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Nitpick: Its Gell-Mann amnesia, Michael Chrichton's name for Murray Gell-Mann's amnesiatic behavior, not an effect discovered or promoted by Gell-Mann.
by alisonkisk 6y ago
Nitpick: Its Gell-Mann amnesia, Michael Chrichton's name for Murray Gell-Mann's amnesiatic behavior, not an effect discovered or promoted by Gell-Mann.
- tptacek 6y agoIt's not a nitpick. The "Gell-Mann" in the name elevates a novelist and pundit's ideas to those of a Nobel physics laureate. It's worth pointing out! It's also a frustrating argument. What does it actually say? "Journalists are often wrong". No shit! That's why it's called "the first draft of history". Meanwhile, everybody is often wrong. But we don't have a "Djikstra amnesia" to describe all the times we fall short of the ideals of our own discipline, but forget about that when holding other people to our notional ideals of their disciplines.
- zepto 6y agoThat’s because of the Bader Meinhoff phenomenon.
- jancsika 6y agoI propose to refer to facile references to "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" here on HN as the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Affectation"
- renewiltord 6y agoThe strongest interpretation of the idea expressed by Gell-Mann Amnesia is "You set your posteriors to be different from your priors based on journalism more than you should be and you do not alter this difference upon seeing evidence that should indicate imperfection in journalism". i.e. it warns you that you are likely over-weighting journalism. Fortunately, most journalism is useless for information transmission and likely rarely alters behaviour - the latter having been chosen first with the journalism being used as justification. To that degree, the fact that most journalists are usually low quality information sources is not particularly dangerous since you never use them to do anything different from what you'd do.
- corty 6y agoJournalism-as-confirmation is only used by people who have a strong conviction. There are lots and lots of people undecided about an issue, reading some journalistic drivel. They are most easily influenced on that undecided issue.
- a1369209993 6y ago> But we don't have a "Djikstra amnesia" to describe all the times we fall short of the ideals of our own discipline, but forget about that when holding other people to our notional ideals of their disciplines. Perhaps we should? (And then, of course, someone can post: > Nitpick: Its Djikstra amnesia, tptacek's name for Edsger Djikstra's amnesiatic behavior, not an effect discovered or promoted by Djikstra. when it eventually gets rounded to "Djikstra effect".)
- tptacek 6y agoI will commit to correcting anyone who attributes a "Djikstra amnesia effect" to Djikstra.
- grzm 6y agoIs it Djikstra’s Amnesia forgetting his name is Dijkstra?
- tptacek 6y agoThat too!
- a1369209993 6y agoEmbarrassingly, I double-checked the spelling on "Edsger", but still didn't catch that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gweinberg 6y agoIt's not that journalists are often wrong, it's that journalists often say stuff that is obviously wrong to anyone who knows anything about the subject. And that indicates sloppy investigation, like not contacting Signal before reporting this story.
- kasey_junk 6y agoThe question is are they more wrong than any other segment of the population that writes for consumption? Journalists, unlike say bloggers or marketers or think tank authors or pundits, have a fairly robust ethics/rules system about how to publish. Does it fail them at times? Of course, but do they fail at a higher % than other outlets? I’ve never seen any actual evidence to suggest that. That there is a pithy quote from a Nobel prize winner isn’t interesting.
- pvg 6y agothere is a pithy quote from a Nobel prize winner There isn't even that! The Nobel laureate is just part of the schtick.
- gweinberg 6y agoThe point is that journalists tend to be a lot less reliable than the reading public seems to think they are. Most people would have enough sense to take information with a grain of salt if the source is "I heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy." Even if the guy is reliable, who is to say that the other guy is reliable?
- tptacek 6y agoJournalists aren't random people who have "heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy". They do reporting: they call people, develop sources, and work with fact checkers. That doesn't make them right all the time, or mean you should read them uncritically. But, of course, the bullshit meme is that you shouldn't take them seriously at all. It's premised on holding journalists to a standard we don't hold doctors to, let alone software developers.
- ben509 6y agoCrichton expressly noted that he picked the name ironically because people would implicitly trust it if he named it after Murray Gell-Mann.