
Why Americans have come to worship their own ignorance - jseliger
http://www.macleans.ca/society/why-americans-have-come-to-worship-their-own-ignorance/
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js2
Sadly, at no point in the interview is the question asked in the headline
answered.

The interview is a plug for Tom Nichols new book, which is an expansion of
this article he wrote in 2014:

[http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-
expertise/](http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/)

~~~
RandomOpinion
> _Sadly, at no point in the interview is the question asked in the headline
> answered._

I beg to differ. He touches on problems with the post-secondary education
system, increasing hostility from the public against the elite, the collapse
of journalism, and failure of experts to engage the public as parts of his
answer to that question.

~~~
js2
Okay, fair enough. But I feel like those are explanations of how we came to be
ignorant, but not necessarily why we'd worship it. Maybe I'm taking the
headline too literally.

------
sdflkd
Note: I am Canadian, but we share similar culture.

I disagree with his evaluation of post-secondary education. At least with
respect to how students are treated. Maybe it's because I go to a "good"
school, but I've never felt university reinforced my worth. In fact, it
constantly hammers me with assignments and exams that I have to deal with as I
do internship interviews and prepare for those as well.

If anything, university taught me that I really knew nothing and am not really
as good as I thought I was in subjects. I used to think I was amazing at math.
Then I encountered pure maths and people who actually were good at math.

I also disagree that the difference between a highschool graduate (who took on
no further schooling) and a university graduate is negligible. There are huge
gaps in knowledge between people in the same university in different programs.
There are huge gaps in knowledge between people in the same program at school!

Maybe the gaps I perceive are not as large as they seem. I am still young. But
as someone currently going through a rigorous program, I can say that the
university seems to revel in beating me up rather than celebrating my
existence. The mental health woes that pervade my school seem to echo the
sentiment.

~~~
didibus
I'm Canadian too, living in the state, and I've come to learn the culture is
quite different. Not sure you can really compare them, at least in regard to
the article. The education system is vastly different between both countries.

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squozzer
Experts themselves have created the problem. People mistrust experts not
because people worship ignorance and wallow in their own narcissism - which
many people do, certainly - but because experts are routinely bought and sold
by non-experts.

Need a tax break? Buy a politician and start shopping for an expert.
Eventually you'll find one.

Here's a tasty example -- [http://boards.fool.com/scholes-quotim-being-
trapped-herequot...](http://boards.fool.com/scholes-quotim-being-trapped-
herequot-19313877.aspx?sort=postdate)

It's the money and power that people mistrust. The expert's puppet strings are
visible from space.

~~~
wamsachel
Yep, the education system is a juicy target for the rich and the powerful to
subvert. Laser guided bombs and foreign trade agreements are not the
machinations of people who worship ignorance.

------
HoppedUpMenace
I agree with the author, especially the part about what students are getting
from universities, and especially what they're not getting. Narcissism is
definitely a problem in this country, further exacerbated by the ignorance
people seem to enjoy having for the things they'd rather not discuss nor
explore, for fear of disrupting the ideal world they have created for
themselves. The difference is whether or not someone's level of narcissism is
getting to the point of unhealthy and if they can acknowledge it as such or
continue thinking themselves as "normal". That being said, there is a huge
difference between ignorance and willful ignorance, seems though like there is
plenty of both to go around in many social circles on and offline.

------
pottersbasilisk
Nasim Taleb refutes this well.

Basically experts have lost their legitmacy in the eyes of the public.

[https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-
idiot-13211e...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-
idiot-13211e2d0577#.c1z7dcyfq)

~~~
mturmon
I happened on to this article of Taleb's, but I did not find it compelling in
the least. It's full of attitude and cocky dismissals of strawman characters
-- people who place too much faith in the _New Yorker_ and TED videos.

Well, _of course_ there are wannabe intellectuals out there.

Taleb's alternative to a reliance on expert judgement? That:

"People are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and
listen to their grandmothers ... with a better track record than these
policymaking goons."

So, "go with your gut"? This is ridiculous.

~~~
pottersbasilisk
Well you took a portion out of context.

" With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing
after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than
astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the
risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time,
people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and
listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical
knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons. "

Ideally our experts should reform their practices and regain lost faith in
them.

~~~
mturmon
I assure you, I read the whole piece, and only responded to your earlier
comment because the piece is so dreadfully shallow and one-sided.

Sure, the experts fail. And at the periphery of hard science -- psychology,
diet -- we're starting to learn how little behavioral guidance limited studies
can provide. No argument.

But this is such a shallow indictment. What about the numerous examples of
successful expertise all around -- civil engineering, aircraft safety, weather
forecasting, novel drug therapies, market interventions like cap-and-trade?
All these sorts of expert-based interventions have social policy implications,
and they have been generally very successful. I might owe my continued
existence to one of them.

Yet, Taleb's indictment gives no way to separate this kind of "good" expertise
from the "bad" ones. So it's vacuous as a critique, and the article is an
embarrassment.

Note: Taleb has some good ideas. His notion of "skin in the game" in markets
and policy, and his awareness of heavy tails, for example.

~~~
Sunset
>Yet, Taleb's indictment gives no way to separate this kind of "good"
expertise from the "bad" ones.

I can give you an extremely simple and effective heuristic. But it would
probably be against posting rules here.

~~~
mturmon
What was the point in posting this comment?

