Surprising it's still 20% left with all the insanity that's been going on. You'd think people would not trust the media anymore considering the track record in recent years, starting with stuff like the Hunter Biden laptop being probably the most egregious in my recent mind.
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.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Didn't realize the concept was coined by Michael Crichton.
Also disappointed the physicist it's named after is a Jew.
I read a book about famous hoaxes in archeology, and the author told a story in the preface that is basically the same thing.
He said he used to get all these mail order books about a variety of different subjects and was shocked that the revelations and counterfactual narratives they presented weren't mainstream knowledge. The books all sounded logical and well supported by evidence to him, yet they shattered accepted norms.
Then he ordered one that dealt with anthropology, which was his field of expertise, and everything in it was complete bullshit- half truths, the truth twisted and misused, and outright lies. He then realized that all the books he had been reading were complete bullshit, he just lacked the expert knowledge to spot it.
Surprising it's still 20% left with all the insanity that's been going on. You'd think people would not trust the media anymore considering the track record in recent years, starting with stuff like the Hunter Biden laptop being probably the most egregious in my recent mind.
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
Didn't realize the concept was coined by Michael Crichton.
Also disappointed the physicist it's named after is a Jew.
I read a book about famous hoaxes in archeology, and the author told a story in the preface that is basically the same thing.
He said he used to get all these mail order books about a variety of different subjects and was shocked that the revelations and counterfactual narratives they presented weren't mainstream knowledge. The books all sounded logical and well supported by evidence to him, yet they shattered accepted norms.
Then he ordered one that dealt with anthropology, which was his field of expertise, and everything in it was complete bullshit- half truths, the truth twisted and misused, and outright lies. He then realized that all the books he had been reading were complete bullshit, he just lacked the expert knowledge to spot it.