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‘The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a theoretical psychological phenomenon, the term itself being coined by author, film producer and academic Michael Crichton aft
by shawndumas 8y ago
‘The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a theoretical psychological phenomenon, the term itself being coined by author, film producer and academic Michael Crichton after discussions with Nobel-Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
Originally described in Crichton's "Why Speculate?" speech, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect labels a commonly observed problem in modern media, where one will believe everything they read from a journalist even after they come across an article about something they know well that is completely incorrect.
The conclusions found and perspectives portrayed by the author are entirely erroneous, often times flipping the cause and the effect. Crichton notes these as "wet streets cause rain" stories.
In short, most eloquently put by Thomas L. McDonald, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect defines the idea that "I believe everything the media tells me except for anything for which I have direct personal knowledge, which they always get wrong."’
— https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- amelius 8y agoNo wonder influencers get paid so well ...
- GauntletWizard 8y agoI think this generalizes as well. People believe what they're told, even if it's coming from people with a poor history of speaking the truth, whether it be misunderstanding or lies. Further, when they realize they've been lied to, they're often bad at going back and invalidating their cache and fixing assumptions based on that bad data. It's really hard - you are told or assume, you internalize it, build on top of it, and then when you realize that you've built on falsehood it's easy to remove that piece without understanding what load it was bearing in your tower of thought. I've found myself doing this all the time when doing designs - I've had to train myself to go back frequently and retrace the logic I followed, being careful not to fall into the same pitfalls and re-introduce the same flaws -that the tower still holds up to inspection when those components were never introduced.
- novalis78 8y ago“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Lenin
- poizan42 8y agoIronically that is a misattribution, see https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/32944 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/32944
- sievebrain 8y agoI'm not sure it's true though. Look at any polls about trust in the media. It's been falling for a long time. People are becoming aware that journalists are systematically unreliable and it's having an impact.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoOr they're being told that all news is fake news in order to convince them to switch to the official state apparatus for information disbursement.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoNPR?
- rayiner 8y agoThe media made its bed and now it can lie in it.
- m12k 8y agoAnd unfortunately the alternative people have found is random hearsay on the web. The dieticians lost our trust and now we're just eating junk food instead.
- CM30 8y agoThey've been finding random hearsay for a while now. Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Is the Daily Mail or Sun or Mirror or Express more accurate than some clickbait farm? Probably not. Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news, it was low quality tabloids with a helping of TV and radio pundits.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Outside of NYC, the US has basically no daily tabloids. > Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news Most people in the US that were reading any daily news were probably reading the dominant local newspaper or one of the latter reputable metropolitan or national papers, because that covers pretty much all the daily written news outlets they would have had access to.