The following is an excerpt from The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols, which was published in 2017. We covered this book in Al-Andalus Book Club in 2018. I found myself thinking about this work again recently. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues with various forms of lockdowns and restrictions in different major cities around the world, many are responding to the caution fatigue they’re experiencing with skepticism about what got us into this current state. A number of underground but well-known conspiracy theorists are becoming mainstream with glossy documentaries and interviews that are gaining popularity due to their being censored on multiple social media platforms. Trust in expert medical professionals seems to be at an all-time low and a mantra of “do your own research” is gaining more credence. Ten minutes on Google seems to be of more value than ten years studying medicine and treating thousands of patients. I think this book is even more important today than it was at the time of its publication. A lot is at stake in terms of people’s lives and livelihood, and it can’t be left to those whose only skill is the creation of clever posts on social media that will misinform and have the potential to subsequently harm multitudes.
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Celebrities abusing their status as celebrities is nothing new, but the Internet amplifies their effect. While we might dismiss Jim Carrey’s antivaccine rants as the extension of the comedian’s already unconventional personality, people with more storied names get sucked into the electronic funhouse as well.
In 2015, the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni got a call from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the senator and presidential candidate assassinated in 1968. It was important, Kennedy told Bruni, that they meet. Kennedy was insistent about correcting Bruni on the issue of vaccination. Like too many other Americans, Kennedy was lugging around ill-informed paranoia about vaccines causing, in Kennedy’s words, “a holocaust” among American children. (Indeed, Bruni noted that Carrey “has previously done worship in the church of Robert Kennedy Jr.”) Bruni later recalled of the meeting: “I had sided with the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [But] Kennedy knew better.”
Kennedy, Carrey, and others did what many Americans do in such situations: they decided beforehand what they believed and then went looking for a source on the Internet to buttress that belief. As Bruni pointed out, “The anti-vaccine agitators can always find a renegade researcher or random “study” to back them up. This is erudition in the age of cyberspace: You surf until you reach the conclusion you’re after. You click your way to validation, confusing the presence of a website with the plausibility of an argument.
This kind of Internet grazing – mistakenly called “research” by laypeople – makes interactions between experts and professionals arduous. Once again, confirmation bias is a major culprit: although many stories on the Internet are false or inaccurate, the one-in-a-billion story where Google gets it right and the experts get it wrong goes viral. In a tragic case in 2015, for example, a British teenager was misdiagnosed by doctors who told her to “stop Googling her symptoms.” The patient insisted she had a rare cancer, a possibility the doctors dismissed. She was right, they were wrong, and she died.
The British teen’s story made big news, and a rare mistake likely convinced a great many people to be their own doctors. Of course, people who have died because they used a computer to misdiagnose their heart disease as indigestion never make the front page. But none of that matters. These David-and-Goliath stories (a teenager against her team of doctors) feed the public’s insatiable confirmation bias and fuel their cynicism in established knowledge while bolstering their false hopes that the solutions to their problems are just a few mouse clicks away.
Once upon a time, books were at least a marginal barrier to the rapid dissemination of misinformation, because books took time to produce and required some investment and judgment on the part of a publisher. “I read it in a book” meant “this probably isn’t crazy, because a company spent the money to put it between two covers and publish it.” This was never entirely true about books, of course; some of them are carefully fact-checked, peer reviewed, and edited, while others are just slammed between covers and rushed to bookstores.
Nonetheless, books from reputable presses go through at least a basic process of negotiation between authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers, including the book you’re reading right now. Books from self-published “vanity presses,” by contrast, are looked down upon by reviewers and readers alike, and with good reason. Today, however, the Internet is the equivalent of hundreds of millions of vanity presses all cranking out whatever anyone with a keyboard wants to say, no matter how stupid – or how vile. (As National Journal’s Ron Fournier has said, in the age of the Internet, “every bigot is a publisher.”) There’s a fair amount of wisdom and information hiding out there, but there’s no escaping Sturgeon’s Law.
Accessing the Internet can actually make people dumber than if they had never engaged a subject at all. The very act of searching for information makes people think they’ve learned something, when in fact they’re more likely to be immersed in yet more data they do not understand. This happens because after enough time surfing, people no longer can distinguish between things that may have flashed before their eyes and things they actually know.
Seeing words on a screen is not the same as reading or understanding them. When a group of experimental psychologists at Yale investigated how people use the Internet, they found that “people who search for information on the Web emerge from the process with an inflated sense of how much they know – even regarding topics that are unrelated to the ones they Googled. This is a kind of electronic version of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which the least competent people surfing the web are the least likely to realize that they’re not learning anything.
People looking for information, say, about “fossil fuels” might end up scrolling past many pages on a related term, like “dinosaur fossils.” After enough websites fly by, they eventually lose the ability to recognize that whatever they just read about either subject isn’t something they actually knew before they looked at a screen. Instead, they just assume that they knew things about both dinosaurs and diesel fuel because they’re just that smart. Unfortunately, people thinking they’re smart because they searched the Internet is like thinking they’re good swimmers because they got wet walking through a rainstorm.
The Yale team somewhat gently described this problem as “mistaking outsourced knowledge for internal knowledge.” A blunter way of putting it would be to say that people can’t remember most of what they see while blowing through dozens of mouse clicks. As the writer Tom Jacobs observed, searching “appears to trigger an utterly unjustified belief in one’s own knowledge – which, given the increasingly popular habit of instinctively looking online to answer virtually any question, is a bit terrifying.”
It may well be terrifying, but it’s definitely annoying. These mistaken assertions of gained knowledge can make the job of an expert nearly impossible. There is no way to enlighten people who believe they’ve gained a decade’s worth of knowledge because they’ve spent a morning with a search engine. Few words in a discussion with a layperson can make an expert’s heart sink like hearing “I’ve done some research.”
How can exposure to so much information fail to produce at least some kind of increased baseline of knowledge, if only be electronic osmosis? How can people read so much yet retain so little? The answer is simple: few people are actually reading what they find.
As a University College of London (UCL) study found, people don’t actually read the article they encounter during a search on the Internet. Instead, they glance at the top line or the first few sentences and then move on. Internet users, the researchers noted, “are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed, there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” This is actually the opposite of reading, aimed not so much at learning but at winning arguments or confirming a preexisting belief.
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