8 ms·

What you're describing is Gell-Mann Amnesia: "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject

What you're describing is Gell-Mann Amnesia: "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." -Michael Crichton

nether 10y ago
More people are interested in world events than in science, so it's reasonable to assume a newspaper will set a higher standard of reporting for those events. A journalist who studied political science isn't equally inept at writing on all subjects; he might have some very good insights on politics. Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields.
- jcoffland 10y ago
  > Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields. Wow, that could hardly be more wrong. HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects. Sure there is a bias towards software but that's hardly the limit. Even if HN was only read by SW exports assuming that they don't know about anything else is ridiculous. Not that HN is nonsense free. Your comment for example.
  - adwn 10y ago
    > HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects. Although I agree with this, there is also a lot of nonsense and factually incorrect statements. Not everyone is an expert in every field, and many people will make bold claims about topics in which they're not well versed – even on HN. Unfortunately, this applies to me as well sometimes.
mattkrause 10y ago
This quote has always bugged me a little bit. It does seem reasonable to expect that reporters and editors know more about the major world events that are the paper's bread and butter and less about other things. The structure of a typical science section doesn't help. There are typically only a few reporters--often only one-- and they tend to cover whatever's timely (e.g., has recently been announced/opened/published), which doesn't let them build up much expertise. I think this also explains why pop-science articles tend to conflate background (here's what was known before this paper was published) and whatever actual result was: it's all new to the reporter. That said, I was recently interviewed by CBC about my research and I thought they did a very good job. Everyone seemed prepared, asked reasonable questions, and the final product matched what I said!
- fegu 10y ago
  I have also been interviewed by CBC (about floppy disks, oh well) and they were great. They put me in the best possible light, made me sound coherent, and got the facts correct.
eigenvector 10y ago
My favourite example of this is the Economist news magazine. The Economist reports on a much larger range of country and topics than the typical magazine or newspaper. Many of its readers like it for that exact reason: it gives them information on stories they won't normally find in their local or national news sources and they want to be informed about, say, hydroelectric developments in the Congo. The problem is that writing about 25 different countries in a single issue doesn't mean they actually have experts on most of those places or people on the ground to do original reporting. Often, it devolves into British or American writers regurgitating inaccurate information from the Internet. But if it's the only thing you read about, say, forest exports from Myanmar, you have no reason to question it. The easiest way to see this is to be a non-US/UK/EU person and read an article in the Economist about your own country. Then you realize that all the other articles are just as simplistic and uninformed.
- colordrops 10y ago
  The Economist also has a fairly evident political agenda.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    I don't follow it that closely, but aren't they also pretty up-front about their own bias? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance
    - gaius 10y ago
      Indeed, and that is why I very rarely read it - for me, it would be too echo-chambery. I read the NYT quite deliberately and every day, enumerate why Krugman and Blow are wrong about whatever they are pontificating about...
  - siberianbear 10y ago
    Has The Economist shifted? I started reading it in about 2000, and at the time I really liked it because it seemed so intelligent and neutral. It seemed like such a pleasure to read something that went deep into interesting topics without an obvious axe to grind. In the past ten years it seems to have drifted gradually leftward. Sometimes I can't reconsile The Economist of 2000 with the one of 2016. Did The Economist move gradually to the left or did I move to the right?
robryan 10y ago
You see this all the time with startup news. Read a mainstream article about a startup you know personally. Sure the main details are all there, but the small details are changed/ omitted to fit the mould of the story the author had in mind.
Dylan16807 10y ago
>read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate This was not stated. The opposite was implied in GP's case. It's relevant to mention this, but it is emphatically not what was being described.
beefield 10y ago
Funny. After reading this, I decided to comment that in my mind The Economist is a somewhat good counter example. Then I noticed that pretty much all other comments were already discussing TE. I guess I can keep on paying my subscription.
masondixon 10y ago
I don't see this effect. The more inaccurate and biased stories I read makes me read the other stories actively looking for biases. I think people are turning off MSM big time after this election.
chris_wot 10y ago
It seems rather ironic to me that this theory, which uses as it's basis that some journalists mix up cause and effect, then turns around and in essence posits that because some articles have errors it means that all articles have the same category of error. It's not at all evident to me that every article in a more reputable news source will make errors in every thing they report on.
ideonexus 10y ago
There's a bit of irony in this quote coming from Michael Crichton. When I started hanging out with the Science Online community in the early 00s, I learned that Crichton was widely regarded as spreading bad science by regularly citing discredited studies or fringe research in his books. He was also known for getting even basic science wrong, like in "Jurassic Park," where the scientists fill-in missing dinosaur DNA by splicing it with reptile and amphibian DNA. Anyone who has studied dinosaurs knows that their closest living relatives are birds. How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact? Then there was that embarrassingly awful book attacking the idea of climate change... but I think Crichton is a great example of this Gell-Mann phenomena. I know many people, even academics, who have read his books and will bring them up as having a degree of science fact.
- talmand 10y ago
  >> How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact? Because following that scientific fact would have ruined one of the major plot points of the story? Fiction authors do take some liberties to suit their fictional stories.
- eonwe 10y ago
  Jurassic Park was published 1990. I don't think that birds being the closest relatives of dinosaurs was established beyond doubt at that time as the theory of dinosaurs being ancestors of birds was revived only in the 1970s.
specialist 10y ago
Michael Crichton? The xenophobe and anthropocentric climate change denier? Pot, meet kettle. He should have stuck to fantasy land, err, show business.
- recursive 10y ago
  The quote can stand on its own merit. Discrediting the source doesn't change the words.
  - specialist 10y ago
    I've changed my mind. Thank you. Who better to explain profiteering from misogyny, lying, hysteria, anti-intellectionalism, war-mongering, amnesia, obfuscation than Micheal Crichton?
irrational 10y ago
It's funny to me the quote mentions Palestine. I once spent six months in Israel on study-abroad (I was a near eastern studies major). While there I saw certain things firsthand. When I came back I noticed that all the US newspapers I could find in the University library all reported falsehoods regarding the events. I actually found that the BBCs coverage was the most honest and accurate. This experience has always left me wondering, "If an event that I have personal knowledge of was not reported accurately in the newspapers, how do I know that other events that I do not have personal knowledge of are reported accurately?" It doesn't seem to be enough to use multiple sources since all of the US sources I could find were inaccurate and how would I know if the BBC was always accurate?
- xemdetia 10y ago
  The main way I've found is to just read something from multiple countries. For a given article I care about or feel dubious about I always try to get at 3 or more country's take of it. While it doesn't help you find the 'truth' writers tend to misinterpret the same things different ways while things that are actually reported figures will lean more consistent. Also for lots of things there is generally the direct source available if it is economic/legal/statistically relevant and a quick skim of that is a good get you up to speed thing. The writer made mention of something as 'interesting' so that's just a key to me to go looking for information in that direction where otherwise I would not.
  - irrational 10y ago
    One thing I should point out is that my story took place more than 2 decades ago in the pre-WWW days. It was a lot harder back then to check sources in multiple countries.
LordKano 10y ago
I have a couple of areas of interest where my knowledge is quite deep and I notice this whenever there's anything about those subjects written in the local or national press. I see people asking why we can't have a meaningful dialog about the subject and it's because at least half of us don't understand the basics of the issue.

