The Death of Expertise

Have you ever caught yourself Googling an issue, scrolling for twenty minutes, and walking away feeling like you suddenly knew as much as the experts? In The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols argues that this false sense of confidence isn’t just annoying—it’s become a civic crisis. He contends that society’s rejection of professional knowledge is eroding trust, conversation, and even the democratic foundations that depend on informed citizens. Americans, he says, are not just uninformed—they are increasingly proud of their ignorance, equating every opinion, however baseless, with facts discovered through rigorous study.

Nichols asks why this happens at a time when information is more abundant than ever. He examines a paradox: though we live in the Information Age, we are experiencing a collapse of the very idea that expertise matters. Everyone with a smartphone feels as qualified as doctors, scientists, journalists, or foreign policy analysts. This, Nichols insists, undermines rational discourse and weakens democracy itself, turning political debate into a noisy, angry free-for-all where no one can admit they’re wrong.

Ignorance as Virtue

According to Nichols, Americans have not simply lost respect for experts; they have turned ignorance into a badge of honor. In earlier times, citizens doubted intellectuals but still respected professional competence—pilots fly airplanes, doctors treat illnesses, engineers build bridges. Today, many people mistake opinions for reality and interpret expert disagreement as proof that all knowledge is relative. Nichols likens this to a new Declaration of Independence: instead of "all men are created equal," citizens act as though all ideas are equal, including ones demonstrably false.

The Internet’s Double-Edged Sword

Digital life fuels this illusion. Search engines deliver millions of results instantly, obliterating the sense that learning requires patience, context, and humility. Nichols shows how the endless stream of posts, tweets, and blogs turns debates into confirmation battles rather than genuine searches for truth. We click until we find something that validates what we already believe, mistaking access to data for understanding. The Internet, he writes, produces opinionated pseudo-experts who value immediacy over insight—a dynamic that intensifies polarization and rage.

Education and the Customer Mindset

Higher education should teach critical thinking, but Nichols argues that universities have become commercial businesses where students act as customers and professors become service providers. This erodes authority and trains young adults to assume that being offended is proof they’re right. He fears colleges now reinforce narcissism instead of curiosity, creating graduates who leave with inflated self-confidence and little capacity for self-critique. When those graduates face complexity in the real world, they often lash out at experts who challenge their opinions.

Why It Matters

In a democracy, citizens must learn enough to evaluate policy and elect responsible leaders. Yet Nichols warns that uninformed voters create a vacuum filled by technocrats or demagogues. Either experts seize power without accountability, or populists exploit ignorance by promising easy answers. Both paths lead away from democratic balance. The antidote, he insists, is humility: citizens must accept that expertise earns respect through study, experience, and evidence—not charisma or certainty. Experts, likewise, must engage people honestly and admit their own fallibility.

Nichols’s challenge is both moral and civic. He doesn’t call for worshiping intellectuals; he calls for dialogue grounded in trust, facts, and logic. By the end of the book, you see his argument as more than a lament for lost manners—it’s a warning that rejecting expertise is not only irrational, but a threat to the survival of informed self-government.

Nichols opens by describing the uneasy relationship between experts and nonexperts. We all depend on specialists—mechanics, nurses, engineers—but now many ordinary people think they can do those jobs without training. As Nichols jokes, no one objects when pilots fly planes or surgeons perform operations, yet those same people dismiss economists or epidemiologists as irrelevant. He calls this rebellion against learning one of the defining features of modern American life.

Why We Distrust Experts

Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in America’s democratic culture. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that Americans trust their own reason above authority, assuming all citizens are equally capable. Nichols agrees that healthy skepticism is vital—but notes we’ve crossed into hostility. People now assume experts are wrong by virtue of being experts. This animosity replaced the excessive deference of the mid–20th century with contempt bred by populism, the Internet, and political polarization.

The Rise of the “Explainers”

Nichols humorously portrays today’s “explainers”—neighbors or friends convinced they know more than professionals. In an era of constant information, these self-taught commentators bombard experts with pseudo-facts. He recounts talking with people who lectured him about Cold War arms control despite lacking even basic geography. Over time, he noticed the same arrogance among patients contradicting doctors, clients overruling lawyers, and parents disputing teachers. What once was quirky overconfidence has turned into widespread rage against expertise.

