Kevin Weitz, Psy.D. and William Bergquist, Ph.D. [Note: the content of this essay has been included in a recently published book called The Crises of Expertise and Belief. This paperback book can be purchased by clicking on this link.] To recognize superior expertise would require people to have already a surfeit of expertise themselves. David Dunning (2012) There is a …

We are ourselves a rich source of expertise regarding many matters. While we don’t always fully appreciate this expertise and often distort or make poor use of this personal expertise, it is there for our use – thanks to our capacity to process at multiples in our brain at the same time, and thanks to the recent expansion in the human brain of an advanced mental processing system (the prefrontal cortex).

In my previous essay on “the crisis of expertise”, I not only commented on leadership hubris and over-confidence, but also that many people (especially lay-people in the context of a specific complex topic) are often blatantly ignorant and largely unaware of their ignorance. A phenomenon in our modern digital world, is that information – and misinformation – is rapidly accessible …

The title “Google-fueled, Wikipedia based, Blog-sodden” is taken from Tom Nichols book entitled “The Death of Expertise”. While this description may be a little over the top, we are living through a period in our history where people are dying (as a result of the Covid pandemic), many of whom could be saved if they followed the advice of medical …