The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols.
From the dust jacket - Thanks to technological advances and increasing levels of education we have access to more information than ever before. Yet rather than ushering in a new era of enlightenment, the information age has helped fuel a surge on narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has cripple informed debate 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 or dismissed as undemocratic elitism.
This has become the norm in the domains I work
- Risk management
- Program Planning and Controls
- Cost, Schedule, and Technical performance estimating
- Managerial Finance
And the domains of our neighbors and colleagues
- Climate science
- Medical practitioners
- Nursing practitioners
- Business management
- Dog training
- Horse training
- Gardening
Everyone's a fricken expert because they read it on the Internet
But in fact, they're not, they're simply informed by a possibly erroneous source and have failed to do their homework to verify and validate that source and the ideas the source is producing.
My favorite, of course, is the fallacy of #Noestimates and the unfounded conjecture that decisions can be made in the presence of uncertainty without estimating the consequences of those decisions
If you're interested in how credible estimates are made on software systems, here's a Compendium of Estimating Resources
