
Gell-Mann amnesia effect - glastra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
======
jonathanstrange
I'm a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is
actually measurable for _newspapers_. The problem seems to me that not every
topic is covered in the same way by journalists and that the journalists are
usually also specializing in particular topics and don't just write anywhere.

A science journalist has usually studied some natural science but has to cover
all of them and has to simplify a lot, so a trained expert will find a lot of
inaccuracies. This is not true for the journalist who reports international
events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which
government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said
what when". It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, which
mostly come from multiple news agencies anyway, than describing news about
theoretical physics to laymen in terms that are 100% accurate to a physicist.

In a nutshell, I'm not so sure that the effect really exists in any
significant way.

Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if
not from journalists and press agencies. I've never heard of any reasonable
and viable alternative from critics of traditional news media. Cell phone
videos by citizen reporters with hysterical voice over can hardly count as a
good substitute. Neither are copy&paste news aggregators or bloggers.

At some point you've got to trust your newspaper (or read a better one!)
unless there is explicit counter-evidence from elsewhere against the story.
Most botched reports get corrected very fast anyway.

~~~
coldtea
> _This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and
> affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government
> decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when"._

That's only true when the coverage consists of retelling such basic facts, but
that's a small part of what journalists do.

Anyone with knowledge of international events and affairs can spot all kinds
of errors, omissions, and plain falsehoods when articles cover such topics --
just as well as one does when it comes to say physics or computer science.

> _Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if
> not from journalists and press agencies._

Most journalists and press agencies cater to the lowest common denominator.
There are press sources that go far deeper [1] but those are not what people
usually read for their "news".

For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode
scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire
services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets
with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT.

[1] Even if they introduce a certain delay on the news (which in most cases is
irrelevant, it's not like anybody will need to act immediately upon some news
regarding foreign affairs for example).

~~~
jonathanstrange
> _For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode
> scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire
> services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets
> with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT._

If you have the time, sure. Journalists do this work for you and are trained
to do it, but of course there is nothing wrong with going closer to the
source. Only few people can afford this luxury, though. I sometimes do this
for topics I'm really interested in, but certainly not for every daily news.
For the ones who don't have the time, resorting to reputable newspapers is by
far the best choice.

 _Edit: In your reply you were shifting the goalpost. I was talking about
news, not "what journalists do". Writing an editorial or opinion piece or
broad analysis is not reporting news. Just wanted to make this clear._

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I disagree that the parent comment “shifted the goal posts.” The type of news
article or segment that involves retelling facts like in the original comment
is also where editorial choices of what facts to tell, how to present them,
how to stylize a guest commentator, etc., all take place.

There is no isolated part of the news about foreign affairs, say, that is
commonly just a complete summary of discrete facts. Every choice about
presenting it for consumption is part of an editorial and marketing process.

In this sense, I think the parent comment adequately captures a useful
counterpoint to your original comment, and is not “shifting the goalposts” or
anything by talking about one (journalists) of the many factors that make
reporting even on fact summaries still often full of politically convenient
ommissions or focused on politically convenient estimates rather than full
disclosure of all estimates, etc. etc.

~~~
jonathanstrange
Fair enough. I still think he shifted the goalpost a little bit but didn't
want to make the impression of not accepting the criticism. It's a fair
criticism from the perspective of the OP.

Maybe you and the OP have different conceptions of what news are, though,
because I have definitely no problem discerning factual statements from
opinions or framing and in my book only the former constitute news. That every
news source is biased and in fact every person on earth is biased, that is
journalism 101 and has been known and accepted since the first newspaper was
published. Likewise, you can learn at every photography course that every
picture also tells a story about what's not on it.

I really don't get why people make such a big fuzz about these truisms
nowadays and suspect that many of the critics have a hidden political agenda
themselves. (Not meant as a statements towards you specifically, just as a
general remark, as the description of a tendency.)

~~~
mistermann
> I have definitely no problem discerning factual statements from opinions or
> framing and in my book only the former constitute news.

What if the facts you are discerning have been somewhat modified, or some of
the facts relevant to a specific story have been excluded from the article
entirely?

~~~
jonathanstrange
Then I'm still better informed than anyone who thinks he has "eaten the wisdom
with a spoon", to use an old German proverb.

I said that I see no viable alternative (unless you have unlimited spare time
and unlimited travel funds to interview witnesses and take photos yourself),
not that traditional newspapers are perfect.

Besides, the problem of most people nowadays is that they are overinformed,
leading to an overly negative world view. That problem worries me personally
much more.

~~~
mistermann
> Then I'm still better informed than anyone who thinks he has "eaten the
> wisdom with a spoon", to use an old German proverb.

Or in other words, the "I have no problem...." part is not quite accurate.
Yes, I'm being rather pedantic, but I think it is perfectly fair to point out
any flaws in any "no need to worry" explanations of the shortcomings of
journalism.

~~~
jonathanstrange
Why would choosing the best option be conceived as a problem? Your reply makes
no sense.