The Danger of False Equality

Democracy guarantees equal rights, not equal knowledge. But many Americans now treat every opinion as measurable against evidence. Nichols calls this “the new Declaration of Independence”—a belief that all truths are self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. This false equality undermines professional authority and rational debate. When everyone insists they’re the smartest person in the room, ignorance ceases to be amusing; it becomes dangerous, especially in politics or medicine.

Nichols warns that society cannot function if citizens refuse to trust expertise. Cooperation depends on dividing labor: specialists handle complex tasks so others don’t have to master everything. If this balance collapses, we lose not only efficiency but shared reality itself. To restore respect, he urges both sides to reconnect—the expert must listen humbly, and the citizen must argue from facts instead of ego.

If you’ve ever felt discussions online or around the table turning into endless loops of contradiction, you understand Nichols’s second major argument: modern conversation is broken. People no longer debate to learn—they argue to win. From social media fights to political panels, discussions spiral into hostility because emotional attachment outweighs reason. Nichols explains why reasoning fails under pressure and how cognitive biases make dialogue nearly impossible.

Biases That Blind Us

Our brains prefer comfort over truth. Nichols highlights two major culprits: the Dunning–Kruger Effect and confirmation bias. The first means the less you know, the more confident you feel. People who are uninformed don’t realize they’re incompetent, so they overestimate their understanding. Second, confirmation bias pushes us to seek evidence that proves our preexisting beliefs. These biases make people double down even when proven wrong—what psychologists call the “backfire effect.”

When Facts Fail

Nichols uses colorful examples: from conspiracy theorists who dismiss evidence as part of a cover-up to patients who reject doctors’ diagnoses. Logic rarely works against emotional conviction. People remember exceptions, feel personally attacked when corrected, and confuse disagreement with disrespect. Conversation then becomes exhausting not because people lack intelligence but because they protect their self-image. Nichols observes that Americans treat correction as insult and use “agree to disagree” as a reflex escape from responsibility.

Politeness and Equality Bias

Ironically, even intelligent individuals contribute to this chaos by being too polite. Research Nichols cites shows that people defer to others even when they know better, creating an “equality bias.” This social instinct—to avoid appearing arrogant—leads capable individuals to treat incorrect views as equally valid. The result is a false democracy of ideas where every statement, no matter how absurd, demands respect. Over time, we lose touch with reality because emotional comfort outweighs truth testing.

For Nichols, healthy argument should resemble scientific inquiry: a search for weaknesses, not affirmation. But modern culture prioritizes feelings over critical thought. The more narcissistic society becomes, the harder it gets to change minds. His prescription is humility—recognizing that being wrong is part of learning and that disagreement is not insult but opportunity.

Nichols’s exploration of higher education reveals a troubling twist: college, once meant to teach critical thinking and intellectual humility, now encourages arrogance. Students, treated as customers, believe fees guarantee success and comfort. Professors, in turn, hesitate to challenge clients who can tank their evaluations. The result is campuses that produce confidence without competence—a generation that confuses self-esteem with expertise.

College as Commodity

Before World War II, college was rare and elite. Today, it’s mass-market. Nichols argues this democratization, while good in principle, diluted standards: universities compete for tuition by flattering rather than training students. They offer luxury dorms and flexible grades but little discipline. As he puts it, institutions now market “the experience of going to college” instead of the education itself. Students expect professors to cater to them rather than challenge their thinking.

Grade Inflation and Entitlement

Nichols cites studies showing that As have become the most common grade nationwide. Failure hardly exists; everyone is “above average.” This inflation breeds entitlement—students equate grades with respect and demand validation instead of mastery. Professors who resist risk poor evaluations or administrative reprimand. Universities serving paying clients aren’t eager to hear about “hard truths.” Nichols calls this academically disastrous but economically rational behavior.

Safe Spaces and Fragility

Nichols also condemns campus culture’s obsession with comfort. “Safe spaces” meant to protect students from emotional distress now shield them from intellectual discomfort. He recounts incidents at Yale and the University of Missouri where outrage silenced faculty. Students demanded homes, not intellectual spaces, reducing education to therapy. This, he warns, teaches young adults to reject complexity in favor of emotional validation—a habit that later manifests as hostility toward expert correction.

