The Death of Expertise in the Information Age

Sort of in follow up to my last post, I read this article today that discusses the side effects of the so called "Information Age" in which we live.  The article highlights one of those impacts of living in this new digital age I was attempting to discuss in that last post - the death of facts and expertise.

I run across this somewhat frequently in my line of work, where someone will tell me something about the Constitution or the development of the law in this county that is, pretty easily, demonstrably false.  Its also pretty easy to see elsewhere in our society, most notably in the denying of evolutionary biology by young earth creationists due to religious dogma, the denial of climate change science due to political dogma, and the denial of the effectiveness and safety of vaccines due to some sort of dogma.  And the point in the article about how presenting facts to people typically makes them stronger in their denial, because they shift their belief into a personal and moral opinion, hits the mark, I think.

All of it reminds of a book I read several years ago, called "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free" by Charles P. Pierce.  One of the primary points from that book - the more fervently a person believes in something, the more true and ironclad it becomes, regardless of contrary evidence.

And considering tonight is the first of the presidential debates, I reflect upon the decision our country has in front of us - two candidates; one with a wealth of governmental and public service experience, and therefore a wealth of political baggage and flip flops and decisions that, as being public, are open to intense scrutiny; and one with no governmental or public service experience, seemingly no regard for any facts or evidence based science, and seemingly not open to authentic transparency.

I guess, in an age where accurate and fact based information has become devalued by the sheer volume of all information, it makes sense that someone who peddles in information, however demonstrably false it is, can be a single 50/50 election from one of the most powerful positions on Earth.

“The case against intellect is founded on a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly and diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism…. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect … is lost.” - Charles S. Pierce

"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty." - Stephen Jay Gould