~~~
mistermann
Where does "Why would choosing the best option be conceived as a problem?"
appear in this conversation?

~~~
jonathanstrange
I have argued that there is no viable alternative and that getting your
information from reputable newspapers is the best option. You argued that I
have a problem. I suggested that choosing the best option (even if not
optimal) ought not be conceived as a problem.

------
sundarurfriend
These days I mostly use the effect in reverse - my basic assumption has become
that most media reporting is crap and unreliable. And when I come across some
piece of media (magazine/podcast/etc.) that actually covers stuff I know and
does it well (including being honest enough to not bite off more than they can
chew), they instantly get promoted to long-term favourites list - the rare few
I can listen to without having my bullshit filter on all the time.

~~~
spacehome
Which outlets pass your filter?

~~~
justtopost
Not OP, but that seems to change with each election cycle. Its alarming how
malliable US media gets qhen the money starts to flow.

~~~
smsm42
I don't think it's just about the money. Right now there's enough money on
nearly every side of every issue. It's just people tell themselves "it's too
important an issue to hold myself to a higher standard of truth, objectivity
and rationality - if I just give up on that this one time and my team - which
I _know_ are the Good Guys - wins, wouldn't it be better for everyone?" And of
course the other team does the same, and it happens every time.

------
codeulike
This seems like a fancy name for a hunch that may or may not actually be true.

This could be a form of confirmation bias - like how it seems to rain when you
havent got your umbrella, because confirmation bias makes you remember the
times you got caught in the rain more strongly then the times you actually had
your umbrella and stayed dry.

Similarly if someone is of the opinion that everything in the media is made-
up, confirmation bias will mean they really notice articles that are wrong on
areas that they know about. Whereas articles that are broadly correct in areas
they know about will just pass by unremarkably.

Then then on top of that, you've got the premature extrapolation that because
you've spotted one incorrect article by one journalist, all the other articles
by all the other journalists must also be the same.

Not that I think the media are always right by any means.

Obviously the media I consume are carefully picked so that I know I'm getting
a reasonable sketch of reality, whereas the stuff everyone else is consuming
is clearly made up dangerous nonsense*

* probably biased.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

~~~
brobdingnagians
I was thinking it was more of a false appeal to authority, perpetrated by
ourselves on ourselves. We tend to think of major media as very authoritative
(even if we don't admit it to ourselves), and therefore tend to accept what
they say. Books and permanent media seem to lend themselves to this. If
something has a nice cover and was published and is widely distributed, we
tend to think of it as authoritative and believe it more strongly, even when
the evidence under a little thought might lead us to be more dubious.

~~~
jerf
"We tend to think of major media as very authoritative (even if we don't admit
it to ourselves)"

One thing I've increasingly noticed over the past couple of years (and I think
it's personal development, not any particular combination of news of the day)
is the way the way we trust the mass media can make stories just disappear by
simply not covering them. I'm not even merely talking about political stories
disappearing or the media exerting bias; I mean even bigger than that. How
many times have you read something interesting and would be interesting in
reading about a followup story in a month or two? How often do you see that
followup story? For instance, in the domain of science articles, how many
times do you read about some preliminary result vs. an article discussing the
field's reaction to some preliminary result?

People simply and almost blindly take their cues about what's important from
what the mass media is talking about, but if you examine even just what the
mass media is putting out on its own terms it's hard to conclude that it's the
truly most important stuff.

Note my point here is about people moreso than the media. The media is forced
to be biased by limited bandwidth. If you want to argue that they're biased
beyond what that justifies, I will be right there with you, but that's not
what my point here is about. My point here is that regardless of exactly how
the bias manifests, how casually we tend to accept the mass media's output as
the definition of what is important today, what the agenda is, what we all
have to talk about, what we're going to screech at about each other on social
media, etc.

~~~
hyperman1
I really noticed this in the recent EU Copyright article 11 and 13 debacle:
Where were the media? Mostly they didn't even mention in. At the very last few
days, there was some coverage, mostly about how great the new law was even if
Google was trying to sabotage it by exerting control over the Internet
unwashed masses and pirates. Not a word over possible negative effects.

~~~
drak0n1c
The media has defended the EU lately at the expense of coverage of flaws or
critiques. Compare the volume of coverage for the positively received GDPR
regulation compared to the coverage of negatively received Article 11 & 13\.
Both in the lead-up and post-passage there is a pattern of bias by omission.

------
ryanmarsh
People sure do love their favorite media outlets. It’s always the “other guy”
who gets it wrong. Allow me to bore you to death with the facts: journalists
of all types are human and work in an industry with a very short attention
span. They all get it more wrong than right.

A few personal experiences:

I took the stand as a witness in a murder case. The shit the papers printed
had nothing to do with reality.

I ran a nonprofit after we lost our child to cancer. We got a lot of press, a
lot of incorrect press.

