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One thing a coworker said once that I think about a lot: ever read an article about a subject that you know a bit about, and invariably you come to the conclusi
by rozap 2y ago
One thing a coworker said once that I think about a lot: ever read an article about a subject that you know a bit about, and invariably you come to the conclusion that the writer doesn't really have a good grasp on what they're talking about. Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?
Kind of a bummer to think about.
- red-iron-pine 2y agoMichael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame described this as Gell-Mann Amnesia https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:text=(see%20quotation).-,Proper%20noun,which%20they%20are%20knowledgeable%20about https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:t....
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y agoThat 'bummer' has a name, has been put into the frame of fame: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
- jaredcwhite 2y agoIt's like when we see people "do programming" in TV shows/movies and laugh at how goofy it is. I suspect most technical professions are exactly like that, we just don't realize it most of the time.
- QuantumGood 2y agoEven worse when there are slightly creative solutions that haven't reached conventional wisdom status yet. They're out there, but almost impossible to find.
- rapjr9 2y agoThe accuracy of other articles can be higher or lower because other people researched and wrote them. This is why people tend to have favorite reporters and favorite news outlets. They do not trust every thing they read, they look for people who seem to reliably report the truth as they know it, and those people/outlets they _tend_ to trust. People are naturally skeptical. Often they just read to entertain themselves or to gather topics to discuss with friends or coworkers later. That doesn't mean they believe it all. You can read all the UFO articles but that doesn't mean you believe in UFO's. You might instead find them interesting as a sign that the military ignoring UFO's mean enemy spy drones can easily sneak in and spy on maneuvers, a big vulnerability that the military is _supposed_ to be cognizant of, but is apparently ignoring.
- taberiand 2y agoThat's Gell-Mann amnesia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538
- hatefuldang 2y ago[flagged]
- aboodman 2y agoThat is discussed in the ... sigh, nevermind.
- balder1991 2y agoI feel like most people commenting here haven’t even read the article.
- nickburns 2y agoYou've perfectly described life in the so-called Information Age.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 2y agoI learned in the last 3-4 years to never take seriously an article about aviation by a journalist.
- latkin 2y agoDid you read TFA? This exact phenomenon is discussed thoroughly in the post.
- rozap 2y agoI described a time where a friend summarized this effect and how it stuck with me since, which is the same effect described in the article? And saying that it's a bummer to think about? I didn't say it was original insight on anyone's part, just that it was a sticky thought when it was wrapped up in a small 1 sentence explanation. You're right, there's no great insight in my comment, all it said was "yea this happens to me too all the time" but for some reason it got upvoted. Should I only comment if I have a counterexample?
- aaronax 2y agoMind boggling. Though now I know that for all HN commenters, truly "nobody knows what's going on" (in the article).
- latkin 2y agoUnbelievable how meta the original comment is. Seems like many of the subsequent replies, too. Skim a few paragraphs and that's plenty, time to share your thoughts with the internet... This passage comes to mind: > we want so badly to be believed, to be seen as someone who knows stuff.
- antisthenes 2y ago> Skim a few paragraphs and that's plenty, time to share your thoughts with the internet... Some articles posted to HN have poor enough quality that reading a few paragraphs is all they deserve. The false premise is usually evident from the first paragraphs, and there's no reason to read further (unless it's one of those articles where the author changes their mind through a long exposition).
- jwilk 2y agoFrom https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
- wait_a_minute 2y ago> Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones? Why wouldn't the accuracy be higher? Extrapolating that way from limited experience is not something I would personally do. I would read everything, learn gradually, and continue learning and testing information with experiments and more information.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ffsm8 2y agoIn the context of articles the answer is simple: because the journalist isnt the specialist, they likely just interviewed a few people and wrapped it up the article. For comments it's a different story. You do occasionally get the real experts, but more often then not, you just get another mediocre human like myself that just voiced their opinion. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation with experts not commenting as they've got better things to do vs the average Joe that is commenting with little effort, essentially outputting significantly more comments. Another detrimental factor is that mentally unwell people will often output orders of magnitude more comments then everyone else, complicating everything even more.
- noduerme 2y agoOP has a point. It depends on your frame. Some areas require far more specialized knowledge than others. If your specialization were something incredibly complex like quantum physics, you'd probably find ridiculous mistakes in 99% of mainstream sources. OTOH, articles about business or tax law may have far fewer lay errors, so you would be mistaken to project the popular information error rate in your own field onto popular reporting in every other field.
