I really thought I was going to hate this book, and at first, I did. Nichols’ premise is that people trust experts less today than they did before. I haven’t seen any proof of that, and I have seen some evidence to the contrary (2009 replication of Milgram’s famous authority experiment). I thought the thesis was something along the lines of “trust experts” but it’s more like. “Everybody’s an idiot sometimes, here are some examples”. Which is actually something I sympathize with quite a bit.
For the first half of the book, Nichol’s bashes on the self-educated, and the hobbyists. I wasn’t a fan of this stuff. Yes, well-educated people tend to be right more often than the average hobbyist but the ratatouille doctrine actually holds up pretty well in this regard. “Not everyone can be a great artist, but great artists can come from anywhere.” An illustrative case study evidencing this point is NASA’s 2010 open innovation platform where dozens of problems that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men at NASA were struggling to solve were made into a kind of challenge for anybody to solve. A semi-retired radio frequency engineer, among others, repeatedly crushed the benchmarks that the bonafide experts couldn’t touch.
The second half of the book is bashing on Universities (especially students), journalists, professors, and other kinds of “experts”. This stuff is 24 karat gold. The strong points deal with sloppy research, statistical illiteracy, bad logic, domain infringement, and hypersensitivity.
“When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.” -Nichols
Verdict: Recommend with a tablespoon of salt. Realize he’s got his own agenda and the ranting can be obnoxious.