Wider access to information is claimed to have weakened deference to specialist knowledge, and to have raised confidence faster than competence.
Nichols's argument connects easy access to information, the fluency it produces, and the Dunning-Kruger pattern. The mechanism is plausible and the historical claim is the weak part: deference to experts in earlier periods is asserted rather than measured, and trust series do not show the uniform collapse the title suggests.
In practice
- A patient arriving with an hour of reading and a firm diagnosis has confidence that tracks fluency rather than knowledge.
- A claim that deference has collapsed requires a baseline of deference that was never measured.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is fluency: easy access to information produces confidence faster than competence. Another is exposure, since the internet shows the public how much experts disagree. A third is institutional, as visible failures cost credibility.
- In its favour
- Confidence-competence gaps are measurable, and trust in several institutions has fallen in long-running surveys.
- Against it
- It is a polemic rather than a measured decline: trust in scientists and doctors is stable or high on many measures, and deference to experts has risen and fallen before without the internet.
- Standing
- A polemical thesis rather than a measured decline. Survey evidence on trust in scientists and doctors is more mixed than the claim implies, with some measures stable and the changes concentrated by group and by domain.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change