4 ms·

Apropos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

by sho 8y ago

dingaling 8y ago
That keeps getting quoted but with no evidence that it exists on a large scale. If I read a $NEWS_SOURCE article and they get something wildly incorrect I don't just proceed to the next article, I close the tab / newspaper.
- ben_w 8y ago
  I’ve caught myself making that mistake for literally years after learning about it. I am trying to train myself not to continue. I think I’m getting there now.
- sho 8y ago
  Well, as the wikipedia article states, it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and yet seems intuitively correct to me. I've certainly recognised the phenomenon in my own behaviour. Instead of as a hard fact to be evidenced and justified, I think a better way of thinking about it might be as a kind of parable - a reminder to keep an open mind and not just blindly accept everything you see in the newspaper, or anywhere else.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > If I read a $NEWS_SOURCE article and they get something wildly incorrect I don't just proceed to the next article, I close the tab / newspaper. Then couple hours or days later you get an article on a different topic from the same $NEWS_SOURCE, and you read it like gospel. What changed over past decades is the way we consume news - it's "unbundled" now; much like we consume movies per-title and not per-channel, we consume news per-story, not per-newspaper. But this didn't improve news quality. Gell-Mann amnesia exists at scale, it's one of the most trivial things to verify - you just need to talk with people. With your family, friends, or with folks on any social media site / on-line bulletin board. You'll see countless of examples of people who suffer from this amnesia, who can't perform the most obvious generalization from observation - to conclude that, since for any topic they know anything about every news article is utter bullshit, and since their friends report the same observations for their domains, the news on the topics they're not experts on must be bullshit too.
reaperducer 8y ago
Except that if you know anything about how newspapers work, the Gell-Mann theory falls apart. It only works if every article in a newspaper is written by the same person with the same level of knowledge and ignorance of every topic published. This simply isn’t the case, as newspapers are written by dozens or hundreds of different people working for many different companies and with many different backgrounds. For example, a new reporter who bones a story about a local car factory has absolutely no bearing on the accuracy of the work of a seasoned reporter for a wire service covering politics in the nation’s capitol a thousand miles away.
- danShumway 8y ago
  Well, wait a sec. It does have a bearing on the overall editorial quality of the paper, unless as a reader you can figure out a predictable reason for editorial quality to drop for only one specific topic. It means that a poorly researched article can get out of the door without being flagged. Individual articles of clothing, food, and other products coming out of a company are inspected by different people. But when I go to Wendy's and buy some fries, I don't know which people are inspecting and preparing my food, and know who was preparing my food wouldn't be useful unless I already knew a lot about that person. If I went to a restaurant and my fries had mold on them, it would probably be the fault of a small percentage of the workers there. But I would still be justified in distrusting the rest of my food, even if I thought the rest of the food on my plate was probably prepared by different people. I don't know enough about the individual staff members of my local newspaper or their individual contributions to each article to make an educated distinction between them. If I see evidence that my overall newspaper is willing to publish badly researched articles, it seems very logical to me to conclude, "hey, when you see an article in a subject you're not familiar with, remember that it might be one of the duds. If you see an article by a reporter you're not already familiar with, remember that they were hired by a newspaper that occasionally hires bad reporters."
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  While this is true, it is often also the case that the people writing about certain areas are not necessarily experts in those areas. I have personal experience with this phenomenon as I used to write for and edit a number of IT-related magazines. In that capacity I went to a lot of press meetings, conferences and other similar gatherings where I mingled with my colleagues from other publications. It was striking to notice how little knowledge many of them actually possessed about the - often deeply technical - subjects being discussed and even more striking to see that they nevertheless wrote articles full of mumbo-jumbo which got published in their outlets which' readers can be assumed to have turned to those with the intent of being informed on those subjects. Being able to write a fluent story is a skill in itself and not necessarily linked to deep knowledge about the subjects the story touches. News publications work off deadlines where it can be - no, strike that, is - most important to have something, anything to publish. Those who can reliably produce the required few paragraphs will rise higher than those who put accuracy above timeliness.

