Can We Overcome the “Death of Expertise”?

Last fall, NFL quarterback Aaron Rogers caused quite a stir over his COVID vaccination status. When asked about it the previous August, he’d responded, “Yeah, I’ve been immunized,” implying that he’d been vaccinated. But now it came out that he’d contracted COVID-19, and he clarified that he hadn’t been vaccinated but had instead “immunized” himself through hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, two unproven COVID treatments.

I shared others’ indignation over this news. In refusing vaccination, Rodgers had acted irresponsibly toward his team and others around him, not to mention the legions of fans who saw him as a role model. I was particularly put off by his dishonesty—he had lied by omission.

But what interested me most was the way Rogers justified his actions. He said repeatedly that he’d consulted podcaster Joe Rogan in deciding whether to get vaccinated, which I found aggravating—Rogan is no more a COVID expert than Rodgers. And he tied the situation to concepts like freedom of speech and civility, which I’d been writing and thinking about.

Rogers seemed to think that refusing to get vaccinated demonstrated his own freedom of thought. He seemed to view the vaccinated as sheep, blindly following authorities’ advice, while vaccine skeptics were the true thinkers who freed themselves from such blindness.

In a January interview with ESPN’s Kevin Van Valkenburg, Rodgers said:

We isolate ourselves into these echo chambers where we’re only going to listen to things or read things or watch things that confirm our initial thoughts about things. That’s no way to grow; that just keeps us divided even more…

[I]f you want to be an open-minded person, you should hear both sides… I read stuff on the vaccine-hesitancy side, and I read stuff on the vaccines-are-the-greatest-thing-in-the-world side.

When you censor and make pariahs out of anybody who questions what you believe in or what the mainstream narrative is, that doesn’t make any sense.

I agree with much of that.

But Rodgers is missing something fundamental here, as are so many others who advocate for freedom of speech. That something is this: freedom of speech is pointless if you have trouble discerning which speech is true.

Yes, it’s good to listen to both sides of a debate, and on many issues, both sides have valuable things to say. But on matters of data and science, if one side is made up of credentialed experts who are respected in their field and the other is made up of pundits, internet personalities, and others who lack expertise, it’s crucial to give more weight to the former group’s opinions and statements. Otherwise, freedom of speech backfires, creating false equivalencies that delude instead of enlightening.

This is where Rodgers and so many others have got it wrong.

In 2017, international affairs expert Thomas M. Nichols articulated the problem in his bestseller The Death of Expertise.

Expertise, Nichols explains, is formal training and credentials that “help the rest of us separate hobbyists (or charlatans) from true experts.” The “death of expertise” is the erosion of public trust in that expert knowledge—a trend that’s endangering modern civilization.

In order to function well, a country needs its policymakers to consult with experts so they can make informed decisions. But if the public doesn’t trust experts, they’ll choose policymakers who don’t either. That leads to bad information, bad decisions, and general dysfunction.

People ignore climate change because they listen to non-experts who declare it a hoax. They fail to heed public health advice on vaccines and masks. They listen to “both sides,” not realizing that on some topics, one “side” knows far more than the other.

What’s causing the death of expertise? Nichols describes a perfect storm of problematic trends. The internet presents us all with too many facts to sift through, and it gives us the mistaken impression that our “research” is as valuable as expertise. The insistence that everyone get a college degree has led to a proliferation of “faux universities” that dilute the very meaning of such a degree. And the “boutique” university culture means that even elite schools are often selling an experience as much as an education, turning students (and parents) into demanding, coddled consumers rather than scholars who respect professors’ wisdom.

Another source, Nichols says, is a growing societal discomfort with authority and merit-based hierarchy. Respect for expertise means not always respecting all opinions. Rather, we need to recognize that some opinions carry more weight than others—that some people are simply smarter, more talented, and/or more educated, and some educations are more rigorous than others. All people might be created equal, but all opinions are not.

Nichols doesn’t clearly articulate how to solve this problem. But ultimately, he says we need a better-educated populace with a renewed respect for expertise.

If Aaron Rodgers had had that respect, he wouldn’t have been so confused about whether he was “immunized.”

Nichols’s book was published in 2017, so he probably wrote it in 2016, before Trump was elected. But in 2018, journalist Jonathan Rauch echoed Nichols’s thoughts in a brilliant article called “The Constitution of Knowledge,” and he took direct aim at Trump.

