The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters 1st Edition by Thomas M. Nichols (PDF)

Description

Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. 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: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: 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, among other reasons. 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. 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. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death ofExpertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review Selected as an Amazon Best Nonfiction Books of 2017. Named one of Politico’s Top 50 2017 Shortlisted for Physics World’s Book of the Year 2017. “Nichols expands his 2014 article published by The Federalist with a highly researched and impassioned book that’s well timed for this post-election period. Strongly researched textbook for laymen will have many political and news junkies nodding their heads in agreement.” — Publishers Weekly host of reasons. Here is a book that not only acknowledges this reality, but takes it head on. Persuasive and well-written, The Death of Expertise is exactly the book needed for our times.” — Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group “Americans are indifferent to real journalism in forming their opinions, hoaxes prove harder to kill than a slasher-flick monster, and the word ‘academic’ is often hurled like a nasty epithet. Tom Nichols has put his finger on what binds these trends together: positive hostility to established knowledge. The Death of Expertise is trying to turn back this tide.” — Dan Murphy, former Middle East and Southeast Asia Bureau Chief, The Christian Science Monitor “Tom Nichols has written a brilliant, timely, and very original book. He shows how the digital revolution, social media, and the internet has helped to foster a cult of ignorance. Nichols makes a compelling case for reason and rationality in our public and political discourse.” — Robert J. Lieber, Georgetown University, and author of Retreat and Its Consequences “Tom Nichols does a breathtakingly detailed job in scrutinizing the American consumer’s refutation of traditional expertise. In the era of escapism and denial, he offers a refreshing and timely book on how we balance our skepticism with trust going forward.” — Salena Zito, national political reporter for The Washington Examiner, CNN, The New York Post, and RealClearPolitics “Timely useful…in providing an overview of just how we arrived at this distressing state of affairs.” — New York Times “This may sound like a rant you have heard before, but Nichols has a sense of humour and chooses his examples well. His anger is a lot more attractive than the standard condescension.” — Financial Times “A genial guide through the wilderness of ignorance.” — Kirkus Reviews “Nichols is a forceful and sometimes mordant commentator, with an eye for the apt analogy.” — Inside Higher Education “Excellent…makes important points and offers valuable insight, particularly when it comes to the role of the internet and social media in our political environment…essential reading for anyone interested in this pressing subject.” — The Washington Post “This may sound like a rant you have heard before, but Nichols has a sense of humour and chooses his examples well. His anger is a lot more attractive than the standard condescension. The tricky bit, of course, is what to do about this mess. Here, Nichols can say little more than what sensible people always have. Citizens – now so proudly ill-informed that they cannot even make use of expert opinion in fulfilling their civic role – must rediscover a sense of responsibility. ” — Financial Times “Nichols’ perspective is an essential one if we are to begin digging ourselves out of the hole we find ourselves in.” — NPR “Makes a powerful and compelling argument.” — PennLive “If you’re looking for last-minute holiday gift ideas, Nichols’s The Death of Expertise is one of my favorite books of 2017.” — John Gruber, Daring Fireball “Extremely timely…for those wary of being at the mercy of the ignorant and ill-informed and their “enablers,” these are troubleing times. But Nichols concludes his book on a surprisingly optimistic note. Let’s hope he’s right.” — Toronto Star “Highly readable and entertaining.” — Weekly Standard “Tom Nichols is fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of those dangerous people who actually know what they are talking about. In a compelling, and often witty, polemic, he explores why experts are routinely disregarded and what might be done to get authoritative knowledge taken more seriously.” — Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King’s College London, and author of Strategy About the Author Tom Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School, and a former aide in the U.S. Senate. He is also the author of several works on foreign policy and international security affairs, including The Sacred Cause, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War, and The Russian Presidency.He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, and as one of the all-time top players of the game, he was invited back to play in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions. Nichols’ website is tomnichols.net and he can be found on Twitter at @RadioFreeTom.