nether 10y ago

More people are interested in world events than in science, so it's reasonable to assume a newspaper will set a higher standard of reporting for those events. A journalist who studied political science isn't equally inept at writing on all subjects; he might have some very good insights on politics. Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields.

jcoffland 10y ago
> Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields. Wow, that could hardly be more wrong. HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects. Sure there is a bias towards software but that's hardly the limit. Even if HN was only read by SW exports assuming that they don't know about anything else is ridiculous. Not that HN is nonsense free. Your comment for example.
- adwn 10y ago
  > HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects. Although I agree with this, there is also a lot of nonsense and factually incorrect statements. Not everyone is an expert in every field, and many people will make bold claims about topics in which they're not well versed – even on HN. Unfortunately, this applies to me as well sometimes.

mattkrause 10y ago

This quote has always bugged me a little bit. It does seem reasonable to expect that reporters and editors know more about the major world events that are the paper's bread and butter and less about other things. The structure of a typical science section doesn't help. There are typically only a few reporters--often only one-- and they tend to cover whatever's timely (e.g., has recently been announced/opened/published), which doesn't let them build up much expertise. I think this also explains why pop-science articles tend to conflate background (here's what was known before this paper was published) and whatever actual result was: it's all new to the reporter. That said, I was recently interviewed by CBC about my research and I thought they did a very good job. Everyone seemed prepared, asked reasonable questions, and the final product matched what I said!

fegu 10y ago
I have also been interviewed by CBC (about floppy disks, oh well) and they were great. They put me in the best possible light, made me sound coherent, and got the facts correct.

eigenvector 10y ago

My favourite example of this is the Economist news magazine. The Economist reports on a much larger range of country and topics than the typical magazine or newspaper. Many of its readers like it for that exact reason: it gives them information on stories they won't normally find in their local or national news sources and they want to be informed about, say, hydroelectric developments in the Congo. The problem is that writing about 25 different countries in a single issue doesn't mean they actually have experts on most of those places or people on the ground to do original reporting. Often, it devolves into British or American writers regurgitating inaccurate information from the Internet. But if it's the only thing you read about, say, forest exports from Myanmar, you have no reason to question it. The easiest way to see this is to be a non-US/UK/EU person and read an article in the Economist about your own country. Then you realize that all the other articles are just as simplistic and uninformed.

