The claim isn't really that the book as a whole is necessarily good or bad. It may be expressed as such, but Crichton was talking about the habits of readers.

The claim isn't really that the book as a whole is necessarily good or bad. It may be expressed as such, but Crichton was talking about the habits of readers. Determining whether a source is trustworthy is an ongoing process: you're seeing one portion where you have some expertise or evidence and then another portion where you don't. You have to extrapolate from what you can validate to whether what you can't is valid. The complaint behind Gell-Mann amnesia is that we're too quick to dismiss clear evidence that a source is untrustworthy, that we have a bias towards trust. To put it in perspective, let's imagine the opposite, call it Crank Awareness. If you see a document and it's laid out poorly, uses weird boldface, all caps, colors and blinking text, you'll, at the very least, get the impression it's written by a crank before you even start reading. > But believing they are always bad is the same logical fallacy as believing they are always good. Again, this comes back to the problem of strict logical reasoning vs. treating trust as a larger process. We have limited resources to evaluate sources, so we're stuck making fallacious generalizations when we need to make a decision based on our sources. What we want in the long run is to incentivize authors to exercise care and diligence. That would indicate we should punish known bad information by deprecating the authors. So another way of reading Gell-Mann amnesia is that readers aren't doing this. They're seeing stuff that they know is wrong and continuing to patronize the publications regardless, thus authors can be untrustworthy and still collect a paycheck.