The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters

Abstract

Communicating with non-experts is one of the most important activities in my occupation. While performing the same job for many years, my communication style has changed considerably, and lately I have felt the need to adapt more and more rapidly. It is difficult to consider this change entirely intentional. Rather, it is a response to changes in the questions and attitudes of the people who visit me. They already come equipped with more knowledge and want to use that knowledge to engage me in genuine discussion, or to verify, rather than ask, my opinion. This trend has been accompanied by an increase in the proportion of their knowledge that has no clear source or origin. Moreover, starting with "Anarchy" [1], there have been numerous cult-like phenomena that overtly demonstrate the everyday crises faced by experts where false information misleads a large portion of society. Examples include the anti-vaccine movement based on the belief that vaccines cause autism, attempts to invalidate medical diagnoses, such as the previously popular book claiming that "There is no attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder" [2], and countless trends for alternative medicine or treatments lacking evidence in pediatric psychiatric disease. These matters indicate how people define experts, how they decide whom to trust, and what information to process and put into action. Medicine is fundamentally a branch of science, and these phenomena demonstrate how society interprets data and logic through a subjective, distorted lens.