I was in Iraq as a soldier in ‘04 - ‘05. We had satellite news and everyone
back in the US was learning about a conflict on Mars as far as I’m concerned.
The entire discussion had almost nothing in common with the facts on the
ground.

In Iraq I even had cameras show up to something I was directly involved in
after we already cleaned it up and left. They were egregiously wrong about
that particular situation.

I’m friends with a TV news reporter in a major market. She’s on every night.
The things she’s told me about how the news desk operates...

Market and sports analysis written by bots, virtue signaling “intellectuals”,
beat reporters who are lazy/tired/hurried/being told what to write, humans
having bias.

Honestly it’s all garbage. I just try to read primary sources when I can and
when I have time. People think being well read in the media talk of the day is
some sort of badge of intellectual self reliance. Nothing is further from the
truth.

------
russellbeattie
Having worked at Yahoo, Nokia and now Amazon, I always am amazed at how much
Machiavellian scheming is assigned to what is many times a bunch of techies
making stuff up as they go along. Having made the sausage, I can't tell you
how many times I've read some news and thought, "If they only knew."

The financial crisis made me realize that this is pretty much true for most
areas except, I hope, for bridge-builders and rocket scientists.

~~~
btilly
Oh, the rocket scientists made it up as well. See
[https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...](https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf)
for an entertaining and enlightening history. All sorts of things, such as
rocket fuel that was produced in large quantities and put into storage
containers before discovering that after sitting on its own for a few years,
it became dreadfully unstable.

My favorite "WTF" experiment was a calculation that adding mercury to rocket
fuel would result in better thrust. This went all the way to a full rocket
test, proving that the calculation was absolutely correct. Then the line of
research finally got abandoned because spewing horrible poisons into the air
is not something that we want to do...

~~~
saagarjha
Rockets seem to have all sorts of other toxic materials in them though:
hydrazine comes to mind.

~~~
btilly
Yes, rockets do. However most of the really toxic stuff becomes much less
toxic after it reacts.

Mercury by contrast is bad, stays bad once it reacts with something, and once
it gets in the environment quickly concentrates up the food chain to give you
maximum odds of experiencing just how bad it is. Usual lethal doses are 1-4
grams, and occasionally less. See
[https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents...](https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/mercury-
compounds.pdf) for more on that.

Mercury compounds generally don't get better than that, but they do get worse.
For example 0.3 grams of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury)
causes a bad death, and famously goes through things like latex gloves.

Filling a rocket with 30% mercury by volume may make the rocket go faster, but
spewing metric tonnes of mercury all over your environment at each launch
is..not recommended.

------
skrebbel
There's a dual effect: If you find a news source that consistently gets things
inside your field of expertise _right_ , then that's a data point suggesting
that they might be right about other fields as well.

Not necessarily of course: eg Dutch news broadcaster NOS got significantly
better tech reporting after hiring a particularly good journalist (Joost
Schellevis), but their other reporting didn't suddenly get less biased by him
joining.

~~~
gowld
That's plausible if the new news source is *general interest and is good in
your arbitrary (form their perspective) area of expertise. But it's bad advice
if the editor of your favorite automotive maintenance journal pens an article
about biology or international relations.

------
quickthrower2
Stating a "wet streets cause rain" is too obvious and will be picked up as a
fallacy. But to really con people say: "there is wet streets and again the
rain appears" so the reader makes the false arrow of causation in their mind
although you didn't say it.

------
lolc
The newspapers I read tend to get things right at least in my area of
expertise. Even when they reported on events or initiatives I was directly
involved in, they got the (sometimes incharitable) facts right. The ones that
don't, I don't read.

It does seem strange to continue reading a source that gets things wrong all
the time. A friend's commentary on those: "Just consider them entertainment.
Some readers want to be entertained in ways reality can't offer them."

------
JoachimS
The problem I have with this is that there clearly are fields of interest,
knowledge that are harder than others. Both to understand and to explain to
laymen.

Gell-Mann of course had a fundamental understandingf of modern physics
including many counterintuitive effects. A journalist would not have that
knownledge, and given the task to (in fairly short time) write an article for
an audience that in general neither has that fundamental understanding. So, of
course the journalist will make mistakes, misunderstand aspects of the field
when writing an article. Physics is hard.

But, politics, road safety, sports are interests that one quite probably can
claim are less hard to grasp. And areas a newspaper journalist quite probably
also have more knowledge about. So, the amount of errors and mistakes when
writing an article abpit something in these fields should be fewer. And Gell-
Mann would probably be able to spot them.

~~~
gowld
This may be falling victim to another form of flawed thinking: that long-time
passing familiarity with an issue is useful expertise. We know how to drive
our cars on the roads, but that doesn't mean know how our cars and roads and
city-wide traffic management works

------
tekromancr
This is related to the Gell-Mann-Griffin amnesia effect;

whereby immediately after reading about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, the
reader forgets about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This effect and it's
related origin's anti-memetic properties lead to the constant rediscovery and
dissemination of materials related to said effects.

~~~
sytelus
I'm surprised no one has coined the full recursive version of the effect :).