Education should train citizens capable of reasoning in democracy. Nichols argues universities have the opposite effect—they mass-produce narcissistic consumers of learning. To fix this, schools must treat intellectual challenge as a gift, not a threat. Professors, he says, must reclaim authority, and students must relearn humility, or the line between opinion and knowledge will vanish completely.

Nichols perfectly captures the paradox of the digital age: we drown in information yet starve for understanding. The Internet makes knowledge instantaneous, but speed destroys depth. He invokes Theodore Sturgeon’s Law—“90% of everything is crap”—to illustrate that the enormous flood of online data buries the valuable under mountains of misinformation. Worse, online platforms flatten all voices into equal status: experts and conspiracy theorists compete for attention on identical screens.

When Google Outranks Expertise

Nichols describes how people equate search results with truth. A website’s design or ranking substitutes for credibility. When celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow promote pseudoscience or activists resurrect vaccine conspiracies, millions click them before reading academic research. Real expertise looks slow and boring compared to glamorous misinformation. To illustrate, Nichols retells the tragic story of a British teenager dismissed by doctors who rightly diagnosed her cancer via online research—a single anomaly that reinforces false faith in digital wisdom.

Mistaking Access for Comprehension

Studies Nichols cites show people browsing articles retain almost nothing. Skimming headlines makes them feel informed without learning. Psychologists call this “outsourced knowledge”—we substitute Google’s memory for our own. This illusion fuels arrogance: amateurs challenge experts because online familiarity mimics mastery. Nichols calls this “doing before knowing,” arguing that the presence of instantly retrieved facts weakens intellectual humility. Internet users, convinced of their own intelligence, lose the ability to distinguish speculation from evidence.

Echo Chambers and Troll Wars

Beyond misinformation, the Internet corrodes civility. Social media isolates people into echo chambers where they unfriend dissent and amplify anger. Anonymity breeds contempt; argument becomes insult. Nichols cites studies showing liberals and conservatives equally prone to deleting opposing views. Digital interaction trains us to confuse democratic conversation with self-expression. Alone behind keyboards, people replace curiosity with aggression, convinced their opinions deserve respect simply because they can type them.

For Nichols, the Internet could have been a library. Instead, it’s become a shouting marketplace of narcissism. The cure? Pause before sharing; seek slow learning over instant validation. Treat knowledge as craft, not commodity. Otherwise, he warns, we’ll scroll ourselves into collective stupidity, mistaking access for wisdom and volume for truth.

Nichols’s examination of journalism reveals another culprit behind the death of expertise: the transformation of news into entertainment. Reporters, racing for clicks, don’t vet sources rigorously. He recounts stories like the fake study claiming “chocolate helps weight loss” or the New York Times describing Easter as Christ’s "resurrection into heaven"—mistakes that demonstrate how speed and spectacle beat accuracy. When journalists stumble this way, audiences grow cynical and lump all experts together as unreliable.

Too Much Information, Not Enough Knowledge

By tracing media history from radio through cable to online hyper-news, Nichols shows how an overload of content overwhelms comprehension. The twenty-four-hour news cycle erases boundaries between professional reporting, opinion, and gossip. Audiences no longer distinguish anchors from pundits or facts from spin. Once, networks delivered carefully curated reports; now, they ask viewers to tweet reactions and set agendas. The result is a flood of superficial debate that teaches people attention, not understanding.

From Talk Radio to Fox News

Nichols documents how AM talk radio and later cable networks like Fox and CNN created echo chambers of partisan infotainment. Figures like Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes tapped populist anger by turning suspicion of expertise into profit. Radio hosts mocked bureaucrats and intellectuals, establishing a genre of outrage-as-news. This model, Nichols argues, trained viewers to distrust any authority that contradicts their emotions—an attitude still visible in polarized audiences who watch only outlets confirming their worldview.

When Journalists Become Entertainers

The rise of celebrity anchors and political pundits blurred expertise. Young reporters churn out content faster than they can research it; editors value virality over verification. Nichols shares inside details of how publications like Rolling Stone published false stories of campus rape and how reporters misinterpreted veteran suicide statistics. Missteps accumulate until the public concludes that no source is trustworthy. Yet Nichols insists that abandoning journalism is worse—without shared factual baselines, democratic reasoning collapses entirely.