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is not a book on apologetics. The only apologist you will find referenced is the general wisdom of C.S. Lewis. Still, this is a book that is going to be very helpful for apologists. This is a book that addresses many of the issues that we experience in the field.Nichols is sounding an alarm that expertise is no longer being heeded. There are many factors that contribute to this. Some of us will be quick to say “The internet” and be partially right. The internet is not the sole contributor to this, though it definitely plays a part in all that we’re seeing.The first chapter is on the relationship of citizens and experts. Citizens no longer seem to care about what experts say. They will say one thing that experts were wrong on and then take some medicine for a headache that is the result of expert analysis. Our society has become one that rightly decries elitism, but then sees any idea that someone knows more than someone else on a subject as elitism. We are a society where all truth claims are to be treated as equal. Even worse, to disagree with a truth claim is to attack the person.When the people do not heed the words of experts, every man becomes an island unto himself. Each person is in it for their own good. This also works with the narcissism of our age. We have become so individualistic, that it is tempting to think that we’re the center of the story.This gets us into how it is hard to converse today. The #1 response to a question today has become something along the lines of “Let me Google that for you.” If we used this properly, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with using Google to look up a basic fact that isn’t controversial, such as when did the Battle of Bunker Hill take place? Just recently I was at an event where a speaker said that Moses Maimonides was forced to do a debate by King James of Aragon I. Okay. Why not look that up? I quickly saw that Maimonides was dead before King James was even born. This is a proper use of Google if we do it right.The improper use is thinking that the first website you come across is the one that you should listen to. There will be more on this later, but in this case, it becomes harder and harder to talk to people. Everyone thinks they’re an expert because they can look something up on Google. Having my chief area of expertise be in the New Testament, I can say at this two words come to mind immediately. Jesus Mythicism. I still remember someone on a news page discussing a story telling me that scholars aren’t even sure that Jesus existed. This was news to me seeing as I actually do read the scholars in the field and know that this is a minority position. When I was on the Atheist Analysis show, there was a lot of shock in the crowd when I said how few of scholars are mythicists. I was offered the number of 8% and said to go lower. 3 wasn’t enough either. I think I said somewhere around .0001%.Of course, the solution to this is to get an education. Well, maybe not. Sadly, our educational institutions are often just participating in groupthink. Many students today just walk away thinking what their professors think. In my study of the Bible and New Testament, both major schools I have personally attended, I have fundamentally disagreed with on some issues of NT interpretation. When some people would tell me I’m just arguing what my professors taught me, I would reply that in many cases, I disagreed with some central claims. That’s okay.Sadly, many colleges have become day care facilities with students being shown what is the most entertaining aspect of their stay. Too many students are going to go to college and just party and sleep around and think they’re getting the college life. At my own Bible College where I graduated from, I have often gone back and talked with the professors who always thoroughly enjoy the reunion. One told me about seeing a student on campus during the summer and asked, “What are you reading now?” Reply? “Nothing.” I find this stunning as the kids are seeing learning as the punishment and fun as the goal.This is not to bash entertainment of course. We all must have some leisure times. You can often find my wife and I watching one of our recorded programs and when we do, it’s not uncommon for me to have a Nintendo 2DS out at the same time. Gaming has always been a part of my life, but it’s not the reason why I live either.One example of what’s going wrong on our campuses is the concept of safe places. We have seen lately colleges wanting to ban someone of a more conservative leaning and having to have places where their views are not challenged. What are they thinking? College is about challenging your views. You come there to learn, not just stay entrenched in your own opinion.The result is someone could leave college without being educated but instead being indoctrinated. They will get their degree and never do any more reading or serious work. For my part, I find this bizarre. Even with the degree I have, I have never stopped looking into the field I study so much so that when I have scholars on my own show, it’s quite easy to converse