While respect for expertise was already on the decline when Trump was elected, Rauch argues that his presidency ratcheted the problem up to a whole new level.

The fact is that President Trump lies not only prolifically and shamelessly, but in a different way than previous presidents and national politicians. They may spin the truth, bend it, or break it, but they pay homage to it and regard it as a boundary. Trump’s approach is entirely different. It was no coincidence that one of his first actions after taking the oath of office was to force his press secretary to tell a preposterous lie about the size of the inaugural crowd.…

America has faced many challenges to its political culture, but this is the first time we have seen a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood.

Rauch quotes a Washington Post article by former CIA director Michael Hayden, who says this is the first time a president has attacked “the existence or relevance of objective reality itself.”

“Objective reality” is inherently hard to define, Rauch points out. Different people have always had different beliefs and impressions of the world. Each society must therefore determine how it defines truth.

Disagreement about core issues and even core facts is inherent in human nature and essential in a free society. If unanimity on core propositions is not possible or even desirable, what is necessary to have a functional social reality? …We needn’t and can’t all agree that the same things are true, but a critical mass needs to agree on what it is we do that distinguishes truth from falsehood, and more important, on who does it.

In the distant past, defining truth was the purview of authority figures like priests and monarchs. But with the invention of the printing press and the Enlightenment that followed, reality was wrested from authoritarian control and decentralized into a “globe-spanning community of critical testers who hunt for each other’s errors.” This led gradually to “a system of rules for identifying truth: a constitution of knowledge.”

In this enlightened system, no one person determines what is fact and what is fiction, but by following the agreed-upon rules, the truth eventually becomes clear.

The rules for discerning truth are simple, says Rauch. One is free speech: “any idea can be floated.” But the other is vetting: an idea can only “join reality” after withstanding rigorous critique. Furthermore, ideas only reach the level of “knowledge” if they withstand such critiques over time.

Much of this echoes what Nichols writes. Nichols’s “expertise” is somewhat different from Rauch’s “knowledge,” but both writers are stating the need to discern between valid and invalid information. Rauch is describing the process of discernment, while Nichols is pointing out that credentialed experts are the people whose discernment should be most valued in their field.

Rauch emphasizes that the solution to the problem isn’t to limit speech, tempting as that may be.  Instead, it’s to promote a better understanding of what constitutes knowledge, so that when people hear different ideas, they’re able to tell which are best.

Anyone should be allowed to make claims, but untested, ridiculous, or disproven claims ought to be ignored.

We let alt-truth talk, but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony, or dictate the flow of public dollars. That is why we don’t mail Elvis a Social Security check, no matter how many people think he is alive.

It’s not only scientists and scholars who must follow these rules, but also other communities such as journalists and the courts— “all evidence-based professions that require competing hypotheses to be tested and justified.”

What’s dangerous about President Trump—and this has remained dangerous since Rauch wrote his article and since Trump stepped down—is his ability to spread lies and disinformation, and thus to undermine public trust in institutions like academia, journalism, and the courts. While in the past, conspiracy theorists and trolls were largely ignored, Rauch points out that “there is just no way to marginalize an American president.”

Because he was president, Trump’s falsehoods automatically gained credibility. And by presenting the public with a barrage of lies, Trump created the impression that it was impossible to determine the actual truth—and thus that no objective truth existed.

Trolls like Trump can’t compete with the constitution of knowledge, Rauch says. They don’t have the credentials. But what they can dangerously do is undermine public trust in expertise by creating such a torrent of disinformation that it’s impossible for laypeople to decipher what’s true. This makes many people throw up their hands and retreat from the public sphere.

Nichols, too, asserts that the “death of expertise” alienates the public, who become so overwhelmed that they disengage from politics and policy.  And Rauch’s solution is similar to Nichols’s: not to curb freedom of speech, but to better educate the populace about what constitutes knowledge.

In January this year, when Aaron Rodgers’ unvaxxed status was still making news, Rauch followed up on that 2018 article with a New York Times piece co-written with Peter Wehner: “What’s been happening on the left is no excuse for what’s been happening on the right.”

There is disturbing illiberalism on the left, Rauch and Wehner write. As I described in previous posts, too many progressives refuse to tolerate views that differ from their own, and because they won’t tolerate them, they often don’t understand them. Their intolerance leads to liberal cancel culture and a rejection of basic democratic ideals like civility and freedom of speech.

The left’s main illiberal tendencies might be described as a failure of civility.

