4 ms·

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'

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.

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.