------
madrox
I experienced this first hand once when I was interviewed by the Washington
Post on quantified self. The reporter ignored a lot of information I provided
to make the article about whether quantified self was worth a damn.

In my statistics undergrad, we were told to find a science article, find the
study the article was about, and reinterpret the results to see how well the
article did. The article always overgeneralized study conclusions. Every time.

I have no great hatred for the press, and I don’t call anything I dislike Fake
News, but I do wish I felt like I could trust reporting more than I do.

------
jancsika
> 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.

Turning the page of a newspaper is often a _big_ deal:

* if you turn from the front page to _any other page_ , the sensationalism of the headlines decreases while the overall quality of the coverage increases. Save for the rare case of actual investigative journalism that starts on the front page.

* if you turn from the op-ed page to a news-bearing page, you're changing from reading bold-faced, unapologetic propaganda to reading news stories.

I think Chomsky either wrote or said that the most effective way to get news
from a newspaper is to start from the back and reading to the front.

Anyhow, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect seems not to take any of these truisms
into account. (Nor the fact that people who read newspapers and periodicals
also have a genre literacy, including foreknowledge of the most reputable
reporters, reporters backgrounds, conflicts of interest, etc.)

~~~
jancsika
Just to test out the Gell-Mann logic, let's change the content:

"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the low quality of a
poem, and then turn the page to 20th century poets, and read as if T.S.
Eliot's work was somehow more serious than the baloney you just read."

------
nemild
Partly for this reason, I’ve written a media literacy guide:

[https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-
media/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-
media/blob/master/README.md)

There’s also one specific to the tech industry:

[https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-
media/blob/master/softwar...](https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-
media/blob/master/software-engineers-media-guide.md)

------
redleggedfrog
"At some point you've got to trust your newspaper (or read a better one!)
unless there is explicit counter-evidence from elsewhere against the story."

Gell-Mann has fascinated me for years (even before I knew it by name). It
stemmed from reading news articles about technology in the newspaper (even
pre-internet) and other conventional news sources. They _never_ seemed to get
it right, and it was frustrating. Particularly galling was the use mis-use of
"hacker".

As I got older, and eventually had a cadre of friends and acquaintances in
various professions - nurse, doctor, lawyer, CEO (food), COO (software
development), environmental scientist, hydrologist, industrial engineer,
insurance salesman, high level manager, and most notably, a journalist.

Querying them specifically on Gell-Mann, the results were pretty much
unanimous. They all felt like the conventional media mis-reported their fields
of expertise. Being introduced to the Gell-Mann concept was an eye-opener for
some of them, while others had intuitively understood it, as I had.

Consequently, I follow no out of domain news sources. If I want to know
something, I read something in depth from within the industry it is covering.
I choose carefully, and try discredit what I've read.

I have to say, it was particular satisfying not paying attention to the last
election. One of my friends, a self-avowed news-monger, remarked to me
casually a few days before election day, "Hillary cancelled her post-election
party." I said, "She knows she's going to lose." He said, "You're crazy,
everyone has her in a landslide." I said, "You might be misinformed."

~~~
chasingthewind
>Consequently, I follow no out of domain news sources.

I wonder if this has the opposite risk of creating a kind of "journalistic
capture" where the reporting of the journalists who are experts on the topic
can be too highly influenced by the industry they're covering.

>"Hillary cancelled her post-election party."

A quick search suggests to me that it's well documented that she canceled some
kind of party at the Javits Center on election day rather than days in
advance. Do you have anything offhand that speaks to this? Am I perhaps
searching for a different party than the one you're describing?

~~~
redleggedfrog
"where the reporting of the journalists who are experts on the topic can be
too highly influenced by the industry they're covering."

Yes, I worry about that, too. I try to balance it out best I can.

"A quick search suggests to me that it's well documented that she canceled
some kind of party at the Javits Center on election day rather than days in
advance."

Nope, I suspect that's the one. Sorry about the time-frame lapse. Should have
Googled it myself.

~~~
redleggedfrog
"Nope, I suspect that's the one. Sorry about the time-frame lapse. Should have
Googled it myself."

I just got hit on the head with the irony on that. Thanks chasingthewind I got
a good laugh.

------
drawkbox
Gell-Mann amnesia effect is the same with movies or other information that is
packaged for mass consumption or pop culture, getting details wrong might be a
simplification for understanding and consumption, or a first impression that
might not give the full picture but allows mass consumption of the idea to get
closer to the truth.

In movies, if you are in a field portrayed in the movie, you see how much was
wrong regarding that field or subject in the popular or surface level
understanding of a subject. But then go on to believe the suspended or
simulated reality the movie portrays on other fields or subjects that may also
be off base but in the general direction.

Communication sometimes has to be a simplification or a surface level
knowledge set that is understandable or consumable by all people or the target
market, especially people that might not know about a particular subject. So
you might read an article or see a part of a movie that is wrong, but the
general gist is correct or the view represented might be people's first take
on a subject, but the more detail one knows it might skew farther from that
initial idea.

