“Most causes of ignorance can be overcome, if people are willing to learn. Nothing, however, can overcome the toxic confluence of arrogance,… — Thomas M. Nichols Arrogance Copy Share Image
“And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more… — Thomas M. Nichols Democracy Copy Share Image
“What is different today, and especially worrisome when it comes to the creation of educated citizens, is how the protective, swaddling environment… — Thomas M. Nichols Education Copy Share Image
“What used to be a jocular and usually benign ridicule of intellect and formal training has turned into a malign resentment of… — Thomas M. Nichols Fitness Copy Share Image
“To faculty everywhere, the lesson was obvious: the campus of a top university is not a place for intellectual exploration. It is… — Thomas M. Nichols Education Copy Share Image
“Of course, there’s also the basic problem that some people just aren’t very bright. And as we’ll see, the people who are… — Thomas M. Nichols Confidence Copy Share Image
“This illustrates an important point: then as now, Americans tend to think about issues like macroeconomic policy or foreign affairs only when… — Thomas M. Nichols Foreign affairs Copy Share Image
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a… — Thomas M. Nichols Fitness Copy Share Image
“As the economic writer Ben Casselman pointed out in 2016, most college applicants “never have to write a college entrance essay, pad… — Thomas M. Nichols Education Copy Share Image
“People simply do not understand numbers, risk, or probability, and few things can make discussion between experts and laypeople more frustrating than… — Thomas M. Nichols Safe landing Copy Share Image
“People do not come to the Internet so that their bad information can be corrected or their cherished theories disproven. Rather, they… — Thomas M. Nichols Hoaxes Copy Share Image
“More important and more relevant to the death of expertise, however, is that conspiracy theories are deeply attractive to people who have… — Thomas M. Nichols Complicated world Copy Share Image
“The Internet, however, is nothing like a library. Rather, it’s a giant repository where anyone can dump anything, from a first folio… — Thomas M. Nichols Internet Copy Share Image
“A talk show, for example, with one scientist who says genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are safe and one activist who says they… — Thomas M. Nichols Genetically Copy Share Image
“Populism actually reinforces this elitism, because the celebration of ignorance cannot launch communications satellites, negotiate the rights of US citizens overseas, or… — Thomas M. Nichols Communication Copy Share Image
“Democracy, as practiced in the United States in the early twenty-first century, has become a resentful, angry business. The fragile egos of… — Thomas M. Nichols Business Copy Share Image
“In a passage often cited by Western conservatives and especially loved by American libertarians, the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek wrote in… — Thomas M. Nichols Hayek Copy Share Image
“Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is… — Thomas M. Nichols Disagree Copy Share Image
“Arguing at length with a conspiracy theorist is not only fruitless but sometimes dangerous, and I do not recommend it. It’s a… — Thomas M. Nichols Conspiracy Copy Share Image
“Colleges are supposed to be the calm environment in which educated men and women determine what’s true and what’s false, and where… — Thomas M. Nichols Colleges Copy Share Image
“If the public has no idea about the substance of an issue, and will vote based on who they like rather than… — Thomas M. Nichols Democracy Copy Share Image
“Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to… — Thomas M. Nichols New knowledge Copy Share Image
“Unable to see their own biases, most people will simply drive each other crazy arguing rather than accept answers that contradict what… — Thomas M. Nichols Copy Share Image
“Today, by contrast, students explode over imagined slights that are not even remotely in the same category as fighting for civil rights… — Thomas M. Nichols Civil rights Copy Share Image
“This sense of entitlement is one reason they are continually angry at “experts” and especially at “elitists,” a word that in modern… — Thomas M. Nichols Education Copy Share Image
“In 2015, a Massachusetts accountant named Stephen Pasceri lost his seventy-eight-year-old mother to cardiovascular disease. Mrs. Pasceri had a long history of… — Thomas M. Nichols Cardiovascular disease Copy Share Image
“The two most important facts about grade inflation, however, are that it exists and that it suffuses students with unwarranted confidence in… — Thomas M. Nichols Confidence Copy Share Image
“The American attachment to intellectual self-reliance described by Tocqueville survived for nearly a century before falling under a series of assaults from… — Thomas M. Nichols Average american Copy Share Image
“In modern life outside of the academy, however, arguments and debates have no external review. Facts come and go as people find… — Thomas M. Nichols Argument Copy Share Image
“Thabo Mbeki, then the president of South Africa, seized on the idea that AIDS was caused not by a virus but by… — Thomas M. Nichols Aids Copy Share Image
“As the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in a 1928 essay, laypeople must evaluate expert claims by exercising their own careful logic as… — Thomas M. Nichols Doubt Copy Share Image
“The most obvious problem is that the freedom to post anything online floods the public square with bad information and half-baked thinking.… — Thomas M. Nichols Conspiracy theories Copy Share Image
“The tendency to bring up Nazi Germany in any argument inspired Godwin’s Law and the related reductio ad Hiterlum. The deeply entrenched… — Thomas M. Nichols Argument Copy Share Image
“Worse, what I find so striking today is not that people dismiss expertise, but that they do so with such frequency, on… — Thomas M. Nichols Internet Copy Share Image
“Laypeople complain about the rule of experts and they demand greater involvement in complicated national questions, but many of them only express… — Thomas M. Nichols Ignorance Copy Share Image
“Experts need to remember, always, that they are the servants and not the masters of a democratic society and a republican government.… — Thomas M. Nichols Civic virtue Copy Share Image
