Quote by Thomas M. Nichols

““The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don’t know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they’re failing to make a logical argument. In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry. Even””

Thomas M. Nichols

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More by Thomas M. Nichols

“Conspiracy theorists manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as even stronger confirmation. After all, what better sign of a really effective conspiracy is there than a complete lack of any trace that the conspiracy exists? Facts, the absence of facts, contradictory facts: everything is proof. Nothing can…

Thomas M. Nichols

“Today, by contrast, students explode over imagined slights that are not even remotely in the same category as fighting for civil rights or being sent to war. Students now build majestic Everests from the smallest molehills, and they descend into hysteria over pranks and hoaxes. In the midst of it all, the students are learning that emotion and volume can…

Thomas M. Nichols

“And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and…

Thomas M. Nichols

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“As the economic writer Ben Casselman pointed out in 2016, most college applicants “never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a résumé or sweet-talk a potential letter-writer,” because more than three-quarters of American undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants. Only 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and fewer than 1…

Thomas M. Nichols

“People do not come to the Internet so that their bad information can be corrected or their cherished theories disproven. Rather, they ask the electronic oracle to confirm them in their ignorance. In 2015 a Washington Post writer, Caitlin Dewey, worried that fact-checking could never defeat myths and hoaxes because “no one has the time or cognitive capacity to reason…

Thomas M. Nichols

“If the public has no idea about the substance of an issue, and will vote based on who they like rather than what they want, it is difficult to put too much blame on policymakers and their expert advisers for being confused themselves. How can a republic function if the people who have sent their representatives to decide questions of…

Thomas M. Nichols

“The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge. This is new in American culture,…

Thomas M. Nichols

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“At the root of all this is an inability among laypeople to understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything. The fact of the matter is that experts are more often right than wrong, especially on essential matters of fact. And yet the public constantly searches…

Thomas M. Nichols

“The requirements of a degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), a demanding foreign language, or a rigorous degree in the humanities can be a different matter than a major in communications or visual arts or—as much as it pains me to say it—political science. Every campus has “default majors,” chosen when a student has no real idea…

Thomas M. Nichols

“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 health trouble, including emphysema, and died after an operation to repair a heart valve. Pasceri, however, was convinced that one of his mother’s doctors, Michael Davidson—the director of endovascular cardiac surgery at a top Boston hospital and a…

Thomas M. Nichols