Comment by shawndumas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shawndumas | Hacker News Reader

‘The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a theoretical psychological phenomenon, the term itself being coined by author, film producer and academic Michael Crichton after discussions with Nobel-Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

Originally described in Crichton's "Why Speculate?" speech, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect labels a commonly observed problem in modern media, where one will believe everything they read from a journalist even after they come across an article about something they know well that is completely incorrect.

The conclusions found and perspectives portrayed by the author are entirely erroneous, often times flipping the cause and the effect. Crichton notes these as "wet streets cause rain" stories.

In short, most eloquently put by Thomas L. McDonald, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect defines the idea that "I believe everything the media tells me except for anything for which I have direct personal knowledge, which they always get wrong."’

— https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

I think this generalizes as well. People believe what they're told, even if it's coming from people with a poor history of speaking the truth, whether it be misunderstanding or lies. Further, when they realize they've been lied to, they're often bad at going back and invalidating their cache and fixing assumptions based on that bad data.

It's really hard - you are told or assume, you internalize it, build on top of it, and then when you realize that you've built on falsehood it's easy to remove that piece without understanding what load it was bearing in your tower of thought. I've found myself doing this all the time when doing designs - I've had to train myself to go back frequently and retrace the logic I followed, being careful not to fall into the same pitfalls and re-introduce the same flaws -that the tower still holds up to inspection when those components were never introduced.

I'm not sure it's true though. Look at any polls about trust in the media. It's been falling for a long time. People are becoming aware that journalists are systematically unreliable and it's having an impact.

Or they're being told that all news is fake news in order to convince them to switch to the official state apparatus for information disbursement.

NPR?

The media made its bed and now it can lie in it.

And unfortunately the alternative people have found is random hearsay on the web. The dieticians lost our trust and now we're just eating junk food instead.

They've been finding random hearsay for a while now. Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years. Is the Daily Mail or Sun or Mirror or Express more accurate than some clickbait farm? Probably not.

Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news, it was low quality tabloids with a helping of TV and radio pundits.

> Tabloids had a huge audience, and they're the kind of newspapers many were reading for years.

Outside of NYC, the US has basically no daily tabloids.

> Most people were't exactly reading [insert name of reputable publication] for their daily news

Most people in the US that were reading any daily news were probably reading the dominant local newspaper or one of the latter reputable metropolitan or national papers, because that covers pretty much all the daily written news outlets they would have had access to.

Hmm, you may have raised an interesting point there, namely that the quality of the media is very location specific and some countries had better media outlets than others as a rule.

Unfortunately, it seems coverage of journalism and its decline and what not is very US centric, which likely confuses the hell out of people from other countries where their media outlets got worse much earlier on/didn't have a golden age in general. Kind of like how US media outlets and YouTubers assume the Great Video Game Crash was some worldwide thing, whereas it really only affected the US market and left the European and Japanese ones almost untouched.

It may also explain some of the comments on local journalism, since that stuff over here in the UK isn't exactly fantastic itself. Maybe there's more ambition in local US newspapers than in UK ones, in that they actually did some journalism at some point rather than merely covering what local businesses were up to or what not.

Huh, guess there's a cultural divide in how the news is presented too.

I'm not sure how often the National Enquirer and it's supermarket checkout line cousins publish but they are certainly available and fairly popular (very popular histically) outside of NYC.

Our disagreement could be a dialect thing though, when I say tabloid I mean a printed paper that consists entirely of stories about UFOs and lurid celebrity gossip. I believe in other parts of the world tabloid has something to do with the format of the paper and the content is considered somewhat but not totally disreputable.

I'm not sure which meaning the other posters are using.

> I'm not sure how often the National Enquirer and it's supermarket checkout line cousins publish

Both common local tabloids (which are often have basic journalistic standards, though they frequently have...interesting...editorial viewpoints) and the supermarket tabloids like the Enquirer are weeklies.

FWIW, I think a new alternative has been brewing for a while: long form interviews on YouTube and podcasts. Whether you’re a fan or not, I think Jordan Peterson has some pretty insightful things to say about this on his last interview with Joe Rogan.

Yes but newspapers are basically random hearsay on paper. The web is not necessarily less reliable and can often be more reliable.

Dieticians lost trust because they kept changing their advice about what to eat and clearly aren't reliable either. That's unrelated to newspapers.

People tend to accept what other people say as true on some level. Journalists, Con men, and Religions benifit from that same bias. Consider the odds of any one random thing say a Tiger in a top hat sitting on the other side of a random door being true is very very low.

However, even if I think someone is lying 99.99% of the time when they say a Tiger in a Top hat is behind the door that still raises the odds immensely.

I think the internet may have shattered the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. People can now hear how inaccurate the media are about every topic, since experts in various fields are coming forward and calling them out online. The big thing that kept the effect going was that people didn't have an easy way to find out the truth about various specialist fields outside of the media.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Lenin

Ironically that is a misattribution, see https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/32944

No wonder influencers get paid so well ...

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