Why Americans have come to worship their own ignorance | Hacker News Reader

Why Americans have come to worship their own ignorance

macleans.ca

57 pointsjseliger15 comments

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/

> 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.

Indeed. Maybe the fact that not even that question has a simple answer underlines his point.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

>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.

What was the point in posting this comment?

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