The Death of Expertise, and Why No One Trusts “The Experts” Anymore

Tom Nichols wrote The Death of Expertise in 2017 to warn Americans about a growing cultural problem: we were becoming increasingly unwilling to accept that some people actually know more about certain subjects than other people. The Internet gave everyone access to an almost unlimited amount of information, higher education produced increasingly confident graduates, cable television turned disagreement into entertainment, and social media gave every person with a smartphone the ability to broadcast an opinion to the planet. Somewhere along the way, Nichols argued, Americans began confusing equality of citizenship with equality of knowledge. His point wasn’t that experts are always right. It was that complex societies cannot function if nobody recognizes the difference between somebody who spent thirty years studying a subject and somebody who spent thirty minutes Googling it.

Nichols was right about the problem. But almost a decade later, I think the situation is worse than he described, and not entirely for the reasons he emphasized. Simply put, the “experts” have helped kill expertise. It isn’t enough anymore to complain that ordinary Americans don’t respect expertise. We should also ask why they don’t respect it.

Part of the answer is undoubtedly arrogance, confirmation bias, social media, political tribalism, and the human tendency to believe that our own opinions are more informed than they really are. But another part of the answer is considerably more uncomfortable for the credentialed class: Americans have repeatedly watched people presented to them as “experts” get important things wrong, wander outside their actual areas of expertise, contradict each other, allow political preferences to contaminate professional judgments, and then behave as though questioning any of this proves that the questioner is stupid. Do that often enough and eventually people stop listening. That isn’t the death of expertise because Americans suddenly became idiots. It is the death of expertise because the word expert no longer carries the authority it once did.

Everybody Gets a Trophy. Everybody Gets a Degree.

Nichols spends considerable time criticizing higher education, and this is one of the strongest parts of his argument. He points toward grade inflation, universities treating students as customers, an obsession with self-esteem, and an educational culture that can produce graduates who possess considerably more confidence than competence. His critics and reviewers have noted the same theme: credentials are increasingly common, grades increasingly inflated, and universities increasingly inclined to treat students as consumers who need to be kept happy.

This creates a strange paradox. America is more credentialed than ever, but credentials often tell us less than they used to. A bachelor’s degree was once a meaningful differentiator because relatively few Americans had one. Now it is frequently the minimum requirement to get past an HR algorithm for jobs that previous generations performed perfectly well without four years of university education. Bachelor’s degrees multiplied, so master’s degrees became more valuable. Master’s degrees multiplied, so doctorates became more important. Professional certifications proliferated. Executive education programs proliferated. Online programs proliferated. Everyone started collecting letters after their names. I offer myself, and my six college degrees, as an example.

Credential inflation works a lot like monetary inflation: if you print enough of something, each individual unit becomes less valuable. That doesn’t mean education is worthless. It means a credential and expertise are not the same thing. A diploma proves that an institution certified that you completed a particular course of study. It does not prove wisdom, judgment, intellectual honesty, or even that you are especially good at applying what you learned. It certainly doesn’t prove that you are qualified to pronounce judgment on subjects outside your field. Yet our culture increasingly uses credentials as shorthand for all of those things, creating an enormous class of people who are highly educated on paper and then become confused when the public doesn’t automatically accept their authority. Maybe the public has learned something.

Expertise Has Boundaries

One of the biggest problems with modern expertise is that experts sometimes forget where their expertise ends. A virologist may know enormously more about viruses than I do, but that does not mean the virologist necessarily knows more about constitutional law, childhood education, economics, supply chains, military strategy, or the psychological consequences of social isolation. An economist may understand monetary policy better than almost everyone reading this article, but that does not make her an expert on foreign policy. A retired general may understand brigade combat operations better than almost anyone alive, but that doesn’t mean he understands epidemiology. A climate scientist may possess extraordinary knowledge about atmospheric modeling without possessing any particular expertise in taxation, while a Harvard professor might know more about seventeenth-century European history than anyone else in America and still have no idea how to run a small business.