- jfengel 2y agoAt least in theory, while the journalist isn't a subject matter expert, they have spent time reporting on the same domain. They know the people who are experts, and work under an editor who has worked in that field for decades. They should be able to validate any facts and be able to put them into context. As newspapers have gotten hammered there are fewer and fewer people who actually do that, and more and more bloggers with loud opinions and few facts. Many good sources have gone defunct or given up trying. But there do remain a few sources of decent journalism, where the reporters and editor really are better informed than most laymen.
- pcloadletter_ 2y agoI've been thinking about this recently with internet comments on here, reddit, etc. There are very few topics on which I'd consider myself an expert, but whenever one comes up, the "top" comment (often something contrarian/snarky) is always significantly incorrect.
- roenxi 2y agoAre you claiming expertise in computing or non-computing topics? HN tends to be - as we might expect - quite good at computers and bad/average [0] at everything else. I'd assume it is the same logic as comparative advantages in economics; it doesn't make sense for communities to become experts in everything. The only caveat is that people in the chattering communities (eg, journalists, influencers, celebrities) are some of the last to look to for informed opinions on reality since their speciality is attracting attention and telling stories rather than anything linked to success in the physical or academic worlds. They're often clever, just not involved in complex topics. [0] average = bad. Goes to show how catastrophic dictatorships are that a democracy can consistently outperform one.
- jfengel 2y agoDemocracies function on the notion that most people have no idea what they're talking about, and vote randomly. The few who do know what they're talking about will all vote the same way, so most of the time the right answer will prevail. There are a lot of problems with that assumption. Thus far it seems to work out better than the alternatives, but we'll have to see if that continues to hold.
- caseyohara 2y ago> Democracies function on the notion that most people have no idea what they're talking about, and vote randomly. Can you expand on this? I have no idea what you mean. In what way do most people vote randomly?
- dartos 2y ago
- hanniabu 2y agoAs someone that works in the crypto industry, I feel this every time I see the news or articles report on it, or comments here talking about it.
- laji14 2y ago[dead]
- laji1471 2y ago[dead]
- kennyloginz 2y agoHonestly curious, what is the benefit of blockchain outside of providing evidence in court?
- Gormo 2y agoA blockchain is a distributed public ledger of immutable information. The use cases for that seem clear and obvious: consider all repositories of public information that are either not distributed, and therfore subject to single points of failure, or allow extant data to be modified, and therefore subject to reliability and trust issues. Consider how blockchains might improve all such use cases.
- bradly 2y ago> A blockchain is a distributed public ledger of immutable information. Is it immutable? Forks, 51% attacks, bugs. It it only immutable until consensus decides it isn't immutable, right? If something is immutable, but can be made immutable, is it ever really immutable?
- anon-3988 2y agoYou still have to trust whatever things you rely on upstreams, plus, if the consensus is against you, there's nothing you can do anyway? For example, you got scammed, its written to the ledger. The transaction is immutable and actually, actually did happen. What can you do now?
- bradly 2y agoMy experience working at Apple on both Music and Maps: anything that I had worked on that was reported on was usually wildly inaccurate. Mainstream news, bloggers, HN comments... so much assumption and usually way off.
- _moof 2y agoThis has also been my experience working at multiple household names and reading coverage and comments about things I was working on.
- rr808 2y agoAbsolutely true, but also people who know about a subject often can't see the forest for the trees and an outside perspective brings new detail you haven't seen before.
- protectiveSheet 2y agoA coworker of mine is fond of saying, “I believe everything I read in the New York Times except for the stuff I know about.”
- richrichie 2y ago"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- anotherhue 2y agoGell-Mann amnesia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538
- robotbikes 2y agoAnd now just think of all of the people who will be getting their knowledge from LLMs which are literally making up stuff through statistical linguistic inference on a grand scale from hearsay.
- czl 2y ago> LLMs are literally making up stuff through statistical linguistic inference on a grand scale from hearsay. Hearsay being some personal "truth" it may be useful to know what the statistical average of that "truth" is. If we do it right perhaps we can get the various personal errors to cancel out.
- xwolfi 2y agoSince I've started working in finance, I find all those conspiracies about banks and "wall street" a bit cringe: HSBC is actually a nice bank, they helped me a lot, hedge funds do lose as much money as they make in aggregate across all of them because end of the day it's all a random 0-sum with losers paying winners, inside an investment bank, risk is very managed and boring, deal makers spend lots of time trying to reject proposals, loans are rarely predatory and not always easy to get because nobody wants bad payers, bonuses are scarse, etc. The headlines about some crisis with uneducated comments about how rich bankers exploit the weaks make me hesitate to trust journalism. Often incompetence is way more prevalent than nefariousness ... Each time I say stuff like that I get comments saying "maybe but it's not a reason to defend banks", completely missing that it's exactly my point: this hatred of banks is a bit irrational, I think it's fine sometimes to defend them...
