9 ms·
> I'm a Whole Foods employee, having one of those rare (for me) moments where I can reasonably be considered very well-informed on the subject of a news article
by IkmoIkmo 9y ago
> I'm a Whole Foods employee, having one of those rare (for me) moments where I can reasonably be considered very well-informed on the subject of a news article, and it's a little bit disturbing just how misinformed and one-sided the article is.
"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."
- phyller 9y agoI wish I could upvote this twice. I know its just anecdotal data, but the rare occasions I have had personal knowledge of news articles they have been grossly inaccurate, every time. Where is the quote from? Edit: from another comment: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
- loeg 9y ago> Where is the quote from? Michael Crichton. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann#Quotes_about_Gell-Mann https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann#Quotes_about_...
- specialist 9y agoOh. Crichton coined that phrase? That's some potent unintentional irony right there.
- fouc 9y agoHow so?
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoI'm guessing he is just saying that Crichton's writing was known for sensationalizing science, rather than accuracy. So he basically did the same thing he criticizes reporters for. (Which isn't totally fair imo, because the news should be held to a higher standard than a book about a dinosaur park)
- rootusrootus 9y agoHe vocally let his political ideology direct his selective interpretation of facts around climate change. So it's perhaps a little ironic that he would make an observation about biased reporting coming from other people or organizations. I would argue that it's not ironic, it's expected. IMO people most easily observe the faults in others that they themselves exhibit.
- hueving 9y agoHe's not purporting to report news. So no irony that I can see?
- specialist 9y agohttps://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Michael_Crichton https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Michael_Crichton
- casefields 9y agoIt comes from his amazing essay called 'Why Speculate' which you can read here: http://docdro.id/4wgVecr http://docdro.id/4wgVecr
- asciimo 9y agoAmen. Because it would be terrifying to admit that very few of the people who inform the world actually know what they're talking about.
- jxramos 9y ago"All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things." Bob Knight
- irrational 9y agoHeh, it is amusing that the quote ends with "far-off Palestine". In the mid-90s I returned from living in the middle east for 6 months as a student (Jordan, Israel and Egypt). I personally witnessed an event and upon returning I was reading about said event in a US newspaper and was shocked at how wrong it was. This was the first time I experienced this effect. However, instead of turning to other parts of the paper and trusting what they said, I lost all faith in newspapers on that day and have not read one since. If I know they lied or, more generously, misunderstood what happened about something I know personally about, how can I ever trust anything they write about things I don't know about personally? I can't, I won't, and I haven't.
- coupdejarnac 9y agoWhat was the event you witnessed?
- pacaro 9y agoHere’s an example: while in college, I was in a building that was on fire. A passerby ran into the entrance and asked us if we knew the building was in fire (we didn’t). When the fire was reported by the student newspaper, the only details they got correct was the date and that there was a fire. The journalist spoke with me and with the student whose dorm room burned. Nothing we said made it into the article. It was far more interesting to invent a story about how nobody knew if he was in his room when the fire started, than the prosaic truth that I knew he was in the library. This happened in 1990 and the cause of the fire was a pc catching fire while engaged in the slow and perilous task of reformatting a hard drive.
- ju-st 9y agoFrom where do you get information when you don't read news articles?
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoI've gone for months and years long periods of avoiding the news, including sites like this, and live has always been qualitatively better during those periods. I'm not convinced I understand what purpose being informed of global politics or local dramas serves, other than maybe having something to talk about with friends and colleagues.
- redleggedfrog 9y agoIkmoIkmo, that's an exceptionally insightful and informative reply. I've never heard of that effect before, but the gist of the idea has bothered me for a long time. I was about to reply to tinfins "And now realize that most news stories are probably just as misinformed." I hate to be so skeptical of the mainstream media, but it's hard not to whenever they report on something I know about they seem to get it all wrong.
- dhimes 9y agoI heard this called the "Gell-Mann Paradox."
- nhebb 9y agoSomeone in the LA Times / union thread referred to journalists as "knowledge workers". With Gell-Mann Amnesia in mind, I thought, "Well, that's being generous".
- chiefalchemist 9y agoThis is America's Mainstream Media. This is why our Fourth Estate has failed us.
- danieltillett 9y agoI have never seen a "news" report where I personally knew what happened reported accurately. I am sure we have reporters here so I have a question for you - why is this? Do you just not care about the details, are too rushed and it is faster to just make up crap, or something else I have not considered?
- IkmoIkmo 9y agoDevil's in the details, I guess. It's really hard to be a subject matter expert at everything, yet we find journalists are often required to write pieces about topics in fields they've never worked. The Paul Krugman model (PhD, nobel prize winner, professor at MIT/Princeton, writing for the NYT) is quite rare. And even then, he doesn't exclusively write about his field of expertise. You mentioned reporting though... reporting facts is actually the one thing that journalists do often get right, and that's largely viewed as something holy. Analysis of journalism often finds that western journalists are incredibly accurate in their reporting, but they (un)wilfully frame stories, omit (sometimes by ignorance) important details or focus on meaningless anecdotes. For example, there was a time when in my region the local news kept reporting that 'real estate boom: 60% of homes are being sold for or above the asking price'. All news agencies took it over, a rare few even omitting 'for or' and just reported '60% above asking price'. If you looked carefully, they cited data from a RE agent association that had an interest in making it seem as if you could make an easy buck by buying a home before it rose even more. The association's media reports focused on the 60% figure, but didn't mention the flipside of the underlying data: about 40% of homes were sold below the asking price and 40% were sold for approximately the asking price. In other words, news agencies could have also reported the exact same data by stating '80% of homes were sold for or below the asking price'. I'd been reading these news reports (among others) for a year before I decided to buy a home and had a certain impression of the RE market going into it (a sellers market, had to bid aggressively and wave various rights to recourse to convince a seller). Not until I dove into the data did I find the reporting mischaracterised the market, despite citing factual data. The reason I think in this case and others, is that the journalists aren't RE agents, they're mostly just 29 year-olds with a journalism degree reporting on the 8 different industries they were assigned to, from RE to dairy to, relying heavily on industry associations' brief media reports and representatives to shape a narrative.
- sjwright 9y agoThe Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is great and all, but you also have to factor in the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. How many news articles are you reading which comport with your pre-existing knowledge? We remember the times when you're sure an article is wrong, we have amnesia towards all the of the other times.
- z3t4 9y agoKnowing the facts while the news reports the wrong ones - is a perfect moment to write a blog/article yourself about it.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoOr, like me, you end up beleiving journalists are mendacious idiots. And lo! Polls say that Journalists are less trusted than politicins and used car salesmen. And I know that must be true because I read it in a newspaper somewhere.
- rikkus 9y agoI spent too long being exasperated at the clueless BBC ‘Technology reporting’ before I realised that if it was this wrong about tech (a domain I humbly believe I know fairly well - at least when it comes to hard facts) then how wrong might it be about other things it was reporting on? I stopped assuming any veracity in reporting from _any_ source and quite quickly saw that there was very little accuracy anywhere. There were of course opinions - or voiced ‘opinions’ I understood the motivation for, but with the facts missing, that’s all I was consuming. The opinions of reporters or the ‘opinions’, carefully guided by the media bosses or governments. Interesting? Not when they were so predictable. That’s when I became one of those hipster/snob/weirdo people who doesn’t consume standard news anymore, and can only barely stand some tech publishing.