Tom Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College, Jeopardy champion, and author of the new book, “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.” Nichols joins Ben Domenech on The Federalist Radio Hour to discuss how increasing access to technology, information, and education has lead to a rejection of experts and an inflation of our own narcissism.
There a false intimacy and pedestal of expertise that we give to celebrities and anyone on television. “The boomers went from trusting to no one to trusting any idiot with a symmetrical face in business casual,” Nichols said. “There comes a time to say, ‘I can’t speak to that issue.”
Nichols describes how people react to the errors of experts. “When experts are wrong, they have a double duty. They not only have to fix it. They have to own it. They have to come forward with it,” he said. “People want to scapegoat experts for things that are just bad life choices.”
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