with them.Well, what about the internet? Here we come to a real kicker. The problem with the internet is while it was meant to share our knowledge, more often, we are sharing our ignorance. Anyone can set up a website and be seen as an authority. We also now with self-publishing have it that anyone can get a book out there. Of course, there’s good material out there (I happen to think my own website and Ebooks are good material), but one has to learn to discern. The problem is anyone with a website can look like an expert.This is especially prevalent with conspiracy theories. I have already mentioned Jesus Mythicism as a conspiracy theory for atheists. You can find rumors about the Illuminati and about Reptilians and everything else online. The problem is that many people don’t possess the basic tools to know how to analyze this information and see if it stands up or not.With our narcissism, someone who can Google thinks they can disprove easily someone who reads the scholarly material. They end up thinking they’re brilliant arguers when anyone who reads the material is just shaking their head in disbelief. Those who are ignorant are able to find others who are just as ignorant and join together and build up one another. Getting a lot of likes on their posts doesn’t really help matters out.Search engines will also tend to go where you have gone before as well. In other words, you get in an echo chamber. They use your past history of looking in order to determine sites that will be relevant to you. Rarely do people look and see if these are really authoritative sites. Think for instance of the people who often diagnose themselves entirely based on the internet and then argue with their doctor about it. Sure, the layman can be right sometimes, but all things being equal, go with the doctor.Also, Nichols has a long section on Wikipedia. He points out that most Wikipedia editors are also male which limits our perspective. Wikipedia will have plenty of information on the Kardashians, but not information on political strife in some African countries for instance. It is a fine example of our compound ignorance coming together.At least we have the press to set matters straight, or do we? The press is nowadays often just as gullible and part of the problem is we have so much information coming out at once that everyone is in a rush to be the first to get the news out. This means a lack of fact-checking. From my own perspective, I am a conservative in politics, but I have seen many conservative news sites royally butcher claims and many of them I consider just outright unreliable.I have reached the point of letting my own family know when they send me something false, and in the past that often involved having to send out a group email. Many of our media outlets are doing the same kind of thing with sharing something just because it agrees with them. Fact-checking is not going on as much as it could be.But alas, sometimes experts are wrong. What do we do then? A layman can indeed demonstrate an expert is wrong, but an expert being wrong once doesn’t mean all expert opinion is to be denied. Experts are humans like everyone else and they will make mistakes. Fortunately, other experts will often be there to help point out those mistakes.It’s also necessary to point out that expertise in one area doesn’t equal expertise in all. Richard Dawkins is a fine source I’m sure to quote on evolution. He is not fine on New Testament or philosophy. Gary Habermas is just fine on history, but he is not fine on discussing evolution.In the end, Nichols’s book is a call to return to learning. Hopefully it will be heeded as our society has more access to knowledge than ever before, but we are quite likely dumber than ever before. All the learning in the world doesn’t matter if it is not approached properly. An attitude of humility would go a long way towards helping people learn.In Christ,Nick PetersDeeper Waters Apologetics

⭐Although it was written in 2017, one would be hard-pressed to find a more timely book. In the midst of a pandemic where the tension between medical experts, political leaders, and the citizenry is palpable, this treatise couldn’t be more pertinent. We have Fox News and its followers accusing Dr. Fauci of being an “unelected dictator” who is setting policy for the rest of us to follow when the truth is that he is only an adviser. He is what Nichols refers to as a “Knower.” Trump is the “Decider.”“Experts can only propose; elected leaders dispose. In fact, policymaking experts and elected leaders are almost never the same group, and it cannot be otherwise: there are simply not enough hours in the day for a legislator, even in a city council or a small US state (and much less for a president) to master all of the issues modern policymaking requires. This is why policymakers engage experts—the knowers—to advise them.”