Experts And The Will Of The People

The rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on the legitimacy of scientific expertise in political decision making. This book explores the differences between populism and pluralist democracy and their relationship with science. Pluralist democracy is characterised by respect for minority choices and a system of checks and balances that prevents power being concentrated in one group, while populism treats minorities as traitorous so as to concentrate power in the government. The book argues that scientific expertise – and science more generally -- should be understood as one of the checks and balances in pluralist democracies. It defends science as ‘craftwork with integrity’ and shows how its crucial role in democratic societies can be rethought and that it must be publicly explained. This book will be of value to scholars and practitioners working across STS as well as to anyone interested in decoding the populist agenda against science.

Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.

In the last several decades, there has been a surge of interest in expertise in the social scientific, philosophical, and legal literatures. While it is tempting to attribute this surge of interest in expertise to the emergence and consolidation of a "knowledge society," "post-industrial society," or "network society," it is more likely that the debates about expertise are symptomatic of significant change and upheaval. As the number of contenders for expert status has increased, as the bases for their claims have become more diverse, and as the struggles between these would-be experts intensified, expertise became problematic and contested. In The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics, Gil Eyal and Thomas Medvetz have brought together a broad group of scholars who have engaged substantively and theoretically with debates regarding the nature of expertise and the social roles of experts to examine these areas within sociology and allied disciplines. The analyses take an historical and relational approach to the topic and are motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today. Among the topics considered here are the value and relevance of the boundary between experts and laypeople; the causes and consequences of mistrust in experts; the meanings and social uses of objectivity; and the significance of recent transformations in the organization of the professions. Bringing together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise, this Handbook connects interdisciplinary work done in science and technology studies with the more classic concerns, topics, and concepts of sociologists of professions and intellectuals.

To ordinary people, science used to seem infallible. Scientists were heroes, selflessly pursuing knowledge for the common good. More recently, a series of scientific scandals, frauds and failures have led us to question science’s pre-eminence. Revelations such as Climategate, or debates about the safety of the MMR vaccine, have dented our confidence in science. In this provocative new book Harry Collins seeks to redeem scientific expertise, and reasserts science’s special status. Despite the messy realities of day-to-day scientific endeavor, he emphasizes the superior moral qualities of science, dismissing the dubious “default” expertise displayed by many of those outside the scientific community. Science, he argues, should serve as an example to ordinary citizens of how to think and act, and not the other way round.

"In Trust Us, We're Experts! journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber unmask the sneaky and widespread methods industry uses to influence opinion through bogus reports, doctored data, and manufactured facts. Rampton and Stauber show how corporations and public relations firms have seized upon remarkable new ways of exploiting your trust to get you to buy what they have to sell: letting you hear their pitch from a neutral third party, such as a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog group." "The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged in order to make you believe what they say. In many cases, they have been paid handsomely for their "opinions.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

We live in times of increasing public distrust of the main institutions of modern society. Experts, including scientists, are suspected of working to hidden agendas or serving vested interests. The solution is usually seen as more public scrutiny and more control by democratic institutions – experts must be subservient to social and political life. In this book, Harry Collins and Robert Evans take a radically different view. They argue that, rather than democracies needing to be protected from science, democratic societies need to learn how to value science in this new age of uncertainty. By emphasizing that science is a moral enterprise, guided by values that should matter to all, they show how science can support democracy without destroying it and propose a new institution – The Owls – that can mediate between science and society and improve technological decision-making for the benefit of all.

This book offers an important critique of the ways in which mainstream education contributes to perpetuate an inherently unjust and exploitative Development model. Instead, the book proposes a new anarchistic, postdevelopmental framework that goes beyond Development and schooling to ask what really makes a meaningful life. Challenging the notion of Development as a win-win relationship between civil society, the state and the private sector, the book argues that Development perpetuates a hierarchical world order and that the education system serves to reinforce and re-legitimise this unequal order. Drawing on real-life examples of ‘unschooling’ and ‘self-designed learning’ in India, the book demonstrates that more autonomous approaches such as these can help to fundamentally challenge dominant ideas of education, equality, development and what it means to lead meaningful lives. The interdisciplinary approach pursued in this book makes it perfect for anyone with interests across the areas of education, development studies, radical political theory and philosophy.

Machine generated contents note: 1. Experts, activists, and self-educating electorates T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt and John Barry Ryan; 2. The imperatives of interdependence T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt and John Barry Ryan; 3. Experts, activists, and the social communication of political expertise T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt, Jeanette Mendez, Tracy Osborn and John Barry Ryan; 4. Unanimity, discord, and opportunities for opinion leadership T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt, Jeanette Mendez and John Barry Ryan; 5. Informational asymmetries among voters T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt and John Barry Ryan; 6. Expertise and bias in political communication networks T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt, Alexander K. Mayer and John Barry Ryan; 7. Interdependence, communication, and calculation T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt and John Barry Ryan; 8. Partisanship and the efficacy of social communication in constrained environments John Barry Ryan; 9. Noise, bias, and expertise: the dynamics of becoming informed Robert Huckfeldt, Matthew Pietryka and Jack Reilly; 10. Opinion leaders, expertise, and the complex dynamics of political communication Robert Huckfeldt, Matthew Pietryka and Jack Reilly; 11. Experts, activists, and democratic prospects T.K. Ahn, Robert Huckfeldt and John Barry Ryan.