The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Fearless Leader links to another speech by Michael Crichton, this time on speculation (also known as "wild-assed guesses" or "making stuff up") in the media. Here's what jumped out at me in particular:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (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.)

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.

We've all seen this. I know computers. Not everything about them, but I've dropped out of a Computer Science degree, and on my own time I've studied every relevant topic from solid-state physics to psychology. And the great majority of what is printed in the newspapers regarding computers is, frankly, rubbish. I don't even notice this any more, unless it's a close relative being misquoted (I come from a geeky family) or a particularly obtuse reporter failing to understand anything about the concept of open source. It's what I expect.

I've seen reports on events that I was personally involved in that, if I was lucky, touched on accuracy once or twice within a dozen paragraphs of nonsense. I don't bother to read the paper at all these days. I don't even buy it for the TV guide, since I don't watch TV more than twice a year now that Buffy and Futurama are gone. (That is, I don't watch broadcast TV; I watch plenty of DVDs and downloaded video.)

About the only thing that many newspapers are good for now is to let you know that there is a story, so that you can go and find out the facts yourself.

The cure I found for the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect was the New York Times. The nonsense they were printing in the first half of last year was so egregious that it became obvious even on subjects I didn't know anything about. Oh, and blogs too.

Read The Whole Thing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:42 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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