Expertise is narrow. Celebrity is broad. Our modern information environment constantly confuses the two. Turn on cable television and you’ll see people introduced by their impressive credentials before offering opinions far outside the discipline in which those credentials were earned. Social media makes the problem worse because platforms reward certainty, speed, controversy, and simplicity—the exact opposite of what serious expertise often requires. The actual expert frequently says, “We don’t know yet,” while the television expert says, “Here’s what this means.” Guess which one gets invited back?

COVID Changed Everything

If you want to understand why public trust in expertise collapsed, you cannot avoid COVID-19. Nichols himself recognized this; the 2024 second edition of The Death of Expertise added the pandemic as a major topic. The pandemic should have demonstrated the value of expertise, and in many ways it did. Scientists identified a novel virus, sequenced it, studied its transmission, developed treatments, and produced vaccines at extraordinary speed. Modern medicine saved lives on a scale that would have been impossible in previous centuries. But COVID also demonstrated the danger of turning scientific experts into political authorities.

Americans watched guidance change repeatedly. Some changes were completely reasonable because science changes when evidence changes. That’s how science is supposed to work. But institutions often communicated evolving judgments with a level of certainty that wasn’t justified by the available evidence. Then, when recommendations changed, officials sometimes seemed surprised that people remembered what they had previously been told. The distinction between the evidence changed and we were wrong became politically explosive, particularly because many citizens felt that acknowledging uncertainty or disagreement had itself become politically unacceptable.

Worse, scientific questions became entangled with political ones. Questions about school closures, business restrictions, mask mandates, vaccination requirements, travel restrictions, and acceptable levels of social risk were often presented as though science itself provided a single objective answer. It didn’t. Science can help estimate the probability that a particular policy will reduce transmission. Science cannot determine how society should balance that reduction against lost education, unemployment, mental health, civil liberties, economic damage, family separation, or religious freedom. Those are value judgments. Experts can inform them, but experts cannot make them for everyone else. When public officials blurred that distinction, “follow the science” started sounding less like a commitment to evidence and more like a demand for political compliance. That did enormous damage to public trust.

Iraq Had Experts Too

Those of us from the national security world should be particularly cautious about mocking Americans for distrusting experts. Remember Iraq? Because I do. The United States possessed perhaps the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in human history. We had the CIA, NSA, DIA, State Department, military intelligence organizations, national laboratories, think tanks, academics, regional specialists, weapons experts, and enormous technical collection capabilities. And the central prewar assessment about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was badly wrong.

That wasn’t because everyone involved was stupid. Intelligence analysis is difficult. Saddam Hussein’s regime was intentionally opaque. Analysts worked with incomplete information, and governments make decisions under uncertainty. All of that is true. But tell that to the American public after thousands of Americans died, tens of thousands were wounded, trillions of dollars were spent, and the supposedly existing stockpiles of WMD failed to materialize. The explanations for why the intelligence failed matter enormously to historians, intelligence professionals, and policymakers, but the public’s takeaway was considerably simpler: the experts told us something enormously consequential, and they were wrong.

Then Afghanistan happened. For years, Americans heard optimistic assessments about progress, Afghan security forces, government capacity, and the trajectory of the war. Then in August 2021, the Afghan government collapsed with breathtaking speed and the Taliban walked back into Kabul. Once again, Americans were left wondering whether the experts knew this was coming. Sometimes they did. Sometimes dissenting assessments existed inside the system. Sometimes political leaders ignored warnings. Sometimes bureaucratic incentives rewarded optimism. Sometimes nobody really knew. But from the perspective of the average American watching Kabul fall on television, those distinctions didn’t matter very much. The experts had been wrong again.

Economics Isn’t Much Better

Economists suffer from a particularly brutal problem: their predictions are measurable. Growth will be X. Inflation will be Y. Unemployment will be Z. A recession will happen, or a recession won’t happen. Then reality arrives and checks the math. Economic forecasting is enormously difficult because an economy consists of millions of human beings making billions of decisions in response to changing incentives. Models are useful, but models are models, and they can only incorporate the assumptions and information available to the people building them.

