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Personally I think I've arrived at a place where I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia both with the established sources, and with the conspiracy rabbit holes. I've see

Personally I think I've arrived at a place where I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia both with the established sources, and with the conspiracy rabbit holes. I've seen both NYT and "alt" news say things that are straight-up incorrect about facts that I know from my own experience, in my own domains of knowledge, so I'm not going to trust either blindly. I'm left trying to piece together from various sources of different slants, at different points on the established/fringe spectrum. This is harder than taking a side, but I want to believe it's worth it. Btw, I'm not trying to draw a simple equivalency here. "Thinking for yourself" isn't as easy as saying "both sides distort" and plotting a naive midpoint between extremes. You have to read everything critically.

sokoloff 6y ago
Isn’t that exactly what Gell-Mann would lead you to conclude you should do? Realize that many (most?) sources are riddled with errors? (I agree with your overall stance; I don’t get you wariness of Gell-Mann.) HN is, overall, a high-quality source for many things. I also daily see things stated with absolute conviction that are flat-out wrong and so I don’t trust it blindly either.
- arduanika 6y ago
  Ah. I think I was being so pedantic it was confusing. If the "Gell-Mann amnesia" technically refers to your tendency to forget the unreliability of the source, then the takeaway when you learn about it is to be wary of your own forgetting. But in common parlance, "Gell-Mann" has started to mean "Gell-Mann awareness", so you might well read "wary of Gell-Mann" as "wary of skepticism", not "wary of credulity". Is that where we're getting mixed up?
AngrySkillzz 6y ago
And then you read HN, and you realize no one here knows anything about economics or finance, despite how confident they are! Gell-Mann amnesia is everywhere, and not just in authoritative sources. The people on the internet who you chat with and know a lot about computers... might not know that much about other topics.
- arduanika 6y ago
  Yes, exactly.

sokoloff 6y ago

Isn’t that exactly what Gell-Mann would lead you to conclude you should do? Realize that many (most?) sources are riddled with errors? (I agree with your overall stance; I don’t get you wariness of Gell-Mann.) HN is, overall, a high-quality source for many things. I also daily see things stated with absolute conviction that are flat-out wrong and so I don’t trust it blindly either.

arduanika 6y ago
Ah. I think I was being so pedantic it was confusing. If the "Gell-Mann amnesia" technically refers to your tendency to forget the unreliability of the source, then the takeaway when you learn about it is to be wary of your own forgetting. But in common parlance, "Gell-Mann" has started to mean "Gell-Mann awareness", so you might well read "wary of Gell-Mann" as "wary of skepticism", not "wary of credulity". Is that where we're getting mixed up?

AngrySkillzz 6y ago

And then you read HN, and you realize no one here knows anything about economics or finance, despite how confident they are! Gell-Mann amnesia is everywhere, and not just in authoritative sources. The people on the internet who you chat with and know a lot about computers... might not know that much about other topics.

arduanika 6y ago
Yes, exactly.