- vundercind 2y agoThe flip side of this is that I’ve repeatedly seen people in some industry subject to new regulation claim that some effect of it is an unfortunate accident (when it’s actually the point, the behavior it’s stopping that you think is good is actually unethical and system-wide contributes to huge problems in ways that ought not be hard to understand) or that much-needed regulation is some terrible mistake that people will regret when we have strong evidence (like, real world examples) to the contrary. Granted I’ve mostly seen that in the real estate world, so maybe other industries are less-shit about saying plainly dumb stuff based on “insider knowledge” (self-serving bullshit, actually) See also: cops and all manner of things, like the relative riskiness of their own job (and which parts of it are risky—all that driving is a lot of the risk, and Covid-19 vs guns is a fun comparison for some years) or how dangerous it is to be within one meter of a small amount of fentanyl or whatever, or how we’ll all just super regret it if we keep them from trampling on civil liberties (common view, not making that up) Sometimes the insiders know better and everyone else is wrong. Sometimes the insiders are all sorts of mixed up over some comically basic shit.
- Anotheroneagain 2y ago"loans are rarely predatory" misses the point why they are bad. They are bad for the economy because it's you (not the market) who decides who gets resources.
- foogazi 2y agoYou are describing Gell-Mann amnesia
- dclowd9901 2y agoFor me, it’s often a case of semantics. Like, if I watch a YouTube car repair video, and the presenter is diagnosing an issue and says something like “ok, so we can see here the battery is draining far too quickly so I better check the alternator first,” in my experience, it’s rarely the alternator and often either a bad battery or a short somewhere. My first check is either of those two things. I might eventually arrive at the alternator but it’s all just semantics and interpretation at a certain level. I don’t feel like they’re breathtakingly _wrong_, they just probably have had a different experience than me, leading them to a different conclusion. Caveat: I often work on old cars where a short is far more likely.
- xarope 2y agoMaybe you are referring to articles on the internet that are meant for SEO? The internal white papers I've written and also help co-author (which are for discourse/dissertation on successful project implementations and to be used as reference for future work), or when on a stint with IBM doing ITSO Redbooks, were (are?) highly accurate, and involved subject matter experts (which, as the name would imply, were the SMEs that people would contact specifically as THE experts in that field; and, back then, we were really the experts). OK Ok, you can stay on my lawn for a while longer... /j
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nagonago 2y agoKnoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge."[0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/27/us/required-reading-smith-on-lawyers.html https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/27/us/required-reading-smith...
- vunderba 2y agoThis is why I'm rather bemused when people "freak out" about LLMs hallucination rates. The number of comments I've seen on Hacker news (ostensibly the intellectual sister of reddit) that make extraordinarily confident outlandish claims about various subjects with zero citations, sources, etc across what would otherwise be considered highly scientific disciplines - neuroscience is a particularly egregious offender - is far more worrisome to me than the latest hallucination from Gemini.
- creer 2y agoI have found people receptive to that observation though. That is, it's not yet a widely noticed thing and I feel it helps to spread it around and people generally seem to welcome and understand the concept. It probably does not immediately change how they read - biases are very hard to fight. But it goes in the right direction.
- yoyohello13 2y agoI never really knew about, or thought about, this phenomenon until I started trying code generated by ChatGPT. Then I started to realize ChatGPT's answers seemed really good for programming languages I knew little about, but pretty bad for programming languages I knew a lot about. Then I realized this probably applies to many different subjects.
- alexpc201 2y agoIt's like thinking about how stupid the average person is and then realizing that half of humanity is even stupider.
- simianparrot 2y agoCovid was the litmus test for me. I happened to know a lot about a lot of topics that became wildly reported on, from virology to immunology, and I had to watch in horror as every single media presence and expert weighed in with at best non-existent data to support major changes to existing wisdom, and at worst (and most common) obvious lies that contradicted not just available science but the very nature of how viruses operate. I can’t go back to ignorance ever again.
- koonsolo 2y agoThat's why everyone should read books written by experts, instead of articles.
- lr1970 2y agoThis is known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect [0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Crichton&diffonly=true#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Crichto...
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y agoThat's why I prefer to read books by scientists that are established in the field. Granted, I might miss some spectacular insights that some revolutionists might propose, but I can be relatively sure that most of what I read is actually true in the sense of representing reality relatively accurately.