colordrops 10y ago
The Economist also has a fairly evident political agenda.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  I don't follow it that closely, but aren't they also pretty up-front about their own bias? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance
  - gaius 10y ago
    Indeed, and that is why I very rarely read it - for me, it would be too echo-chambery. I read the NYT quite deliberately and every day, enumerate why Krugman and Blow are wrong about whatever they are pontificating about...
- siberianbear 10y ago
  Has The Economist shifted? I started reading it in about 2000, and at the time I really liked it because it seemed so intelligent and neutral. It seemed like such a pleasure to read something that went deep into interesting topics without an obvious axe to grind. In the past ten years it seems to have drifted gradually leftward. Sometimes I can't reconsile The Economist of 2000 with the one of 2016. Did The Economist move gradually to the left or did I move to the right?

robryan 10y ago

You see this all the time with startup news. Read a mainstream article about a startup you know personally. Sure the main details are all there, but the small details are changed/ omitted to fit the mould of the story the author had in mind.

Dylan16807 10y ago

>read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate This was not stated. The opposite was implied in GP's case. It's relevant to mention this, but it is emphatically not what was being described.

beefield 10y ago

Funny. After reading this, I decided to comment that in my mind The Economist is a somewhat good counter example. Then I noticed that pretty much all other comments were already discussing TE. I guess I can keep on paying my subscription.

masondixon 10y ago

I don't see this effect. The more inaccurate and biased stories I read makes me read the other stories actively looking for biases. I think people are turning off MSM big time after this election.

chris_wot 10y ago

It seems rather ironic to me that this theory, which uses as it's basis that some journalists mix up cause and effect, then turns around and in essence posits that because some articles have errors it means that all articles have the same category of error. It's not at all evident to me that every article in a more reputable news source will make errors in every thing they report on.

ideonexus 10y ago

There's a bit of irony in this quote coming from Michael Crichton. When I started hanging out with the Science Online community in the early 00s, I learned that Crichton was widely regarded as spreading bad science by regularly citing discredited studies or fringe research in his books. He was also known for getting even basic science wrong, like in "Jurassic Park," where the scientists fill-in missing dinosaur DNA by splicing it with reptile and amphibian DNA. Anyone who has studied dinosaurs knows that their closest living relatives are birds. How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact? Then there was that embarrassingly awful book attacking the idea of climate change... but I think Crichton is a great example of this Gell-Mann phenomena. I know many people, even academics, who have read his books and will bring them up as having a degree of science fact.

talmand 10y ago
>> How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact? Because following that scientific fact would have ruined one of the major plot points of the story? Fiction authors do take some liberties to suit their fictional stories.
eonwe 10y ago
Jurassic Park was published 1990. I don't think that birds being the closest relatives of dinosaurs was established beyond doubt at that time as the theory of dinosaurs being ancestors of birds was revived only in the 1970s.

specialist 10y ago

Michael Crichton? The xenophobe and anthropocentric climate change denier? Pot, meet kettle. He should have stuck to fantasy land, err, show business.

recursive 10y ago
The quote can stand on its own merit. Discrediting the source doesn't change the words.
- specialist 10y ago
  I've changed my mind. Thank you. Who better to explain profiteering from misogyny, lying, hysteria, anti-intellectionalism, war-mongering, amnesia, obfuscation than Micheal Crichton?

irrational 10y ago

It's funny to me the quote mentions Palestine. I once spent six months in Israel on study-abroad (I was a near eastern studies major). While there I saw certain things firsthand. When I came back I noticed that all the US newspapers I could find in the University library all reported falsehoods regarding the events. I actually found that the BBCs coverage was the most honest and accurate. This experience has always left me wondering, "If an event that I have personal knowledge of was not reported accurately in the newspapers, how do I know that other events that I do not have personal knowledge of are reported accurately?" It doesn't seem to be enough to use multiple sources since all of the US sources I could find were inaccurate and how would I know if the BBC was always accurate?

xemdetia 10y ago
The main way I've found is to just read something from multiple countries. For a given article I care about or feel dubious about I always try to get at 3 or more country's take of it. While it doesn't help you find the 'truth' writers tend to misinterpret the same things different ways while things that are actually reported figures will lean more consistent. Also for lots of things there is generally the direct source available if it is economic/legal/statistically relevant and a quick skim of that is a good get you up to speed thing. The writer made mention of something as 'interesting' so that's just a key to me to go looking for information in that direction where otherwise I would not.
- irrational 10y ago
  One thing I should point out is that my story took place more than 2 decades ago in the pre-WWW days. It was a lot harder back then to check sources in multiple countries.

LordKano 10y ago

I have a couple of areas of interest where my knowledge is quite deep and I notice this whenever there's anything about those subjects written in the local or national press. I see people asking why we can't have a meaningful dialog about the subject and it's because at least half of us don't understand the basics of the issue.