Similar to the way hackers are portrayed in movies, hackers do things with
machines and software that are amazing in real life, but it is a cartoon
version in the movies. Space travel movies are also usually guilty of this.
The Martian was lauded for the more scientific and reality based takes on
aspects of the movie, but also it was still packaged for consumption to get a
point across.

When it comes to news and facts, incorrect details are bad when articles are
wrong or get detailed parts incorrect, but many times first impressions are
wrong or first takes on subjects are off base slightly, ultimately the truth
comes out or is refined to closer to correct. Journalists might not fully
understand a subject enough or may be missing parts to fully get all the
details correct, eventually through more work though these ideas are
corrected. The journey to truth and fact is iterative.

People simplify to get to a point where they can understand something to then
find out the truth through more discovery, it is a work in progress, kinda
like finding out about our place in the universe, initially people thought
Earth was the center of all that is. The pursuit of knowledge and fact is
getting a foothold to climb closer to the truth bit by bit, unless the bias is
intentionally to mislead or spread disinformation.

------
bmmayer1
This is a pretty good explanation for why 'fake news' is a thing.

"Michael Crichton concluded in the same essay that there is absolutely no
value in the media, as society continues to seek information from the same
source that was entirely wrong on the topic in which one retains expertise"

------
yellowapple
While I do observe this in theory, in practice I've found that some
newspapers/magazines/websites just do a better job in certain subjects than
others. One wouldn't expect Top Gear to be 100% correct in an article about
floral arrangements, after all. I've noticed this a lot for local news
channels; they're great at covering local events (that's their specialty) but
terrible at covering world events (which is very much not their specialty; the
better ones stick to the key points instead of trying to go in depth, which is
smart).

So a publication totally butchering a subject is certainly cause to get a
second opinion for other subjects, but not necessarily cause to discard the
publication's take on those other subjects outright.

------
jcriddle4
Trust in media has been dropping:
[https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/226472/sides-aisle-
ag...](https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/226472/sides-aisle-agree-media-
problem.aspx)

------
faitswulff
"The media" is such a nebulous phrase. I tend to avidly follow particular
journalist's work - Ed Yong in science, for instance. I think this is more
reliable than ascribing wholesale to a particular publication or "the media."

------
tptacek
Why are people so sure that this effect is real, and not just a cognitive
illusion caused by Sturgeon's Law?

It's _really_ easy to cite counterexamples to it. Even in our field, and in
very mainstream press outlets.

~~~
tedunangst
I'm sure the effect is exaggerated because it gives people the warm fuzzies to
know they're smarter than those newspaper dolts, but demonstrating a few news
articles were correct doesn't seem like it proves all reporting is correct.

Although perhaps there is actually the opposite effect. Now people read an
article in their field, notice some flaws, and conclude all reporting is
terribly flawed?

But really, one month you read a wired article about kaminsky and the keys to
the internet, and then you read an article about hacking slot machines, and
you think, oh yeah, I'm sure this accurate?

~~~
tptacek
Wait, it's not my argument that all reporting is correct! It's my argument
that 90% of it is crap.

------
chimprich
This article seems to be based on a Michael Crichton speech. Crichton himself
had some controversial and unscientific views on climate change; maybe this
was what he had in mind when he wrote the speech. Perhaps, contrary to this
opinion, he should have been less sceptical of the media.

The article seems quite poor. Of two supporting references it uses, one seems
to contradict the effect (C.S. Lewis became _more_ sceptical) and the other
suggests Hitchens referred to this effect in an interview that came years
before the speech.

~~~
mherdeg
In Crichton's 2002 speech which cites the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (
[http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-
speculate/](http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/) ) he argues
that:

(1) newspapers and other media sources should not quote experts who predict
that the 2002 United States steel tariffs will affect GDP or employment,
because no one can predict the future, and you should ignore any predictions
you read experts making which are quoted by newspapers. Note that in
retrospect ( see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tarif...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tariff)
and links ) research has showed that the tariffs adversely affected GDP and
employment, as some experts predicted.

(2) other predictions which people made are wrong and, with the benefit of
hindsight, they should not make them. Note that Crichton cherry-picks only
those predictions which turned out to be inaccurate.

In retrospect there is a bit of irony in his being forced to "predict" certain
future predictions which would turn out to be wrong. The one specific future
prediction he happened to choose happened to be somewhat accurate.

Yes, Crichton does use the latter half of the speech to argue that global
climate change is not happening, or if it is happening it's good for humanity,
and anyway it's considerably less important to humanity's fate than changes in
the Earth's magnetic field strength.

What he does not say in his speech is "I have analyzed predictions made in
news articles for the past X years, and judged the accuracy of N predictions
-- Y% of them were accurate. Frustratingly none of them expressed any degree
of confidence in their predictions so I treated all equally for this analysis.
This percentage is [no worse than guessing | worse than guessing, so you
should expect the opposite of what is predicted with weak/strong confidence |
better than guessing, so you should expect what is predicted with weak/strong
confidence]. Here are my data so you can see for yourself."

Did Crichton do his homework? Or did he just give up in dismay and cherry-pick
some examples of failed predictions? His argument is rhetorically compelling
but it's based on anecdotes rather than data and it's hard to trust.

A very quick Web search shows that with respect to opinion columnists (not the
same as newswriters), this work has been done at an undergraduate level -- see
[https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/pundits-as-accurate-
as-c...](https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/pundits-as-accurate-as-coin-toss-
according-to-study) , [https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-
accura...](https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accuracy-of-
forecasts-in-the-political-media.pdf) \-- and has found that some specific
opinion writers tend to make predictions which are accurate and some do not.

------
redwards510
I'm sorry do I have this wrong? You read one story in source X from author A
which you determine to be incorrect based on your own personal knowledge. Now
we should assume everything published from source X is wrong because author A
was incorrect? Is that what this is trying to say?

Journalists get things wrong. Doesn't mean I am going to completely ignore the
nytimes from then on.

Or am I just a sucker now, according to Michael Chriton.

