The Quiet Collapse of Who We Believe

A scientist’s honest look at why expertise is under fire — and what those of us who hold it still owe you.

There’s a store in Canada called Sports Experts. When someone wants to know whether to buy backcountry or recreational snowshoes, they walk in and ask a person who knows . We do this constantly. We read reviews before buying a fridge, we seek a specialist when a diagnosis frightens us, we send our research papers to reviewers who know more than we do. And yet, at the very same time, expertise is under assault more than it has ever been.

That contradiction is the story I want to tell you today. Because it’s not really a story about facts. It’s a story about us.

What We Actually Threw Away

When the first COVID-19 cases appeared in Wuhan at the end of 2019, nobody imagined the emergency would stretch on the way it did . What surprised me more than the virus was watching one of the strangest social effects take hold — a growing loss of confidence in science and in the people who practise it .

Here’s the part worth sitting with. The problem was never doubting an expert. Doubt is healthy. The problem was discarding expert knowledge completely in favour of individual experience and personal perspective. There’s a difference, and it matters enormously.

Tom Nichols, who wrote The Death of Expertise, put his finger on it. He wrote the book, he said, “because the general public began to lecture experts in the fields that they dominate” . If it were simply a case of not trusting a scientific claim, we’d do something reasonable — we’d seek a second opinion, the way you would with a worrying medical diagnosis. But that’s not what happened. For a large slice of the public, the belief took hold that the way they search, process, and learn on their own is equal to — or more truthful than — what real experts provide.

That’s not a misinformation problem. It’s a cognition problem. And you can’t fix a cognition problem by adding more sources, because a person rooted in that belief will only hunt for the sources that confirm it .

How Emotion Beats Fact — And Why That’s Not New

Expertise is how we separate fact and truth from emotion and myth. The trouble is that emotion and myth are often far more powerful, and far more enduring, than either . That imbalance, sharpened during the digitally saturated 2010s, is one of the defining marks of our moment . A culture that has taught itself to disbelieve, that celebrates the iconoclast, and that has handed everyone a megaphone — that culture becomes fertile ground for anti-expert feeling .

The irony stings. Experts today have more learning, more experience, and more exposure than at any point in history . Governor Jerry Brown of California said it plainly: “There’s an ongoing attack on expertise” . And Barbara Mistick, who leads the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, went further — “We’ve decided as a culture that experts are villains. We can only hope that this is temporary. Our civilisation depends on it” .

There’s a political thread running through this too. Nichols traces a pattern back to 2016, when leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro built campaigns by casting themselves as spokesmen for people deceived by established elites . They sowed mistrust that reached past the political class and into academia itself . Nichols admitted his own naivety — he’d assumed a crisis like climate change or a pandemic would push the public and the scientists back together. Instead, he said, “I didn’t consider that there would be a complete political and media infrastructure with a serious interest in not helping the public get out of a state of ignorance” .

Read that twice. An infrastructure with an interest in keeping people ignorant. Individualism, incentivised by these structures, became more important than facts.

But Let’s Be Fair — Experts Have Earned Some of This

I won’t pretend the anger comes from nowhere. Experts are mostly right; that’s why we celebrate them at all . But sometimes they’re spectacularly, even hilariously, wrong . Aristotle, watching barnacles form on a boat’s hull, decided life could be spontaneously generated . Percival Lowell, who founded a genuine observatory in Arizona, convinced himself the “canals” on Mars were an irrigation system built by intelligent life .

And some errors carried terrible costs. Between the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 — with the Bhopal gas leak of 1984 in between — a seven-year run of disasters shook public faith . In each case, the reassurances of experts proved wrong. At Bhopal, where nearly 4,000 people died and more than half a million were exposed to toxins, the environmental and health damage continues to this day .

So when someone tells me they don’t automatically trust the white coats, I understand where the wound came from. The task isn’t to demand blind faith. It’s to rebuild something better.

The Weight a Scientist Carries

Society lifts scientists to the level of “super experts” and expects them to solve our problems — while remaining wary, even fearful, of the very progress those scientists enable . We hand them a high degree of responsibility “for our lives” and expect them to serve humanity . That’s a heavy thing to carry.

