This blog post got a bit out of hand. Because it's a blog post. That is too many pages long.

So the basic idea is that people tend to ignore expert advice, and that is bad. And then he goes on to dissect this idea in many ways that are not only boring, but they tend to become irelevant. I noticed that the man doesn't seem to understand the Internet culture very well, and many of his examples are shallow, or blown out of proportion. For example, he assigns the identification of a faked document about George W. Bush's military service to „crowd wisdom”, not to experts, but in that crowd there were experts that once they revealed their observation, the crowd just amplified their message. Same about the doubts about Wikipedia, that while not a reliable source all the time, experts do contribute to this project.

He quotes very little data - it's not a very well researched book - it's a collection of comments on stuff you could read in the press. There's few data to back these opinions. And while I think that Nichols has a good idea, he's not serving the idea very well. Some examples cannot be verified, like the dialogue of an expert (Dan Kaszeta) with a student, where the expert was a bit ignorant and arrogant. The core problem is that sometimes Nichols quotes opinions as facts, and it's hard to discern sometimes between the two.

As I said, for a blog post it would've been enough to state the thesis, then pick one example from each area. Going for the long form doesn't bring more value to the book. The idea is stated in the first few pages, and perhaps the most important thing that is not in the title is emphasizing on the difference between generalization and stereotyping.