Yet economists are regularly presented to the public with the rhetorical authority of physicists describing gravity. When predictions fail, there’s always an explanation. The model didn’t anticipate this variable. Consumers behaved unexpectedly. Energy prices changed. A war intervened. The Federal Reserve changed policy. Again, those explanations can be entirely legitimate. But ordinary people notice something important: the experts who explain tomorrow with great confidence frequently spend the day after tomorrow explaining why yesterday’s prediction didn’t happen. Eventually, “experts predict” becomes background noise.

Science Has Its Own Problems

Even science—the institution we often hold up as the gold standard for self-correcting expertise—has suffered serious credibility problems. The replication crisis is perhaps the most obvious example. Beginning prominently in psychology and spreading into broader conversations about scientific research, researchers discovered that influential published findings sometimes could not be reproduced. Concerns emerged about questionable methodologies, publication bias, small samples, p-hacking, and institutional incentives that reward novel results far more than boring attempts to verify someone else’s work. The problem became serious enough that prominent scholars described a “crisis of confidence.”

This doesn’t prove science doesn’t work. In fact, it demonstrates something important about why science does work: findings can be challenged, tested, rejected, and replaced. But that’s not how scientific findings are usually presented to the public. The public hears that a “study proves” something, then another study says something different, then a meta-analysis challenges both, and ten years later someone explains that the original finding doesn’t replicate. Then we’re shocked when ordinary people shrug at the phrase “scientists say.” We trained them to.

Politics Poisoned the Well

Perhaps the most destructive development has been the politicization—or perceived politicization—of expert institutions. Expertise requires trust, and trust requires a belief that the expert is trying to tell you what is true rather than what is politically convenient. Once people believe the expert has joined a political team, the expert becomes just another political actor. This is true regardless of which political side is doing it.

Conservatives have experts. Liberals have experts. Republicans can produce economists explaining why Republican policies will work, and Democrats can produce economists explaining why Democratic policies will work. Both sides can find retired generals, former intelligence officials, doctors, lawyers, professors, historians, scientists, and policy specialists willing to appear on television and explain why the other side is dangerously wrong. Eventually the public notices something: if experts are supposed to possess superior knowledge, why can each political tribe reliably find credentialed experts who agree with everything that tribe already believes?

That doesn’t necessarily mean those experts are corrupt. Smart people genuinely disagree. Different assumptions produce different conclusions. Values affect policy preferences. Evidence can be ambiguous. But the public doesn’t experience that nuance. They experience dueling experts. CNN has its expert. Fox has its expert. MSNBC has its expert. The podcast has its expert. YouTube has its expert. Your favorite politician has twelve experts standing behind him at a press conference. At that point expertise stops functioning as an independent source of authority and becomes ammunition.

The Internet Didn’t Kill Expertise. It Exposed It.

Nichols understandably places considerable blame for the death of expertise on the Internet. He argues that the democratization of information created an illusion of knowledge: people can Google something for twenty minutes and convince themselves they understand a subject better than someone who spent decades studying it. He’s right. But the Internet did something else too: it gave ordinary people receipts.

Before the Internet, an expert could make a prediction on television and most people would forget it. A government official could say something in 1997 and say the opposite in 2002, and finding the original statement required somebody to dig through newspaper archives. Now it takes twelve seconds. The Internet remembers, and so does social media. People can watch compilations of contradictory statements from officials. They can read the original study instead of the newspaper summary. They can find dissenting experts. They can compare predictions against outcomes. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Experts should be accountable too.

The problem is that the Internet strips away context just as efficiently as it preserves evidence. A thirty-second clip can make a reasonable revision based on new evidence look like hypocrisy. A genuine expert and a complete crank can build websites that look equally professional. A peer-reviewed study and a conspiracy theory can appear next to each other in search results. Information has been democratized, but judgment hasn’t.

Being Wrong Isn’t the Real Problem

Experts will always be wrong sometimes. That’s unavoidable. Meteorologists are wrong. Intelligence analysts are wrong. Doctors are wrong. Economists are wrong. Generals are wrong. Engineers are wrong. Professors are wrong. The existence of error doesn’t invalidate expertise. If I need brain surgery, I’m still going to a neurosurgeon instead of the smartest guy at my local bar.

