"I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 14 June 1807, Works 10:417--18
(sigh - sometimes people notice, but not much can be done, and trying only seems to make things worse, ahem, "fact-checking", cough ... perhaps we should lower expectations, and not demand that advertisement padding double up as a source of truth.)
I think this can be a great tool to vet sources. I've often found that looking for subjects I am an expert on lets me understand how much nuance and understanding someone is putting into presenting some work.
I've found this to be extremely important because many of the tough (and popular) topics we discuss today are extremely complex. But if people are only going into the basics and don't talk to experts about the complexity and nuance they will frequently make extremely bad conclusions. Science communicators are supposed to be taking the complex and nuanced topics that experts understand and distill it into something more palpable for the common (or even a bit nerdy) audience. But I do find that a lot of our extremely popular YouTube pop-sci channels or information based comedy shows (and even news) often don't actually seek out discussions with experts for clarity, even if they appear to or have the budget for it. It has really limited my source list of these channels and shows, but I also think it has really helped.
It's a big assumption though, yes? Namely, that the accuracy of information, or lack thereof, will somehow be consistent across topic areas?
It seems reasonable to me to expect journalists to have a better grasp of certain things than others (say politics or law instead of physics), and for this to vary across writers (one writer might have a background in chemistry; another in population biology).
I also think there's a certain variability of opinion on certain topics when you get to a certain level, and experts aren't always aware of this. That is, some (not all) tend to believe they are infallible and everyone else who disagrees is incorrect, or sometimes, "unscientific." There's probably several ways this could play a role, but I do think it plays some role in this.
I think this Gell-Mann amnesia is sort of a real bias that's interesting to think about, but I also think in reality it might not be quite what's being assumed in this essay.
> It's a big assumption though, yes? Namely, that the accuracy of information, or lack thereof, will somehow be consistent across topic areas?
Yes and no. It's more a method to rule out, not rule in. If a presenter gives bad information about something I know I can't trust them. If a presenter gives good information about something I know, it builds evidence that I can trust them. These two are different. The latter isn't complete trust and still maintains skepticism. At the end of the day, we have to have some trust. But that also doesn't mean absolute.
On subjects I'm an expert in? That undoes the evidence for trust, right?
On subjects I'm not an expert in? Well I can't know.
The problem here is that I'm not an expert in everything. In fact, I'm not an expert in most things. I feel like people are taking this test as a perfect test. Far from it. There is no such test and never will be. But to everyone that is trying to counter this I'll ask you the inverse question: "Why should I trust someone when they've proven to mischaracterize a topic?" That's the heart of this metric.
If you've proven that you won't do enough research, I have reason to not believe you. If you've proven that you will do enough research, I have reason to believe you. It is statistical. Everything is. It is imperfect. Everything is. If you got suggestions about how to extend this and improve upon this, I'm listening. But I'm not just going to abandon it and start listening to people that have given me strong evidence to distrust them. That's a bit insane. It is also exactly what the Gell-Mann amnesia effect is making fun of: trusting people in things you don't know about that proved to be untrustworthy in things you do.
I miss Michael Crichton. His writing and imagination reinforced my interest in science and engineering and got me interested in studying biochem in undergrad. I should not have been reading his books in the third grade, but it was a defining period for me.
The 90's were great. Michael Crichton, Bill Nye, Carl Sagan, LeVar Burton, Mr. Wizard, Stephen Hawking, Lonnie Johnson (local engineer and inventor of Nerf and Super Soaker). We were also fresh off the 80's wave of sci-fi with Aliens, RoboCop, Terminator, etc. The future always felt like it was going to have infinite potential.
It's probably even better for kids now with YouTube. Derek Muller, et al. are killing it.
Less denialism than caution against jumping to conclusions and "consensus". He understood that to base society off of models with phenomenally low confidence has the potential to harm more than help, despite any good intentions.
Of course, which is why there isn't "one" model, there's lots of models, and they provide a statistical range of expected possibilities. And of course Crichton knows that damned well himself.
Applying impossibly high (or inappropriately high) standards of proof is a bog-standard rhetorical tactic - "how can we ever know anything with total certainty after all?". And yet the effects predicted by the consensus models have if anything proved to be too conservative, a possibility that the ever-so-open-minded Crichton never mentioned at all! Certainly that was always a possibility too, and yet he only cared to harp on the one possibility that was most comfortable to his mindset. And that's a kind of bias too - the willingness to dismiss presented evidence when it's inconvenient personally or politically.
As they say, though, science advances one funeral at a time. It's just rather sad that it occurred at such a critical time in our planet's history, and that this particular individual had a megaphone and yet used it for such negative ends.
It's crazy to characterize those models as "phenomenally low confidence," and it seems at this stage that that ignorance is highly likely to get a lot of people killed. It was basic physical chemistry.
He’s actually a person to whom I applied the “opposite” of the Gell Mann effect to. I first watched his videos on the stuff I did know something about to make sure he was covering the nuances before watching his other material. Now I watch his other videos on things I don’t know about, trusting that he’ll cover the nuances of those subjects.
> 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.
I don't understand. I feel like reading something ridiculously inaccurate would rather increase my skepticism about the next thing I read (let alone in the same newspaper) than decrease it as the statement suggests.
You under estimate the effects of confirmation bias. It's easy to dismiss one news article when the rest are an echo chamber for your political beliefs. To question the accuracy of a site that agrees with you means you must question your beliefs, too.
Actually that's the reason I posted this when I saw that gem at the bottom of his blog.
Naming is clearly a form of branding. Why Michael Crichton called it the Gell-Mann amnesia effect:
By the way, why is the effect named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann? Crichton explained
I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.
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It reminds me of why von Neumann told Shannon to call it entropy:
When Shannon first derived his famous formula for information, he asked von Neumann what he should call it and von Neumann replied “You should call it entropy for two reasons: first because that is what the formula is in statistical mechanises but second and more important, as nobody knows what entropy is, whenever you use the term you will always be at an advantage!
Although it does have the slight downside that Gell-Mann in his later years started promoting nonsense in the field of linguistics to the effect that all human languages supposedly descended from one (it's a common failing among great scientists; compare Pauling's unfortunate trend towards "Vitamin C cures cancer!" in his later years)
John Cook's blog posts are often interesting and are generally very well-written. I wonder why he is so obsessed with his blog? To promote his consulting business? That may be a factor, but he posts so frequently that there must be a stronger motivation.
"I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."
Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 14 June 1807, Works 10:417--18
(sigh - sometimes people notice, but not much can be done, and trying only seems to make things worse, ahem, "fact-checking", cough ... perhaps we should lower expectations, and not demand that advertisement padding double up as a source of truth.)