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To say that all Chinese people are short, however, is to stereotype. The key to a stereotype is that it is impervious to factual testing. A stereotype brooks no annoying interference with reality, and it relies on the clever use of confirmation bias to dismiss all exceptions as irrelevant. (Racists have mastered this mode of argument: “All Romanians are thieves except this one lady I work with, but she’s different.”) Stereotypes are not predictions, they’re conclusions. That’s why it’s called “prejudice”: it relies on pre-judging.
The Death of Expertise
Tom Nichols
Experts can tell the voters what is likely to happen, but voters must engage those issues and decide what they value most, and therefore what they want done. Letting Boston slide into the harbor is not my preferred outcome, but it is not a failure of expertise if people ignore the experts and let it happen anyway: it is instead a failure of civic engagement. If Boston is to become Venice, it should be by choice, not by accident. When voters remain utterly unwilling to understand important issues because they are too difficult or discomfiting, it is unsurprising that experts will give up talking to them and instead rely on their positions in the policy world to advocate for their own solutions.
The Death of Expertise
Tom Nichols
DEEP TIME
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the creation of Twitter than to the creation of the Great Pyramid. The T. Rex lived closer in time to us than to the Stegosaurus. These facts (and evolution) are counterintuitive, since our puny minds cannot grasp the vastness of time.
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