The problem is not simply that experts are wrong. The problem is what happens when they are wrong. Do they acknowledge uncertainty before making predictions? Do they admit mistakes afterward? Do they explain what changed? Do they distinguish evidence from opinion? Do they stay inside their areas of competence? Do they welcome challenges from qualified dissenters, or do they retreat behind their credentials? That last option is fatal. “Trust me, I’m an expert” is probably the worst argument an expert can make in 2026. The credential is not the argument. The evidence is.

The Experts Aren’t Wrong as Often as Everyone Else—but It Feels That Way

There is one place where I would modify the provocative premise of this article. It is tempting to say that experts are wrong at least as often as everyone else. Literally, that isn’t true. A cardiologist knows more about cardiology than I do. An aircraft engineer knows more about aircraft structures than I do. An artillery nonofficer knows more about artillery than someone who has never seen a howitzer. Genuine expertise produces enormous predictive and practical advantages, which is precisely why modern civilization depends on specialization.

The problem is that from the public’s perspective, it increasingly feels like experts are no better than everyone else because the expert failures that matter most are often spectacular, consequential, political, and unforgettable. Nobody writes headlines when structural engineers correctly calculate the load capacity of 100,000 buildings, but everybody remembers the bridge that collapses. Nobody remembers the thousands of intelligence assessments that were correct, but everybody remembers Iraqi WMD. Nobody remembers all the medical guidance that remained accurate, but everybody remembers the guidance that changed. Success becomes invisible, failure becomes evidence, and once trust collapses, every new mistake confirms the belief that expertise itself is fraudulent.

So What Is an Expert Worth?

Quite a lot, actually, but the days when a credential alone could settle an argument should probably be over. Maybe that’s healthy. Expertise should confer a presumption of competence, not a presumption of infallibility. Credentials should get you into the conversation, not allow you to end it. Institutions should demonstrate why they deserve trust instead of demanding trust because of the names printed on their buildings.

Experts also need to become comfortable saying three words that modern media culture punishes mercilessly: “I don’t know.” Those might be the most important words an expert can say because they establish boundaries, acknowledge uncertainty, and remind everyone that expertise isn’t omniscience. More importantly, they create credibility for the moments when the expert says, “This I do know.” A person who admits the limits of his knowledge is far more persuasive than someone whose Ph.D. apparently transformed him into an authority on every subject known to mankind.

Trust Has to Be Earned Again

Nichols’s central warning remains important. A society in which everyone believes his personal opinion is equivalent to specialized knowledge is going to make terrible decisions. Modern civilization is too complicated for every citizen to personally master medicine, engineering, economics, military strategy, epidemiology, law, energy production, artificial intelligence, agriculture, and a thousand other fields. We need experts. But experts need us too. They need public trust, and trust cannot be commanded. It cannot be credentialed into existence. It cannot be fact-checked into existence. It cannot be restored by calling skeptical people ignorant. Trust is accumulated slowly through competence, transparency, humility, intellectual honesty, and accountability.

The death of expertise isn’t simply a story about stupid people refusing to listen to smart people. It is a story about institutions that expanded credentials while diluting their meaning, media organizations that turned experts into political performers, politicians who selectively embraced expertise when it supported their policies, academics who sometimes confused educational attainment with wisdom, and professionals who too often treated legitimate questions as challenges to their status. The public responded predictably: they stopped trusting them. Once trust disappears, expertise becomes just another opinion competing in the marketplace.

That’s dangerous because there really are people who know what they’re talking about. There really are doctors you should listen to, engineers whose warnings should stop projects, intelligence analysts whose assessments should shape national policy, scientists whose research should change our behavior, and military professionals whose experience should matter when politicians contemplate war. But we have spent years putting them on television next to activists, pundits, influencers, celebrities, politicians, and credentialed partisans and labeling all of them “experts.” Then we wonder why nobody can tell the difference.

Tom Nichols warned about the death of expertise, and he was right. But expertise wasn’t murdered by the ignorant masses alone. The Internet helped. Political polarization helped. Credential inflation helped. Universities helped. The media helped. Government institutions helped. And experts who confused credentials with infallibility helped. Some of the fingerprints on the murder weapon belong to the experts themselves.

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Charles served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.