“When the public no longer makes a distinction between experts and policymakers and merely wants to blame everyone in the policy world for outcomes that distress them, the eventual result will not be better policy but more politicization of expertise. Politicians will never stop relying on experts; they will, however, move to relying on experts who will tell them—and the angry laypeople banging on their office doors—whatever it is they want to hear.”Nichols pedigree is impressive. He has a “bachelor’s degree from Boston University; a master’s from Columbia University; and a doctorate from Georgetown University.” He’s “an academic specialist on international affairs, currently a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School. His work deals with issues involving Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs. He was previously a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.”The following excerpts present the essential problem addressed by the book:“The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance.”“Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.”“No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”“We no longer have…principled and informed arguments. The foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of ‘uninformed,’ passed ‘misinformed’ on the way down, and is now plummeting to ‘aggressively wrong.’ People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.”“Experts are derided as elitists, one of many groups putatively oppressing ‘we the people,’ a term now used by voters indiscriminately and mostly to mean ‘me.’ Expert advice or any kind of informed deliberation by anyone whom laypeople perceive as an elite—which is to say almost everyone but themselves—is rejected as a matter of first principles. No democracy can go on this way.”“Most causes of ignorance can be overcome, if people are willing to learn. Nothing, however, can overcome the toxic confluence of arrogance, narcissism, and cynicism that Americans now wear like full suit of armor against the efforts of experts and professionals.”Nichols goes on to address what he sees as the major contributing factors to our current dilemma; a failure of our educational systems (treating students as intellectual equals and clients who need to be affirmed and satisfied, and as a byproduct, failing to teach critical reasoning skills); instant access to knowledge without understanding through the internet; the internet providing an illusion of equal legitimacy for both professional journalism and anyone with web access; a growing trend towards mistaking political equality for actual equality; confirmation bias; and The Dunning-Kruger Effect.“The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.”“Confirmation bias makes attempts at reasoned argument exhausting because it produces arguments and theories that are nonfalsifiable. It is the nature of confirmation bias itself to dismiss all contradictory evidence as irrelevant, and so my evidence is always the rule, your evidence is always a mistake or an exception. It’s impossible to argue with this kind of explanation, because by definition it’s never wrong. An additional problem here is that most laypeople have never been taught, or they have forgotten, the basics of the ‘scientific method.’ This is the set of steps that lead from a general question to a hypothesis, testing, and analysis.”“Every single vote in a democracy is equal to every other, but every single opinion is not”“When democracy is understood as an unending demand for unearned respect for unfounded opinions, anything and everything becomes possible, including the end of democracy and republican government itself.”“Websites that are outlets for political movements, or other, even worse enterprises that cater specifically to zealots or fools, will do more harm than good in the search for accurate information. Instead, ask yourself questions when consuming media. Who are these writers? Do they have editors? Is this a journal or newspaper that stands by its reporting, or is it part of a political operation? Are their claims checkable, or have other media tried to verify or disprove their stories?”“In a democracy, this level of cynicism about the media is poisonous. All citizens, including experts, need news. Journalists relay events and developments in the world around us, providing a reservoir of facts we use as the raw material for many of our own opinions, views, and beliefs. We have to rely on their judgment and their objectivity, because their reports are usually the first encounter the rest of us have with previously unknown events or facts. Around the world, journalists do their job amazingly well, often at risk to their own lives. And yet the majority of Americans distrust the information they provide.”“Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.”“The most important of these intellectual capabilities, and the one most under attack in American universities, is critical thinking: the ability to examine new information and competing ideas dispassionately, logically, and without emotional or personal preconceptions.”“When we are incapable of sustaining a chain of reasoning past a few mouse clicks, we cannot tolerate even the smallest challenge to our beliefs or ideas. This is dangerous because it both undermines the role of knowledge and expertise in a modern society and corrodes the basic ability of people to get along with each other in a democracy.”“When confronted by hard evidence that they’re wrong, some people will simply double-down on their original assertion rather than accept their error. This is the ‘backfire effect,’ in which people redouble their efforts to keep their own internal narrative consistent, no matter how clear the indications that they’re wrong.”