Apropos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

by sho 8y ago

Apropos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

That keeps getting quoted but with no evidence that it exists on a large scale. If I read a $NEWS_SOURCE article and they get something wildly incorrect I don't just proceed to the next article, I close the tab / newspaper.

ben_w 8y ago
I’ve caught myself making that mistake for literally years after learning about it. I am trying to train myself not to continue. I think I’m getting there now.
sho 8y ago
Well, as the wikipedia article states, it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and yet seems intuitively correct to me. I've certainly recognised the phenomenon in my own behaviour. Instead of as a hard fact to be evidenced and justified, I think a better way of thinking about it might be as a kind of parable - a reminder to keep an open mind and not just blindly accept everything you see in the newspaper, or anywhere else.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> If I read a $NEWS_SOURCE article and they get something wildly incorrect I don't just proceed to the next article, I close the tab / newspaper. Then couple hours or days later you get an article on a different topic from the same $NEWS_SOURCE, and you read it like gospel. What changed over past decades is the way we consume news - it's "unbundled" now; much like we consume movies per-title and not per-channel, we consume news per-story, not per-newspaper. But this didn't improve news quality. Gell-Mann amnesia exists at scale, it's one of the most trivial things to verify - you just need to talk with people. With your family, friends, or with folks on any social media site / on-line bulletin board. You'll see countless of examples of people who suffer from this amnesia, who can't perform the most obvious generalization from observation - to conclude that, since for any topic they know anything about every news article is utter bullshit, and since their friends report the same observations for their domains, the news on the topics they're not experts on must be bullshit too.

reaperducer 8y ago

Except that if you know anything about how newspapers work, the Gell-Mann theory falls apart. It only works if every article in a newspaper is written by the same person with the same level of knowledge and ignorance of every topic published. This simply isn’t the case, as newspapers are written by dozens or hundreds of different people working for many different companies and with many different backgrounds. For example, a new reporter who bones a story about a local car factory has absolutely no bearing on the accuracy of the work of a seasoned reporter for a wire service covering politics in the nation’s capitol a thousand miles away.

danShumway 8y ago
Well, wait a sec. It does have a bearing on the overall editorial quality of the paper, unless as a reader you can figure out a predictable reason for editorial quality to drop for only one specific topic. It means that a poorly researched article can get out of the door without being flagged. Individual articles of clothing, food, and other products coming out of a company are inspected by different people. But when I go to Wendy's and buy some fries, I don't know which people are inspecting and preparing my food, and know who was preparing my food wouldn't be useful unless I already knew a lot about that person. If I went to a restaurant and my fries had mold on them, it would probably be the fault of a small percentage of the workers there. But I would still be justified in distrusting the rest of my food, even if I thought the rest of the food on my plate was probably prepared by different people. I don't know enough about the individual staff members of my local newspaper or their individual contributions to each article to make an educated distinction between them. If I see evidence that my overall newspaper is willing to publish badly researched articles, it seems very logical to me to conclude, "hey, when you see an article in a subject you're not familiar with, remember that it might be one of the duds. If you see an article by a reporter you're not already familiar with, remember that they were hired by a newspaper that occasionally hires bad reporters."
Yetanfou 8y ago
While this is true, it is often also the case that the people writing about certain areas are not necessarily experts in those areas. I have personal experience with this phenomenon as I used to write for and edit a number of IT-related magazines. In that capacity I went to a lot of press meetings, conferences and other similar gatherings where I mingled with my colleagues from other publications. It was striking to notice how little knowledge many of them actually possessed about the - often deeply technical - subjects being discussed and even more striking to see that they nevertheless wrote articles full of mumbo-jumbo which got published in their outlets which' readers can be assumed to have turned to those with the intent of being informed on those subjects. Being able to write a fluent story is a skill in itself and not necessarily linked to deep knowledge about the subjects the story touches. News publications work off deadlines where it can be - no, strike that, is - most important to have something, anything to publish. Those who can reliably produce the required few paragraphs will rise higher than those who put accuracy above timeliness.