Trust, he concludes, must be rebuilt through patience: journalists need to slow down, citizens need to read widely, and both sides must reject cynicism. Being well informed isn’t about consuming more news—it’s about consuming it carefully.

Nichols dedicates an insightful chapter to the hardest question: what happens when experts fail? Mistakes, he writes, are inevitable in any complex system, but society tends to blur the distinction between honest error and malpractice. He outlines several types of failure—from simple misjudgment to fraud—and shows how misunderstanding these kinds of errors fuels populist suspicion of all professional knowledge.

Ordinary Error vs. Deception

Some failures are the natural by-products of science’s trial and error. Nichols highlights nutrition experts who demonized eggs or foreign policy scholars who predicted the Soviet Union’s endurance until it suddenly collapsed. These are miscalculations, not conspiracies. But more serious damage occurs when fraud enters the picture—scientists manipulating data or fabricating credentials. Cases like Andrew Wakefield’s false vaccine study and historian Michael Bellesiles’s invention of American gun data erode public faith far beyond their fields.

Crossing Lines of Competence

Nichols warns that expertise in one domain doesn’t translate everywhere. He mocks the tendency of famous scientists and celebrities to pontificate outside their knowledge—Linus Pauling promoting vitamins, Gwyneth Paltrow peddling wellness rituals, or Noam Chomsky moving from linguistics to global politics. Such overreach, he says, is intellectual vanity disguised as activism. When experts forget the limits of their training, they become as unreliable as amateurs.

The Perils of Prediction

People crave forecasts, but experts aren’t prophets. Nichols cites political scientist Philip Tetlock’s research showing even specialists barely outperform chance when predicting global events. The best predictors, Tetlock found, were “foxes”—open-minded generalists who weigh many variables—rather than “hedgehogs,” narrow experts trapped in their own frameworks. Nichols isn’t cynical about knowledge; he simply stresses that expertise explains reality better than it foretells it. Expecting clairvoyance from scholars only sets the stage for disappointment and distrust.

Nichols concludes that failure, owned honestly and corrected publicly, should enhance credibility, not destroy it. Experts must acknowledge uncertainty, and citizens must distinguish honest mistakes from deceit. Otherwise, every error becomes ammunition for ignorance—and expertise itself dies from the impossible expectation of perfection.

The book’s conclusion ties Nichols’s arguments into a larger warning: rejecting experts destabilizes democracy. He uses examples like Brexit and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign to show how populist movements exploit distrust of knowledge. When people brag they’ve “had enough of experts,” they aren’t demanding independence—they’re surrendering reason to emotion. Nichols insists that democracy needs informed citizens who respect facts, not followers who treat ignorance as authenticity.

The Death Spiral of Distrust

Nichols describes a vicious circle: citizens know less, become frustrated, disengage, and then blame experts for complexity. As voters retreat into entertainment and opinion bubbles, technocrats or demagogues fill the vacuum. Either unelected administrators quietly run government, or populist figures weaponize ignorance for power. Both undermine self-government. Civic literacy collapses into superstition, memes, and rage, leaving experts isolated and democracy hollow.

The Misunderstood Idea of Equality

Nichols argues that Americans confuse political equality with intellectual equality. Everyone deserves a vote, but not every opinion deserves equal weight. He cites C.S. Lewis’s warning that when people say “I’m as good as you,” they reveal envy, not justice. This misunderstanding drives resentment against competence. Ordinary citizens now see expertise as elitism, turning knowledge into class warfare. Nichols calls this “reverse evolution,” a march back to tribal thinking where feelings replace facts.

Rebuilding the Alliance

Nichols doesn’t propose restoring blind trust; he advocates mutual accountability. Experts must be transparent, humble, and willing to engage public scrutiny. Citizens must reciprocate by learning enough to hold experts responsibly accountable, not contemptuously equal. He quotes James Madison—“A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Democracy isn’t sustained by opinion; it thrives on informed judgment.

In closing, Nichols predicts that without renewed respect for facts, either populist rage or technocratic impatience will erode democracy. His hopeful answer is dialogue: experts serve, citizens learn, and both listen. It’s an uneasy balance—but it’s the only one that keeps knowledge, freedom, and government alive together.