“When students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge; worse, they do not develop the habits of critical thinking that would allow them to continue to learn and to evaluate the kinds of complex issues on which they will have to deliberate and vote as citizens.”Nichols also points out how this animosity towards expertise played a pivotal role in the 2016 election:“In Trump, Americans who believe shadowy forces are ruining their lives and that any visible intellectual ability is itself a suspicious characteristic in a national leader found a champion.”“Trump’s ignorance during the campaign was willful and persistent. He had no idea how to answer even rudimentary questions about policy; rather than be shamed by his lack of knowledge, he exulted in it.”“Consider the various ways in which Trump’s campaign represented a one-man campaign against established knowledge. He was one of the original ‘birthers’ who demanded that Barack Obama prove his American citizenship. He quoted the National Enquirer approvingly as a source of news. He sided with antivaccine activism. He admitted that he gets most of his information on foreign policy from ‘the shows’ on Sunday morning television. He suggested that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died from natural causes in early 2016, might have been murdered. And he charged that the father of one of his opponents (Ted Cruz) was involved in the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”Nichols’ speculation as to what it may take to resolve our bias has proved eerily accurate:“Tragically, I suspect that a possible resolution will lie in a disaster as yet unforeseen. It may be a war or an economic collapse. (Here, I mean a major war that touches America even more deeply than the far-away conflicts fought by brave volunteers, or a real depression, rather than the recession of the early twenty-first century.) It may be in the emergence of an ignorant demagoguery, a process already underway in the United States and Europe, or the rise to power of a technocracy that finally runs out of patience and thus dispenses with voting as anything other than a formality.”Despite the fact that Nichols would undoubtedly dismiss me (someone who never completed their bachelors much less any graduate degree) as an ignorant layman, I agree with his findings. I think he has identified many of the contributing issues to our current epistemological crisis. However, I’m not sure that the factors that have brought us here can be clearly quantified.The book itself is an expansion on an essay that Nichols wrote previously. And I have to confess, the best chapters are the first ones and the last. Much of the text in between is repetitive and the issue would probably have been more impactful if it had been left as an essay.If you, like me, find yourself surrounded by friends and family who have gone “all in” in their support of Trump and various conspiracy theories, then I think you’ll find this book to be a balm. Allow me to leave you with two excerpts to consider:“It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them. Is that ‘elitist’? Maybe it is; maybe we have become so inclined to celebrate the authenticity of all personal conviction that it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history.”However…“No matter how much we might suffer from confirmation bias or the heavy hand of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, for example, we don’t like to tell people we know or care about that they’re wrong. (At least not to their face.)”

⭐“The Death of Expertise” by Tom Nichols is a thought-provoking book that sheds light on an important issue in today’s society. This book challenges the reader to think about the value of expertise and the impact it has on our ability to make informed decisions.One of the most striking things about this book is the way it breaks down complex ideas in a way that is easy to understand. Nichols uses clear examples and analogies to illustrate his points, making this book accessible to readers of all ages.The author argues that the decline of expertise is a major problem that is affecting society in many ways. He believes that too many people are quick to dismiss the advice and knowledge of experts, which is leading to a situation where we are less able to make informed decisions. This is a timely and important message, especially given the current political climate.One of my favorite quotes from the book is, “Expertise is not simply a matter of knowing more facts. It is, rather, the ability to think critically and creatively about a body of knowledge and to use that knowledge to solve problems.” This quote sums up the author’s view on what expertise really means and why it is so valuable.Overall, The Death of Expertise is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the importance of expertise in society. It will leave you thinking about the role that experts play in our lives and the impact that a lack of expertise can have on our ability to make informed decisions. This book is well written, insightful, and encouraging, and I highly recommend it to all.