But Rauch and Wehner, who are both conservative, say it’s the right’s illiberalism that poses the greatest threat to our country.

Yet…the threat from the illiberal right is more immediate and more dangerous. If that wasn’t clear before the last presidential election and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it should be clear now.

Trump, unlike all presidents before him, tried to overturn an election—and the Republican Party has continued to support him.

Republicans are shattering faith in the integrity of our elections and abandoning their commitment to the peaceful transfer of power — the minimum commitment required for democracy to work. This is an unforgivable civic sin, but it hardly exhausts the lists of concerns…

Around the country, Republican officials who defend the election and count votes honestly have been threatened and have needed to leave their homes or live under guard…

Intimidating election officials, lying about elections and storming the Capitol are not actions promoted among mainstream Democrats.

These are alarming, undemocratic trends, and on the surface, their cause might seem to be simply a disrespect for democratic norms and a troubling GOP shift towards authoritarianism. But it’s not quite so simple. The insurgents who stormed the Capitol, and the leaders and followers who threatened election officials, mostly thought they were trying to save democracy, not end it. They believed the election had been stolen—after all, President Trump said it had been. They saw themselves as patriots.

Authoritarianism wasn’t the only cause of their behavior. Confusion, too, played a key role. Their confusion stemmed from the right’s most troubling illiberal tendency: what might be called a failure of knowledge.

In recent years, too few conservatives have been able to differentiate between fact and fiction about several highly politicized topics. The result is a misinformed conservative movement that endangers the rest of us by mistaking authoritarianism for democracy, refusing to participate in basic public health efforts, and ignoring the very real threat of climate change.

Why has American conservatism departed so starkly from expertise and knowledge on these subjects? Conservatism isn’t inherently anti-science. Studies have shown liberals and conservatives to be equally likely to reject science or believe in conspiracy theories, and back in the 1970s, conservatives were more likely than liberals to trust in science.

And the right’s failure of knowledge isn’t due to lack of intelligence, either. Belief in false information doesn’t correlate with IQ, or at least, not when it comes to highly complex topics. One study, for instance, showed that participants who were smarter or more skilled at math were actually more likely to exhibit biases in interpreting scientific information. Rather than using their intelligence and skills to ascertain the truth, they instead used these advantages to shore up their own rationalizations for their false beliefs! (As several researchers wrote in a Washington Post article on conspiracy theories: “The implication is that people use data like drunks use lampposts: more for support than illumination.”)

But as Ezra Klein argued in 2014, although liberals and conservatives are equally biased about science at the individual level, the Democratic Party has proven better than the GOP at “checking its worst impulses” at the national level. There is no Democratic equivalent of climate denial.

A 2021 Scientific American article about vaccine hesitancy posits that the problem has stemmed from GOP leadership.

[W]hy do so many Republicans distrust government, including government science, and think scientists are “always getting it wrong”? A large part of the answer is that this is what the party’s spokespeople have been saying for 40 years, from the early days of acid rain to our ongoing debates about climate change. It was [Republican pollster Frank] Luntz himself who, more than 20 years ago, designed the Republican party’s strategy to fight climate change by insisting there was no scientific consensus on the issue. It has mostly been Republican governors resisting mask mandates, even when science showed they slowed the spread of COVID-19. And it was, by and large, Republican governors lifting those mandates in the spring, even while Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, begged them not to.

I think this problem with GOP leadership relates to various other factors. Republicans tend to be regulation-averse on most issues, and when it comes to climate change and vaccines, that largely explains their resistance to government intervention and mandates. There’s also the problem of corporate influence in politics: business lobbyists spread disinformation that conflicts with scientific findings, and too many politicians are under those lobbyists’ sway. And of course, the death of expertise plays a role—politicians have trouble distinguishing experts from charlatans, and they confuse lobbyists’ and pundits’ info for true expertise.

Political polarization exacerbates all of these problems. When we’re alienated from everyone but the people who think like us, it’s much harder to know when our own side is lying to us.

The death of expertise is an insidious form of illiberalism—a form that affects everyone, but that’s become especially strong on the right. On the surface, GOP leaders can tout ideals like freedom of speech and civility, as Aaron Rodgers also did. But meanwhile, many of those same leaders have been eroding the very purpose behind those ideals: the public’s ability to make well-informed decisions about important issues.

When we devalue expertise, science, and facts, the whole concept of truth loses meaning. Reasoned debate becomes impossible. The free and open exchange of ideas becomes pointless.