4 ms·

>2) "especially on the right, but also the left" is wrong. All media organisations are routinely wrong on all issues - there was an anecdotal named law for this

>2) "especially on the right, but also the left" is wrong. All media organisations are routinely wrong on all issues - there was an anecdotal named law for this but I've forgotten the name of it, where if the media reports on something that the viewer understands it is obvious all the reporting is wrong, but then the viewer assumes that reporting on subjects they know nothing about is correct. One subgroup can't be more wrong when all of the group is basically all wrong - there is news that is wrong the way the consensus is wrong and then there is news that is wrong in radical new ways. What you are referring to here I believe is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect [0] cited by Michael Crichton. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

davvolun 8y ago
Wow, thanks for linking to that. Note that the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" is a discussion point by a popular novelist, not a well-researched psychological concept. Frankly, without deeper research into the concept, it's a quote from an famous person.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  It wouldn't find any traction if it didn't ring true with a lot of people. I don't need it to be a "well-researched psychological concept" if I've personally experienced it. Years ago when local papers were still relevant, there was a local paper article about me and three other people. They got the details hilariously wrong. Everything was totally backwards. There was no plausible motive for malice, they just got everything wrong because the reporter was lazy or something. Didn't take good notes. After that I still kept my subscription to the paper and didn't doubt the accuracy of other stories in that paper, even from that same journalist. So years later when I see the Gell-Mann Amnesia quote for the first time, the pieces all click. Plainly I had been afflicted, and I see no reason to think I'm the only one.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    I feel that there's a sort of wide-spread cynicism that has far overshot its mark: people routinely disparage journalism, even though the better publishers (NYT, Economist, WSJ, etc) today are in my impression far better than ever before. They are, for example, exemplary in terms of correcting errors quickly and transparently. I rarely come across errors these days, and the ones I see corrected below articles are almost always very minor, such as spelling errors in names. In some circles, such as HN, it also seems to be en vogue to consider all media biased and unprofessional, every politician to be corrupt, every business leader as optimising (short term) profit with no regard for other considerations, every scientific study underpowered, and every headline clickbait. I guess gratuitous negativity is often mistaken for expertise or intelligence. But in reality, it just renders any actual effort useless: why not be corrupt/lazy/incompetent/etc, when that is the charge that will be levelled against you, no matter what you do?
    - davvolun 8y ago
      Right? I see Chris Cillizza deliberately drop the concluding sentence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' comment to deliberately take it out of context[1] or a single CNN journalist fabricating sources for years[2] (not to pick on CNN too much, I don't think they're any worse than most news orgs, and they're better than a good few). And I think, there are some problems there, this deserves addressing, but to take that and scream FAKE NEWS in tweets every third day; that's just stupid. [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/424190-ocasio-cortez-accuses-cnns-chris-cillizza-of-taking-quote-out-of-context-in https://thehill.com/homenews/media/424190-ocasio-cortez-accu... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/media/claas-relotius-spiegel/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/media/claas-relotius-spiegel/...
  - davvolun 8y ago
    You don't need it to be a "well-researched psychological concept" if you've personally experienced it, but that does absolutely nothing to convince me, and further, you should carefully weigh your own anecdotal experience versus others' experiences. Maybe the reporting in your particular case was just really, really bad? How would you know? Maybe 99.9% of journalism is completely accurate and you just happened to fit into the 0.1%... if you can't definitively disprove what I'm saying, then I don't think you should be so confident in your conclusion. As for "it would find any traction if it didn't ring true with a lot of people." A lot of people throughout history have believed a lot of unscientific things. I don't believe we've reached a point of enlightenment where we no longer do that. Science not infrequently finds the truth is not what we expected, not what our intuition would lead us to believe.

davvolun 8y ago

Wow, thanks for linking to that. Note that the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" is a discussion point by a popular novelist, not a well-researched psychological concept. Frankly, without deeper research into the concept, it's a quote from an famous person.

darkpuma 8y ago
It wouldn't find any traction if it didn't ring true with a lot of people. I don't need it to be a "well-researched psychological concept" if I've personally experienced it. Years ago when local papers were still relevant, there was a local paper article about me and three other people. They got the details hilariously wrong. Everything was totally backwards. There was no plausible motive for malice, they just got everything wrong because the reporter was lazy or something. Didn't take good notes. After that I still kept my subscription to the paper and didn't doubt the accuracy of other stories in that paper, even from that same journalist. So years later when I see the Gell-Mann Amnesia quote for the first time, the pieces all click. Plainly I had been afflicted, and I see no reason to think I'm the only one.
- matt4077 8y ago
  I feel that there's a sort of wide-spread cynicism that has far overshot its mark: people routinely disparage journalism, even though the better publishers (NYT, Economist, WSJ, etc) today are in my impression far better than ever before. They are, for example, exemplary in terms of correcting errors quickly and transparently. I rarely come across errors these days, and the ones I see corrected below articles are almost always very minor, such as spelling errors in names. In some circles, such as HN, it also seems to be en vogue to consider all media biased and unprofessional, every politician to be corrupt, every business leader as optimising (short term) profit with no regard for other considerations, every scientific study underpowered, and every headline clickbait. I guess gratuitous negativity is often mistaken for expertise or intelligence. But in reality, it just renders any actual effort useless: why not be corrupt/lazy/incompetent/etc, when that is the charge that will be levelled against you, no matter what you do?
  - davvolun 8y ago
    Right? I see Chris Cillizza deliberately drop the concluding sentence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' comment to deliberately take it out of context[1] or a single CNN journalist fabricating sources for years[2] (not to pick on CNN too much, I don't think they're any worse than most news orgs, and they're better than a good few). And I think, there are some problems there, this deserves addressing, but to take that and scream FAKE NEWS in tweets every third day; that's just stupid. [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/media/424190-ocasio-cortez-accuses-cnns-chris-cillizza-of-taking-quote-out-of-context-in https://thehill.com/homenews/media/424190-ocasio-cortez-accu... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/media/claas-relotius-spiegel/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/20/media/claas-relotius-spiegel/...
- davvolun 8y ago
  You don't need it to be a "well-researched psychological concept" if you've personally experienced it, but that does absolutely nothing to convince me, and further, you should carefully weigh your own anecdotal experience versus others' experiences. Maybe the reporting in your particular case was just really, really bad? How would you know? Maybe 99.9% of journalism is completely accurate and you just happened to fit into the 0.1%... if you can't definitively disprove what I'm saying, then I don't think you should be so confident in your conclusion. As for "it would find any traction if it didn't ring true with a lot of people." A lot of people throughout history have believed a lot of unscientific things. I don't believe we've reached a point of enlightenment where we no longer do that. Science not infrequently finds the truth is not what we expected, not what our intuition would lead us to believe.