~~~
marcosdumay
You know deeply about subjects X, Y and Z. There's an information source where
every time you read about X, Y or Z, the article is wrong. You know that
because you know X, Y and Z.

There are also subjects A, B and C. You know next to nothing about them. When
you read something about them on that same source, you can't know if it is
correct. So why would you even expect it not to be wrong too?

------
peteretep
The alternative is what, exactly? It may simple be that a facile understanding
of the world is perfectly acceptable for most topics.

~~~
close04
I guess a good option is to pick "reference topics" as measuring sticks. Read
about something you are intimately familiar with. If the reporting matches
your experience you can assume it's relatively unbiased. If there's a strong
mismatch you can assume it will be present when covering topics you are not
familiar with and cannot judge correctly.

~~~
peteretep
This doesn't sound like how newspapers work.

Take a state propaganda outlet like RT.com. They have plenty of stories on
topics I know about that are just fine.

~~~
close04
It's not necessarily applicable at anything above journalist level. Different
journalists have different biases. And their biases might be overridden by
their superiors when they get hired by another media outlet, with different
"sponsors".

But unless you plan on being an expert in every field or just distrusting
about everything you read (safe option if you ask me), such a measuring stick
is better than nothing.

------
SZJX
That's why any sensible person would know not to trust the mass media at all
or at least view every coverage with a load of skepticism. It's obvious from
how the way they cover tech and programming is full of misunderstandings and
forced narratives. Easy to imagine how things can be similar for other fields
as well.

------
blululu
A little tangential, but is this effect actually documented by Murray Gell-
Mann himself? From what I can see I find no evidence to suggest that he
actually experienced this effect. If so, it seems like Chriton's anecdote is
using some deceitful rhetoric.

~~~
gowld
What's deceitful? It's named after something Chrichton observed in Gell-Mann.

~~~
blululu
I can see no source claiming that Gell-Mann ever experienced this effect first
hand. In which case Chrichton's may have nothing to do with the physicist and
the effect is merely a fabrication of the writer's imagination. In any case,
we should really ask 'is science journalism really that bad?'\- do experts in
the field find it to be incorrect.

------
cambalache
Yeah, but this happens everywhere, in real life, online communities etc, here
in HN.

------
rusk
Personal anecdote: Growing up, from maybe late teens up past 30 I'd say, I was
a fanatical adherent of the Irish Times. It's considered to be "centre-right"
in its editorial but was also a quality publication, with great editorial and
journalistic standards, and still is by far the best Irish daily newspaper
(the standard otherwise is not great).

I would devour it. Gobble down her op-eds. Take my thinking from it, even
proudly claiming to shocked friends from time to time that it's _" where I get
my opinion"_. I was pro-business, anti-union - a champion of conservative
values and believed that society adequately served the honest and hard-
working.

I bought it every day. I'd proudly strut about with it tucked under my arm.
They could have told me black was white and I'd have lapped it up.

About 10 years ago a few things changed, and I can't say what exactly. The
editor turned over from a lady who was a distinguished journalist to "some
other old guy" \- maybe that was it. Maybe it was the financial crisis brought
about a lowering of quality standards or a need to compromise values. Or maybe
it was the change in government that brought about a regime that was more
harmonious with their editorial ideals. The Irish Times has strong ties both
presently, and historically with the current ruling party but all through my
youth they were in opposition and perhaps this gave the IT a rebellious note.

Maybe I was just getting older and wiser.

Probably all this coming together; but I started to notice the cracks more and
more. Not just partiality, but sloppy, careless reporting. Some stuff just
downright and even dangerously wrong at times.

They used to be subscriber-only but had some years hence gone purely ad-
driven; when they started to go back to being subscriber only I jumped on it
because I hoped that subscriber-driven revenue would improve journalistic
standards. I enthusiastically battled in the comments section with the
freeloading whingers as I saw them.

I signed up for the online edition and to have the weekend edition delivered
(getting the delivery to actually come was a litany of operational issues that
I won't get into now).

But nothing improved. They spent a bit more money on the site, and rebranded
the print edition. That was it. They started introducing more and more
obtrusive advertising, and the coverage just got more and more partisan and
pro-establishment until one day, they printed just outright lies about the
outcome of a trial I had been following closely.

That was it. I was done. The desperate bastards _couldn 't even give me a way
to unsubscribe online_. I actually _had to ring them up_ on a number that I
found buried in the terms and conditions. Even then on the phone they wanted
to know the whys and wherefores and if I'd be back. They were pleasant and
polite as was I with them.

Since then I've watched them spiral down down down. They're at a point now
where they're presenting different agendas to different "segments": Online
subscriber-only articles tend to be more progressive in their outlook. The
free-access stuff is grotesquely click-baity. The print edition caters to the
stuffy older more conservative readership.

This is a newspaper that claims to be the "Newspaper of Record". It saddens me
that it's still far and away the best daily on Irish newstands though.

Sorry for the rant. It's kind of like when Luis Figo went to Real Madrid. One
Barca fan recorded as saying _" We hate him so much because we loved him so
much"_.

