Originally Posted by
Cameron Wood
I didn't read the book, but read a bunch of Amazon reviews, which tend to pull no punches, and must be taken with salt IME:
Representative of the critical ones:
The book is derived from the author's impression that "...within my living memory I've never seen anything like it.". It reads like an extended Facebook rant by your cranky uncle, and, as it turns out, the book is actually an expansion of a blog post the author wrote in 2013.
Perhaps I could give the book some leeway if Mr. Nichols was an expert in social science, or some topic that would give him authority in the "disregard for expertise", but he is a professor of National Security Affairs. Ironically, because he is not an expert in this area, I found myself disregarding his opinions.
The Death of Expertise is a perfect example of why people do disregard experts. The book FEELS like fact, but it is not. The author presents no evidence to back up the book's premise of an increase in disregard for expertise. You feel like you should trust his opinion, because it is in a book after all. People will cite the book, as if it were fact. And because so many people are saying it, it starts to feel like fact. But Mr. Nichols opinion is no more fact than your cranky uncle's last Facebook post.