The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong. Good singers know when they’ve hit a sour note; good directors know when a scene in a play isn’t working; good marketers know when an ad campaign is going to be a flop. Their less competent counterparts, by comparison, have no such ability. They think they’re doing a great job.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb. Dunning and Kruger more gently label such people as “unskilled” or “incompetent.” But that doesn’t change their central finding: “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wilting under a barrage of perfectly reasonable questions in 2011, clearly didn’t know what was in the ACA either, and she blurted out her widely quoted admission that the Congress would have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.

Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult. And to refuse to acknowledge all views as worthy of consideration, no matter how fantastic or inane they are, is to be closed-minded.

Raise the issue of medical advice, for example, and you will almost certainly find someone who will throw out the word “thalidomide” as though it is a self-explanatory rejoinder. It’s been decades since the introduction of thalidomide, a drug once thought safe that was given to pregnant women as a sedative. No one realized at the time that thalidomide also caused horrendous birth defects, and pictures of children with missing or deformed limbs haunted the public imagination for many years afterward. The drug’s name has become synonymous with expert failure to this day.
No one is arguing, however, that experts can’t be wrong (a subject we’ll discuss in this book). Rather, the point is that they are less likely to be wrong than nonexperts.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Isaac Asimov

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.

Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.

Every single vote in a democracy is equal to every other, but every single opinion is not

How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?