~~~
gowld
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M)

"In this timeless clip, Prime Minister, Jim Hacker explains to Sir Humphrey
and Bernard the importance of the papers and who reads which one."

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751828/quotes](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751828/quotes)

Sir Humphrey: The only way to understand the Press is to remember that they
pander to their readers' prejudices.

Jim Hacker: Don't tell me about the Press. I know _exactly_ who reads the
papers.

* The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country.

* The Guardian is read by people who think they _ought_ to run the country.

* The Times is read by the people who actually _do_ run the country.

* The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country.

* The Financial Times is read by people who _own_ the country.

* The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by _another_ country.

* The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard Woolley: Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as she's
got big

~~~
cptnapalm
Such a wonderful show and several actual prime ministers have said, more or
less, "yes, this is what it is actually like."

------
karmakaze
I can't help but feel the effect at work in the comments. "Oh it can't all be
like that." Either that or HNers just like to be contrarian.

------
w_t_payne
This is why we have institutions with processes that attempt to manage and
improve quality.

------
jonstewart
The Crichton amnesia effect is when you forget how susceptible Michael
Crichton was to embarrassing prejudices himself. Rising Sun and Disclosure...
are... just... yeesh.

------
sparkzilla
Who reads an actual newspaper these days?

------
lamby
So, after reading about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect I now no-longer... (etc.)

------
EGreg
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different
result - Einstein

Democracy is the best system of government, except for all the others -
Churchill

With the News Media, it seems to be the combination:

News based on Capitalism and Competition is the worst system for making sense
of information, creating echo chambers and clickbait to pay its bills in a
race to the bottom, but we will still keep turning to it to inform our
democracies.

How about something new for a change, namely COLLABORATION like wiki or open
source news, and replacing the journalists risking their lives on the ground
with citizen journalists that have cellphones. This is 2018 and people
document every phenomenon anyway. All we are missing is collaboration.

This being HN, let’s hack it together. If you want to build a site like that
together, contact me (greg at the domain qbix.com)

~~~
fzeroracer
'Open-source news' has the very same problem that open source in general does.
It's relatively easy for standards to be adopted, co-opted by companies and
people with agendas and then the open-source basis abandoned.

For example in your scenario how do you stop state actors from infiltrating
and perpetuating stories or views that are positive to them? As you've no
doubt seen recently, facts are surprisingly malleable with the right viewpoint
and those citizen journalists can submit one-sided videos removing or altering
context.

In an ideal news media world the role of a journalist should be to provide
full context for why something matters while performing their own independent
investigations. Meanwhile, the people reading said media should have the
proper education and critical thinking skills trained to analyze multiple
pieces of information to understand biases.

~~~
EGreg
How exactly do people stop these things from happening currently? Because they
happen all the time.

[https://news.avclub.com/behold-this-chorus-of-local-news-
tea...](https://news.avclub.com/behold-this-chorus-of-local-news-teams-
reading-in-unis-1824232244)

------
aj7
Whataboutism is its cousin.

------
justin_vanw
"there is no value in media"

So much this.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message)

What is reported is decided based entirely on what will hold the most
attention for the advertisements. If media outlet attempts to act according to
any other rule they are displaced by one which will maximize eyes on
advertisements. (This is much like politicians who base every decision on
getting more votes against politicians doing anything else.) The exception to
this rule is when the media is directly used to further other interests of the
large corporations which own it.

