4 ms·

Indeed, this is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: "Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call th

by adbge 9y ago

Indeed, this is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: "Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works 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 with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."

adrianmonk 9y ago
I actually don't know if it's amnesia. It might be something more like denial. The idea that we are surrounded by unreliable, incomplete, and misleading information is too unpleasant to contemplate, so we just push that thought out of our minds if there isn't anything concrete to suggest it is happening in the specific case we're looking at. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot when there aren't any obvious better alternatives. Which newspaper can I subscribe to instead that actually is consistently accurate? Not knowing of one, and not wanting to stop reading the news entirely, I stay with the newspaper I already have and make the best of the experience. And part of that is letting myself assume it's accurate whenever I don't have a reason to say otherwise.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  > Which newspaper can I subscribe to instead that actually is consistently accurate? I understand you aren't actually asking this question, so this response isn't directed at you personally: I often wonder why it rarely occurs to people that they can subscribe or consume multiple sources of information in order to arrive at a more accurate conclusion? I also wonder if it has anything to do with poor research skills learned in high school (or maybe even college/university), in which when doing a research paper or other similar work, they only look up the subject(s) in an encyclopedia, use that as their bibliographic source, and never go any further with deeper research using other means...? Likely, it's just laziness and apathy.
  - mercer 9y ago
    > I often wonder why it rarely occurs to people that they can subscribe or consume multiple sources of information in order to arrive at a more accurate conclusion? [...] > Likely, it's just laziness and apathy. I find that 'laziness' is generally the laziest explanation for a phenomenon. Also the least charitable, which is an aspect of interpretation that I've been trying to pay more attention to. That said, I don't disagree with you. In fact, I'm often baffled by how bad people are, in a more general sense, at exploration and search. I feel like half the stuff I teach junior coders is simply how to search for solutions to a problem, or how to build up a collection of sources that can help with the particular domain they're working in. Or even just how valuable it is to take an hour or so to read through some library's documentation before or while using it. Not to mention how to develop heuristics to decide which library is the best one to use for a particular task. In a world where most necessary information is at your fingertips, the skill to focus on is how to handle and filter all this information. Even just a cursory look at most people's google search queries makes it clear that there's a lot that people can learn in this regard. Or the fact that many people I know are barely aware of their mac's Spotlight feature, and instead click around through 'untitled folder (2)' to figure out which document named 'copy of <document> (2)' is the relevant one. (Basically, aside from the more general value of 'learning how to learn' (for which Coursera offers a wonderful MOOC with the same name), I feel that 'learning how to find information' is something that most people are shockingly bad at.) Anyways, I don't think laziness explains it. It's more that people are just not taught this as a basic skill in school, nor are they taught that this is a valuable skill. If you don't know how to find things, or how to learn things for that matter, or why this is something hugely valuable, how can you be expected to figure that out by yourself?

by adbge 9y ago

adrianmonk 9y ago

I actually don't know if it's amnesia. It might be something more like denial. The idea that we are surrounded by unreliable, incomplete, and misleading information is too unpleasant to contemplate, so we just push that thought out of our minds if there isn't anything concrete to suggest it is happening in the specific case we're looking at. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot when there aren't any obvious better alternatives. Which newspaper can I subscribe to instead that actually is consistently accurate? Not knowing of one, and not wanting to stop reading the news entirely, I stay with the newspaper I already have and make the best of the experience. And part of that is letting myself assume it's accurate whenever I don't have a reason to say otherwise.

cr0sh 9y ago
> Which newspaper can I subscribe to instead that actually is consistently accurate? I understand you aren't actually asking this question, so this response isn't directed at you personally: I often wonder why it rarely occurs to people that they can subscribe or consume multiple sources of information in order to arrive at a more accurate conclusion? I also wonder if it has anything to do with poor research skills learned in high school (or maybe even college/university), in which when doing a research paper or other similar work, they only look up the subject(s) in an encyclopedia, use that as their bibliographic source, and never go any further with deeper research using other means...? Likely, it's just laziness and apathy.
- mercer 9y ago
  > I often wonder why it rarely occurs to people that they can subscribe or consume multiple sources of information in order to arrive at a more accurate conclusion? [...] > Likely, it's just laziness and apathy. I find that 'laziness' is generally the laziest explanation for a phenomenon. Also the least charitable, which is an aspect of interpretation that I've been trying to pay more attention to. That said, I don't disagree with you. In fact, I'm often baffled by how bad people are, in a more general sense, at exploration and search. I feel like half the stuff I teach junior coders is simply how to search for solutions to a problem, or how to build up a collection of sources that can help with the particular domain they're working in. Or even just how valuable it is to take an hour or so to read through some library's documentation before or while using it. Not to mention how to develop heuristics to decide which library is the best one to use for a particular task. In a world where most necessary information is at your fingertips, the skill to focus on is how to handle and filter all this information. Even just a cursory look at most people's google search queries makes it clear that there's a lot that people can learn in this regard. Or the fact that many people I know are barely aware of their mac's Spotlight feature, and instead click around through 'untitled folder (2)' to figure out which document named 'copy of <document> (2)' is the relevant one. (Basically, aside from the more general value of 'learning how to learn' (for which Coursera offers a wonderful MOOC with the same name), I feel that 'learning how to find information' is something that most people are shockingly bad at.) Anyways, I don't think laziness explains it. It's more that people are just not taught this as a basic skill in school, nor are they taught that this is a valuable skill. If you don't know how to find things, or how to learn things for that matter, or why this is something hugely valuable, how can you be expected to figure that out by yourself?