"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."
My favourite example of this is the Economist news magazine. The Economist reports on a much larger range of country and topics than the typical magazine or newspaper. Many of its readers like it for that exact reason: it gives them information on stories they won't normally find in their local or national news sources and they want to be informed about, say, hydroelectric developments in the Congo.
The problem is that writing about 25 different countries in a single issue doesn't mean they actually have experts on most of those places or people on the ground to do original reporting. Often, it devolves into British or American writers regurgitating inaccurate information from the Internet. But if it's the only thing you read about, say, forest exports from Myanmar, you have no reason to question it.
The easiest way to see this is to be a non-US/UK/EU person and read an article in the Economist about your own country. Then you realize that all the other articles are just as simplistic and uninformed.
My experience is the opposite. And I'm definitely not blind to the Gell-Mann Amnesia, I notice it on Wikipedia all the time.
I've noticed that in The Economist the articles about my field of technology, work, and my small home country, have been accurate to the point that I suspect they have had experts in the field involved in creating them. That gives me confidence in the articles about issues I'm not intimately familiar with.
That is why The Economist is one of the few news sources I read after cutting out following daily news completely. As a result I'm much better informed about the facts and issues than I was when reading huge amounts of daily news. It boils down to a difference between consuming mostly noise and consuming mostly signal.
Interesting. My own area of knowledge is renewable energy, a topic which appears with moderate frequency in TE. I would say 8/10 articles are merely repackaging reports published by major global consultancies like McKinsey, Navigant, etc. that I had seen two or three months earlier through my employer (a large multinational energy company). I would not say the information is not correct, but it hardly insightful and often presents an incomplete picture which looks at the industry primarily from the perspective of financiers.
Well that's why it's not called The Technologist I guess :) It's hard to expect non-specialist publication to write anything non-trite to an expert in the field, but just not botching up the basic facts is often refreshing.
perhaps not insightful to you, someone with knowledge of the area. but how about others? how about me? where should I gain my insights into all of the various industries that I don't have direct knowledge of today?
I'd like to echo this sentiment. In fact, this is the exact reason that I happily pay for The Economist. Even when reporting on topics with which I'm quite familiar, The Economist nails it in terms of accuracy.
For instance, recently there was a writeup on quantum computing in which they made a somewhat hyperbolic claim regarding D-Wave. This gave me pause; however, the point was clarified in subsequent paragraphs, thus restoring my confidence in their analysis.
Much like the parent poster, I too have dropped many of my daily news sources, but not The Economist. I've yet to find a publication which matches it in terms of coverage and accuracy--not to mention their exceptionally high-quality audio recordings of each edition (perfect for commuting!).
But the nice thing about the newspaper (The Economist refers to itself as a newspaper, not a magazine) is that they provide pure opinion journalism and as a reader you know exactly where they are coming from.
While I agree a lot with the publication (for example: they argued to liberalize drugs, or advocated gay marriage literally decades before it was chic). I encounter my share of (what I lovingly refer to as) full-of-shit opinions, with which I wholeheartedly disagree.
Overall, though, it's one of the last remaining publications, on which I put a certain amount of trust because they usually know what they're writing about and even on the subjects on which I (partially vehemently) disagree it's always an interesting read.
Because they argue their position intelligently and competently. It won't make me a believer, but it's useful and interesting to get the counterpoint from a reputable and trustworthy publication and sometimes get your dogmas slightly shaken in the process.
Additionally, I feel they present opposing opinions with proper weight and fairness (before arguing against these points), so you never quite feel totally in the dark about the full controversy.
I'll give you an example. The Economist has a few core principles that they hold very dear. Two of these are social liberalism and trade liberalism. They are strong believers in the free market. Applying these principles to issues in the recent past, the Economist took positions in favour of both legalisation of drugs and enacting the Trans Pacific Partnership. Most people (but not all) disagree with one of these stances but not the other. A Reagan Republican would favour trade and "just say no" whereas an Obama Democrat would demonise the TPP and demand the end of a failed, pointless war. It's easy to see how such people would find some stances taken by the Economist as "full-of-shit".
I'm a long time subscriber to the Economist, ever since I was in high school. I appreciate their breadth of reporting and their commitment to provide opinionated takes on news while also giving a balanced take on news. Very few times have I felt the "Murray Gell-Mann effect" while reading it. I can recall just one instance they have been wrong about a topic I'm knowledgeable about. That's a better record than any other publication I read.
Reading the above quote from Micheal Chrichton, I immediately thought about The Economist and how they are usually well informed. I remember a short article on some legal case in rap music. I used to be very into rap, and while I didn't learn a lot from the article it did confirm that the writers take it very seriously whatever topic they are reporting on.
I stopped reading TE because I was put off by their too steadfast belief in monetarism as the be it end all. To their credit, they are pretty upfront about that though.
Actually, the Economist has about 400 reporters for a 50 page weekly magazine, about 8 per page, so they do have enough people to include experts for all those fields.
The times I read an Economist article about my country or my line of work the coverage was actually very good, but your milage may vary.
Very true, but TE is usually way less wrong than the alternatives. The journalists there at least seem to know how to use Wikipedia. I mean, what am I supposed to read instead?
Indeed, and that is why I very rarely read it - for me, it would be too echo-chambery. I read the NYT quite deliberately and every day, enumerate why Krugman and Blow are wrong about whatever they are pontificating about...
Has The Economist shifted? I started reading it in about 2000, and at the time I really liked it because it seemed so intelligent and neutral. It seemed like such a pleasure to read something that went deep into interesting topics without an obvious axe to grind.
