I had come across this term several years ago, forgotten the name but remembered the concept, and just recently re-encountered it. Here's the original quote where the term was coined, from and essay by science fiction author Michael Crichton:
Quote:
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.
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.
http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/
This concept immediately resonated with me, as it pointed out both something I had experienced, learning about a subject only to realize that the media got it horrifically wrong most of the time, and a hole in my thinking, that I failed to apply the lesson to areas outside my subjects of expertise. If a reporter can't bother to spend ten seconds on Google verifying that what he's saying about guns (one of my strongest subjects), for example, is accurate, why would I expect that the next story about technology or medicine or some other topic that I don't have first hand experience with will be any more factual? It's more than just not trusting the media, it's realizing that most of the times they get something wrong I won't even know, and questioning everything I've ever learned other than first hand, which is kind of humbling.
Anyway, I'll expand on this later, for the moment I'm just happy to have stumbled upon this concept again, and hope it might open some other people up to the idea that they might know less than they think they do.
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Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer.
- Rick Sanchez
23 May 2016, 12:15 am
