Excerpt from The Death of Expertise - John Nichols

This quote was added by phaedra
These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument.

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kumagai 3 years ago
The reason people resist knowledge is precisely because there is so much of it now. When every possible piece of information is available to you simultaneously, even the simplest of decisions becomes paralyzing. So we filter out most of it to keep from going mad. And this is also why we reject the advice of experts. We now have access to every expert interpretation of every issue simultaneously, and they never all agree. So we have no idea which expert to believe. This is especially true in the age of Covid.
zizuke 4 years, 2 months ago
Thinking yourself as intelligent and thinking that certain traits are intelligence is arrogance. The appeal to authority really hits my point home. Close-mindedness, on the other hand, is a huge problem.
weesin 5 years, 3 months ago
Fantastic quote!

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