Visual Business Intelligence – The Devaluation of Expertise

Like it or not, we rely heavily on experts to function as a society. Expertise—high levels of knowledge and skill in particular realms—fuels human progress and continues to maintain it. For this reason, it is frightening to observe the ways in which expertise has been devalued in the modern world, nowhere more so than in America.

My most vivid and direct observations of this problem involve the ways that my own area of expertise—data visualization—has been diluted by the ease with which anyone with a modicum of experience can claim to be a data visualization expert today. Learn how to use a product such as Tableau or Power BI today, or Xcelsius a few years ago, and you’re suddenly a data visualization expert. Write a blog about data visualization and you certainly must be an expert. With the relative ease of publication today, you can even write a book about data visualization without ever developing more than a superficial understanding. This is nonsense, it is frustrating to those of us who have actually developed expertise, and it is downright harmful to people who accept advice from faux-experts.

My other direct observation of this phenomenon is the way in which the Internet has inclined people to believe that they are instant experts in anything that they can read about on the Web. Not only do some of the people with scant data visualization knowledge who write comments in response to this blog believe that they know more about it than I do, but many of us are inclined to instruct our medical doctors or our attorneys after an hour or two of Web browsing. We even have the temerity to call simple Web searches “research,” disrespecting those whose work involves actual research. The phrases, “I’m doing research on…” and “I’m an expert in…” used to mean more than they do today.

I’m not alone in my concern about this. I just finished reading a book by Tom Nichols entitled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, which clearly describes this problem in great breadth and depth.

The book’s title is a bit of a misnomer, no doubt chosen to get our attention, for Nichols isn’t arguing that expertise is going away, but that its value is being devalued and ignored. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s jacket:

As I mentioned earlier, this problem is perhaps most extreme in America. We have always prided ourselves on being self-made and resistant to intellectual elitism. It’s a deeply ingrained strain of the American myth. Nichols writes:

Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we holdthesetruths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other…The foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of “uninformed,” passed “misinformed” on the way down, and is now plummeting to “aggressively wrong.” People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.

This isn’t all due to the Internet. Other factors are contributing to the devaluation of expertise as well, including our institutions of higher learning.

Higher education is supposed to cure us of the false belief that everyone is as smart as everyone else. Unfortunately, in the twenty-first century the effect of widespread college attendance is just the opposite: the great number of people who have been in or near a college think of themselves as the educated peers of even the most accomplished scholars and experts. College is no longer a time devoted to learning and personal maturation; instead, the stampede of young Americans into college and the consequent competition for their tuition dollars have produced a consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right.

I observed during my own time of teaching at U.C. Berkeley that institutions of higher learning have become businesses that do what they must to compete for customers. Professors must please their students (customers) by providing them with an enjoyable experience if they wish to keep their jobs. Learning, however, is hard work.

Journalism also contributes to this problem when it focuses on giving readers what they want, making the news entertaining, rather than seeking to truthfully and thoroughly inform the public. The customer is not always right. The public can be easily entertained into a state of ignorance.

Experts sometimes get it wrong, but true experts still know a lot more about their fields of knowledge than the rest of us and they get it right a lot more often than we do. Occasional errors by experts are no excuse for turning our backs on knowledge.

Look where the devaluation of expertise has taken us in America. We now have a president who is the poster child of narcissistic ignorance whose only expertise is in being a media celebrity. This is a slap in the face of the expertise that built this nation and made it strong. America did not become a city on a hill for the world to see and emulate by celebrating ignorance. History has revealed more than once what happens when you place extraordinary power into the hands of a narcissistic bully. This has perhaps never been done, however, with someone who exhibits Trump’s degree of prideful ignorance.

What do we do? Nichols reminds us that “Most causes of ignorance can be overcome, if people are willing to learn.” Are we willing to learn? That doesn’t seem to be the case.

How can we get back on track? It might take a disaster of spectacular scale to turn the tide. I hope this isn’t the case, but no divine power will bail us out if we continue on our current course. We must do what humans have always done to thrive and advance. We must use our brains.