History gives us four men who carried it in radically different ways.

Wernher von Braun built rockets he was so enthralled by that he barely paused to consider how they’d be used . His V-2 rockets, mass-produced by some 20,000 workers who perished at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, killed around 8,000 civilians in London and Antwerp . Confronted with the damage, he might well have shrugged, as the satirist Tom Lehrer imagined — “this is not my department” . He was called “an amoral opportunist” .

Fritz Haber gave the world synthetic fertiliser and, with it, the food to feed a growing planet — then personally organised the first chlorine gas attack at Ypres in 1915, over the objections of fellow scientists . “During peace time a scientist belongs to the World,” he said, “but during war time he belongs to his country” . (The regime he served later forced him out for his Jewish heritage. History has a cruel sense of symmetry.)

Edward Teller, father of the American hydrogen bomb, stayed resistant to ethical arguments against nuclear weapons even as colleagues pleaded for restraint .

And then Andrei Sakharov. The father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, who looked at what he’d made and chose to speak against it — campaigning against atmospheric testing, helping bring about the 1963 Test Ban Treaty, founding a human rights committee, and paying for it with exile and constant surveillance .

Four men, one kind of power, four different answers to the same question: what do I owe the world for what I know? That question hasn’t gone away. It’s ours now.

What Journalists Owe Us Too

The scientist doesn’t stand alone in this. The journalist stands beside them, and carries a load of their own.

Good science journalism treats knowledge as valuable in its own right, while accepting that science is limited and uncertain — which is exactly why it needs expertise from outside science to examine how discoveries connect to society . That’s a mature model. It doesn’t worship scientists and it doesn’t mock them. It holds them to account and translates them honestly.

The democratisation of content can be a wonderful thing when someone genuinely wants to learn . It turns dangerous when the goal is being informed about a situation drenched in uncertainty, and the web serves up contradictory, polarised material from unreliable sources . Sorting that mess is the journalist’s real job. Not amplifying the loudest voice. Not manufacturing a false balance between 97 percent of climate scientists and one contrarian .

Here’s the Part We’d Rather Skip

There’s an uncomfortable truth buried in all this, and I’d rather name it than dodge it. Having expert knowledge doesn’t make anyone ethically privileged or more likely to make a virtuous decision than the rest of us. Von Braun and Haber prove that. So we’re left with genuine unease — many ethical choices now require such technical knowledge that only experts can competently address them, yet expertise alone doesn’t grant the wisdom to choose well .

That tension doesn’t resolve neatly. And I think pretending it does is part of how we lost trust in the first place.

Let me simplify one idea for you, because the philosophers make it dense. Being a reliable expert isn’t only about knowing your field. It’s about a duty toward the people who depend on your word — a responsibility to be a trustworthy informant, sometimes even leaning on knowledge outside your own to get it right. Expertise, in other words, is not a trophy. It’s a relationship.

So Where Does This Leave You And Me?

Science was never a switch you flip to silence your worries and hand you a tidy answer . The work is slow — study the situation, form a hypothesis, test it, fail, adjust, try again. Uncertainty, trial, error, and the occasional success are the daily texture of a scientist’s life .

Expertise grows the same way — through diligence and discipline, sometimes bending toward the light of a good mentor, sometimes rising out of the rubble of discredited ideas . It’s built slowly and it’s dismantled fast. That’s the asymmetry we’re living inside.

Here’s the one thing I’d ask you to hold onto. Learn to tell the difference between the opinions you form from your own experience and the verifiable facts that come out of scientific work . Not because your experience doesn’t matter — it does. But because knowing the difference gives you firmer ground to stand on when you make the decisions that actually shape your life and the lives around you .

We rely on experts to function as a society, whether we like it or not — that knowledge and skill is what fuels human progress and keeps it going . Watching it get devalued should frighten us . It frightens me.

What kind of trust do you think we can rebuild — and who has to move first, the expert or the public?