateurs and outsiders, who haven't been seduced into the prevailing system and the prevailing orthodoxy. The New Deal, for instance, was developed by outsiders in the form of Marxist economists and inspired thinkers from outside academia, led by the wishes and needs of ordinary uneducated folk who were suffering in the Depression, and not by the group-think of Washington or the great universities, which ordinary voters they correctly chose to treat as authoritative.
lol, he's not talking about blindly following experts, after all they are human too, and yes there are examples of non-experts having better ideas.. but as he said, plumbers/craftsmen are experts too, you seem to be generalizing a small subgroup of them, pinning them on anecdotal examples.
That's why I am a nationalist
In general I agree with Nichols concerns about the death of expertise. But every time he opens his mouth to talk about what he sees as what is right, he loses me. His denial of elitism and its self-serving bias astounds me. I read his book with great interest and found many of the general observations about public ignorance to ring true. I am a retired college professor. And I must confess I have little respect for alleged expertise. The biggest reason for the death of expertise is that we don’t really have very many experts. We have a bunch of elites with lots of credentials.
Start something new focus on solutions
I think u have a very perverse ideation of Americans, which is our biggest problem. We are not all that self reliant. We are fearful, overly protective of our inane 'Americanism'. We are isolationists, clinging to this idea that WE are the best. We are stubborn, uneducated as to the workings of the rest of the world, loud and arrogant. If u've ever met U in other countries...it is painful obnoxious. BUT...like this man we have to be the BEST despite the FACT that we are not!
It’s so rare and so glad to hear an American’s reflective thinking! Unfortunately, in most of American’s minds, whatever America does is right, whatever American believe is truth, whatever American’s value is universal, whatever America against is evil.......etc, it’s ridiculously toxic! That’s why America has started so many wars and conflicts in this world......even though America still believe it’s right.
The man somehow completely misunderstands the distrust in experts. People distrust the experts because they (correctly) see that the reductive mechanisms of science leave no place for non-scientific values, values such as freedom or, among religious americans, piety. The expertise that is credentialed and pushed upon the clientele public is academic, secular, urban, cosmopolitan, and international, and the public no longer trusts experts not because we've all become narcissistic know-it-alls, blessed with Dunning-Krueger; it has just become obvious that at a cultural level, the "experts" have a different desired destination than the People whom they are supposed to be advising. It is not irrational to not consult a man going north on how to go south, and so far as I have read, Nichols does not address this in his book.
41:53
Bill Clinton impression.
Men being obnoxious and degrading women and mandately has an effect on women. Women bounce off. Antagonisms sprout up and take off running.
Tom Nichols is the biggest hack ever
If he doest like working at his 'boutique' school and he would feel more respected at a school where there are far fewer 'priveleged' young people....there are plenty of community colleges around the country. His views lack coherency.
that clinton impersonation was spot-on.
HeldDerNamenslos timestamp?
HeldDerNamenslosen oh wait got it
41:53
Dad had a colonestomy. You start to learn the minute you are born.
"What have the Romans ever done for us?"--- Monty Pythons ' Life of Brian "
Actually, not to be a douche Prof, but, *we are a democracy*. We fit the definition, the description and the concept. A republic is a form of democracy. Sorry, I'm not an expert but as far as I know, factual.
You just disproved yourself and proved what he said. You wrote: "*we are a democracy* and "A republic is a form of democracy." Exactly. America is a republic, which, yes, is a democracy. "Republic" is the form that U.S. democracy takes.
Yes, he's a good speaker and (it appears) an expert, but for someone who touts humility, I find that he lacks it. He has *many* peers who weren't so surprised about Trump (or Flynn), but as far as I can tell, he hadn't been paying much attention to them. Also, as for WaPo... well, I'd trust it over RT and (absolutely) over Info Wars, but I find him too quick to disregard the conflict of interest that arises from it being owned by the richest man on the planet.
Opinions and expertise are not the same.
Actually, I'd eat a cheeseburger for breakfast if you don't include the bun. Nutrition science is fake news.
Nutrition science is notorious for being bunch of bullshit. The worst part is that the public once assumed it could at least trust the large, prestigious studies on nutrition. In the last 20 years, we've come to learn the alcohol, corn, sugar and dairy industries paid for flawed research that made these guys a lot of money.
This guy is a propaganda expert, that's for sure.
what's your expertise to speak about expertise~? an epistemologist? a sociologist of knowledge?
He was a 5-time Jeopardy "champion". He won't let anyone forget.
No, it's exactly the opposite. now
Academia is full of lies and A.I. answers public's questions better and less biased.