The Collapse of Knowledge

Once upon a time, facts felt solid. Science worked. Expertise mattered. If something was true, it stayed true long enough to build a life on it. Then something quietly broke. In The Collapse of Knowledge, psychologist Lee Hopkins examines what happens when the systems designed to help us understand reality begin rewarding certainty over accuracy, confidence over curiosity, and performance over truth. This is not an anti-science book. It is a book written by someone who believed in science completely, taught it, lived by it, and watched its foundations warp under incentives no one wanted to talk about. Drawing on psychology, social science, lived experience, and a darkly humorous eye for human behaviour, Hopkins explores: ¿ Why being "right" feels so good it can override truth ¿ How expertise quietly turns into authority ¿ Why social media rewards confidence, not accuracy ¿ How psychiatry and medicine can follow evidence and still miss the point ¿ Why scepticism itself has become exhausting ¿ What happens when AI inherits our broken epistemology This book is for readers who feel an unnamed unease when experts speak with absolute certainty. For people who sense that something is wrong, but can't quite articulate what. For professionals, thinkers, clinicians, and ordinary readers who want to stay sane inside an information economy that profits from confusion. Written with clarity, humility, and an unflinching refusal to oversimplify, The Collapse of Knowledge does not offer comforting answers. It offers something rarer. A way to think again. ************* Target readers ¿ Readers of Adam Grant, Jonathan Haidt, Nassim Taleb ¿ Psychologists, therapists, coaches, academics ¿ Professionals burned out by "expert culture" ¿ Intelligent general readers who distrust slogans ¿ Neurodivergent readers who spot system failures early