⭐How have we come to a position where those with quantifiable experience, demonstrated expertise and hard won knowledge are no longer respected for the consideration and effort they have expended to attempt to draw high quality conclusions. Or worse than that, how have experts come to be treated by areas of the general populace as though for all the detailed analysis they have made that their views are of no higher value than that of anyone on the street who has the ability to share an opinion, often based on a thing called ‘common sense’, something which has not been scrutinised but just feels right. The outcome is that fewer people than ever appear to respect learning and expertise.This book gives the context for this growth in simplistic thinking by presenting a series of examples which outline where the lack of scrutiny and the tendency to give equal weighting to unfounded opinion has entered our daily conversation.Nichols refers to changes in the media over the last century. The growth in talk radio and the proliferation of cable TV channels and to changes in how news is delivered. How news has changed from scheduled, bulletin based news, to 24 hour rolling news, where once there would have been expert opinion. Now there is a huge amount of airtime available, people are engaged to speak who are experts in completely different fields, or not experienced in the topic area at all, with the result being that those without the skills to identify this shoddy thinking are taken along for the ride. Journalistic scrutiny is an area which is not as well practised as it was formerly. Younger, busier, more inexperienced journalists are up against fast moving schedules with a need to fill air-time with a result that the quality of their analysis is diminished or critical thinking is non-existent. Opinion is given equal weighting to that of expert analysis, something you will recognise in the UK if you listen to national talk radio where a climate change denier can be given equal credibility to that of the weight of the full scientific community, and the focus appears to be not on the disparity of the evidence between the two positions but that there is some sort of debate to be had where there should in reality be none due to the claims being demonstrably and well know to be false.The education system, particularly that of the US, also has a part to play. It isn’t that people are not educated, but that the quality of that education has been altered to meet the expectations of those paying for a ‘consumer experience’ rather than to be challenged in their belief systems. The prevailing attitude is becoming one of ‘the customer is always right’ and the outcome of that is that gaining a degree now bears more resemblance to training than education, two distinctly different concepts. An education system where critical thinking is no longer a core element of the curriculum can not be counted as being fit for purpose.Experts are also not spared from having some responsibility, however the part they play is a much more subtle one and is in part a reflection of the difficulty in expressing complexity to an audience that isn’t just ignorant of that complexity but is wilfully ignorant in the face of evidence to the contrary. Nichols makes reference to Dunning-Kruger, and the veracity of that effect can easily be witnessed on the internet, book reviews are often a give-away, although hopefully not this one…The greatest influence of all is the internet and social media. These channels allow people to quickly find information which reinforces their way of thinking, there is no critical thought, just confirmation bias in an infinite feedback loop. Any information is skimmed, assumed to be absorbed, and makes instant experts of those that have less depth of knowledge than a tea stain on the cover of a mathematical textbook.An interesting and ultimately depressing read. Although a brief skim of the internet suggests to me that there may have been moments like this throughout the entirety of history, fingers crossed hey, it’s common sense…

⭐This is an interesting book on an important subject. It discusses how advanced democracies can head blindly into dangerous cul-de-sacs where, through lack of understanding, they demolish the very things that made them great societies in the first place.It is well written but I found it rather repetitive and slow to get to the (important) point. To avoid this, I advise skipping the Preface (both of them) and moving quickly through the Introduction: it really does get thought-provoking once it gets going. The ‘Preface to the Paperback Edition’ (if you have that) works much better as an afterword (the author uses it as an update on events after the original edition) so save it for later.

⭐I agree with the author on most of the points raised. I’ve even learned some things that I was previously unaware of. However, I wish he had stayed away from actual political content. The principles of elite involvement are fine to discuss, but actualities on the ground mean that sometimes the elite point of view is the wrong one, especially for democratic reasons. Should an institution be protected merely because it services the desires of elites? If we are to accept the expertise of the elites then of course it should. Slight conflict of interest there.

⭐Tom Nichols makes a number of interesting remarks in this book. For instance, he reports an opinion poll in the USA (in 2014) showing that it was those who knew the least who showed the greatest enthusiasm for a possible military intervention in Ukraine. In chapter 6 Brexit and the election of President Trump are discussed. During the Brexit debate Michel Gove famously said: “I think people in this country have had enough of experts”. Tom Nichols conclude that politically we are all equal, we all have one vote. But when assessing opinions on the internet, we are not all equals, some opinions are worthy of greater consideration. Of course ”experts” can sometimes be wrong, but it would just be foolish not to take into account the reliability and expertise of any information or opinion sources.

⭐An excellent read. Science has made our western civilisation strong and resilient and the book exposes those who would break this structure down by a mixture of crass ignorance and a mischievous adherence to unscientific political stances and ideology. Our civilisation ignores measured, tried and tested, scientific findings at its peril

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