~~~
rbanffy
Capitalism is a wonderful thing, but only when the social benefit of a service
is well aligned with the profit of realizing that benefit. When they are
completely misaligned, they may pretend to do a job while they are actually
doing a very different one.

~~~
justin_vanw
"Capitalism" is totally orthogonal to this, any alternative to capitalism
requires the use of force to confiscate carrots from one person to give
carrots to someone else, by definition (replace carrots with whatever you grow
on your farm or make at work all day). This sort of scheme is so unnatural to
human psychology that it can only persist where there is a total lack of any
criticism, which means there is no 'media' whatsoever in non capitalist
countries, there is only state propaganda.

You might say "what about slavery", and you would be correct, except that this
makes my point perfectly. It was _illegal_ to teach a slave to read, at a time
when the only media was newspapers and the written word. Why did they have to
prevent slaves from having access to media? Because the system was so
unnatural to human psychology that it could only persist while there was no
media whatsoever.

So talking about 'media' in an environment besides 'capitalism' doesn't even
make sense.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> "Capitalism" is totally orthogonal to this_

The rest of your post fails to substantiate this claim. Concretely, the "this"
that you claim is orthogonal to capitalism is that:

 _> > When [social benefit of a service is completely misaligned aligned with
the profit of realizing that benefit], they may pretend to do a job while they
are actually doing a very different one._

Unsurprisingly, this is not a big problem for economic systems that do not
reward profit-making. It is certainly true, as you note, that there are
_other_ ways in which the distribution of reward warps behaviors even in
systems that aren't organized around profit-making.

But the problem of social benefit being misaligned _specifically with_ profit-
making is very much a quintessentially capitalist problem. Witness e.g. the
fact that capitalist systems always end up realizing and attempting to solve
this problem with a patchwork of laws and regulations.

Also, consider that your comments about psychology are mostly comments about
your own biases and value systems. People who grow up and are successful in
other political/value systems tend to say similar things about their own
milieu.

~~~
justin_vanw
> The rest of your post fails to substantiate this claim.

Re-reading what you posted I have to agree with this.

>Unsurprisingly, this is not a big problem for economic systems that do not
reward profit-making.

There are few examples of such systems and they are extremely unstable, there
are certainly no examples surviving more than a hundred years or so.

> Witness e.g. the fact that capitalist systems always end up realizing and
> attempting to solve this problem with a patchwork of laws and regulations.

All systems end up solving all problems with a patchwork of laws and
regulations, except the problems that go away by themselves, or the problems
that are not addressed at all.

> But the problem of social benefit being misaligned specifically with profit-
> making is very much a quintessentially capitalist problem.

Again, this is just a tautology. Above you effectively define capitalism as
the system that rewards profit-making. So any feature of any system that is
specific to profit making can only exist in capitalism in the structure you
set up, so it's not a meaningful claim at all.

> Also, consider that your comments about psychology are mostly comments about
> your own biases and value systems.

No, this is simply not the case. If you think that mammals don't inherently
have a concept of personal property you should see how my dog reacts when the
cat is sleeping in her bed. We have to spend countless hours teaching children
to share, not because it is natural for them, but because what is natural for
them is not adaptive to life in a society. Our social structures have evolved
much faster than our biology.

------
daveguy
This is a political statement masquerading as a wikipedia article. You should
always take a single article with a grain of salt, whether they are talking
about palestine, physics or show business. Entertainment reporting, even in a
reputable source, generally doesn't have the same rigor applied as stories
about war and politics. You didn't just "learn" something by identifying a
single poor article you know a lot about. All articles should be read with
some skepticism and multiple sources should be used and chosen carefully.
Avoid the VOX and FOX sources and you'll probably have a pretty realistic view
of world events. Also, know the difference between the opinion section (and
prime-time opinion "news" shows) and the news sections (and news shows).

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
>Avoid the VOX and FOX sources

That's exactly the problem. Who do you like?

Because I've seen HORRIBLY inaccurate articles on guns done by BBC and NPR who
routinely has Michael Bloomberg on as an "expert" in the field when he happens
to be the single source of almost all gun control money in the USA right now.

There is no white whale. There are stories that Fox has absolutely gotten
right. The are things Vox or Vice get right. CNN this last month refuses to
acknowledge they made up a claim from an anonymous source. NYT and WaPo have
run articles dangerously close to fake news and retracted them.

If you followed the 2016 election, you _should_ be aware that there is no
unbiased news. Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept article which I typically like
have some extremely biased articles by the other authors. Mind boggling
they're on the same site.

It extends past news as well.

Who seriously thinks it's "right" in terms of bias to have the cast of
Avengers in a commercial telling me I need to vote for Clinton? There are the
same people that feign protest against things like Citizen's United.

In the Wikileaks Podesta emails it was discovered that The Colbert Report as
far back as 2013 was running content designed by Clinton's campaign as an
intro to her running. If no one remembers the last six months of Jon Stewart's
Daily Show, I'll remind you it was The Trump Show, I am under no illusion that
was by someone's design as Viacom who was for Clinton.

I don't think there is a solution to "just don't listen to Vox or Fox".

 _" Turn on the TV, hear a bunch of what the fucks, dude is dating so and so,
blabbering about such and such, and that's not Jersey Shore, homie that's the
news. The same people that's supposed to be telling us the truth"_