In the past ten years it seems to have drifted gradually leftward. Sometimes I can't reconsile The Economist of 2000 with the one of 2016. Did The Economist move gradually to the left or did I move to the right?
I think you've moved to the right, or this is another case of "reality having a leftwing bias". Or perhaps issues not reducing clearly to left/right.
The Economist were always Mill/Smith liberals, in favour of free trade, light but effective regulation, against the War on Drugs, pro-migration etc. They have a strong tendency to recommend economic liberalism regardless of what the problem is. These days the "right" have moved to "illiberal" positions - restricting free trade and migration. That may be what you're seeing.
Essentially it is, with caveats. The Economist was originally a publication set up to protest the Corn Laws and their distortion of the marketplace. The stance has shifted over the years but the tone is often inline with the founding idea that people and businesses should be left up to their own devices unless there is an excellent reason to intervene.
This quote has always bugged me a little bit. It does seem reasonable to expect that reporters and editors know more about the major world events that are the paper's bread and butter and less about other things.
The structure of a typical science section doesn't help. There are typically only a few reporters--often only one-- and they tend to cover whatever's timely (e.g., has recently been announced/opened/published), which doesn't let them build up much expertise. I think this also explains why pop-science articles tend to conflate background (here's what was known before this paper was published) and whatever actual result was: it's all new to the reporter.
That said, I was recently interviewed by CBC about my research and I thought they did a very good job. Everyone seemed prepared, asked reasonable questions, and the final product matched what I said!
I have also been interviewed by CBC (about floppy disks, oh well) and they were great. They put me in the best possible light, made me sound coherent, and got the facts correct.
It's funny to me the quote mentions Palestine. I once spent six months in Israel on study-abroad (I was a near eastern studies major). While there I saw certain things firsthand. When I came back I noticed that all the US newspapers I could find in the University library all reported falsehoods regarding the events. I actually found that the BBCs coverage was the most honest and accurate. This experience has always left me wondering, "If an event that I have personal knowledge of was not reported accurately in the newspapers, how do I know that other events that I do not have personal knowledge of are reported accurately?" It doesn't seem to be enough to use multiple sources since all of the US sources I could find were inaccurate and how would I know if the BBC was always accurate?
The main way I've found is to just read something from multiple countries. For a given article I care about or feel dubious about I always try to get at 3 or more country's take of it. While it doesn't help you find the 'truth' writers tend to misinterpret the same things different ways while things that are actually reported figures will lean more consistent.
Also for lots of things there is generally the direct source available if it is economic/legal/statistically relevant and a quick skim of that is a good get you up to speed thing. The writer made mention of something as 'interesting' so that's just a key to me to go looking for information in that direction where otherwise I would not.
One thing I should point out is that my story took place more than 2 decades ago in the pre-WWW days. It was a lot harder back then to check sources in multiple countries.
There's a bit of irony in this quote coming from Michael Crichton. When I started hanging out with the Science Online community in the early 00s, I learned that Crichton was widely regarded as spreading bad science by regularly citing discredited studies or fringe research in his books.
He was also known for getting even basic science wrong, like in "Jurassic Park," where the scientists fill-in missing dinosaur DNA by splicing it with reptile and amphibian DNA. Anyone who has studied dinosaurs knows that their closest living relatives are birds. How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact?
Then there was that embarrassingly awful book attacking the idea of climate change... but I think Crichton is a great example of this Gell-Mann phenomena. I know many people, even academics, who have read his books and will bring them up as having a degree of science fact.
>> How could someone with so many references and claims of research in his books miss such an elementary fact?
Because following that scientific fact would have ruined one of the major plot points of the story? Fiction authors do take some liberties to suit their fictional stories.
Jurassic Park was published 1990. I don't think that birds being the closest relatives of dinosaurs was established beyond doubt at that time as the theory of dinosaurs being ancestors of birds was revived only in the 1970s.
Funny. After reading this, I decided to comment that in my mind The Economist is a somewhat good counter example. Then I noticed that pretty much all other comments were already discussing TE. I guess I can keep on paying my subscription.
It seems rather ironic to me that this theory, which uses as it's basis that some journalists mix up cause and effect, then turns around and in essence posits that because some articles have errors it means that all articles have the same category of error.
It's not at all evident to me that every article in a more reputable news source will make errors in every thing they report on.
I have a couple of areas of interest where my knowledge is quite deep and I notice this whenever there's anything about those subjects written in the local or national press.
I see people asking why we can't have a meaningful dialog about the subject and it's because at least half of us don't understand the basics of the issue.
More people are interested in world events than in science, so it's reasonable to assume a newspaper will set a higher standard of reporting for those events. A journalist who studied political science isn't equally inept at writing on all subjects; he might have some very good insights on politics. Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields.
> Similar to how most HN readers have very little expertise outside of software engineering, and have said some pretty ridiculous things on other fields.
Wow, that could hardly be more wrong. HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects. Sure there is a bias towards software but that's hardly the limit. Even if HN was only read by SW exports assuming that they don't know about anything else is ridiculous. Not that HN is nonsense free. Your comment for example.
> HN has repeatedly demonstrated expertise in a very wide range of subjects.
Although I agree with this, there is also a lot of nonsense and factually incorrect statements. Not everyone is an expert in every field, and many people will make bold claims about topics in which they're not well versed – even on HN. Unfortunately, this applies to me as well sometimes.
"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."
-Michael Crichton