Comment by MichaelZuo
5 years ago
“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.” - Michael Crichton
The problem I see personally is less parts where the media gets easily verifiable things wrong (Generally for any field where experts occur, there are better sources you can personally find.)
The issue is where they report on things that I can’t easily verify. A company I haven’t worked at, how things are going internally in the white house, what X or Y nation-state was caught doing. These are areas where I have no choice but to trust the media, because none of these entities are open enough for me to personally look at them and fact check what is happening. If some entity wants to say the media is treating them unfairly, that’s unfortunate, but unless they’re willing to open up their inner workings to the public I have to default to believing what the media digs up.
That the media otherwise does have a spotty record is troublesome to me. Generally, I think the right course is to find news sources that at least are right more often than not on the things you can verify. But on many things, the media is the only source we have on what they’re doing besides themselves. And while the media is troublesome, trusting that an entity is doing nothing wrong off their own word is even worse.
To combat this, I try to keep reading multiple, disparate sources until enough facts agree, and the coverage converges, to paint a relatively clear picture of the actual facts. What's been interesting to me, since starting to do this, is that some very, very popular stories -- upon which people will hang their entire political self-identification -- never actually converge, at least to my satisfaction.
> The issue is where they report on things that I can’t easily verify. [...]. These are areas where I have no choice but to trust the media,
Why? What's wrong with just not really knowing?
When it comes to governments, how they act impacts my voting preferences. When it comes to companies, how they act impacts who I choose to purchase from and work for. There are certainly wide swaths of information that aren’t relevant to my decision making process, but some things are hard to personally find out but worth knowing.
Well if the issue is something you have to act on then you should know.
Let's say there's talk about a new vaccine - should you take it or not. Or about candidates for some political office. Or about global warming.
I guess you can ignore everything, but if everybody does it's not going to end well.
I think solution for tough to verify info would be for journalists to include something like a methodology section in their reporting.
Due to the vagaries of journalism compared to e.g. chemistry or physics I'm not sure what this would look like in every situation.
Here is an article I came across recently that is a good example of the concept I am trying to explain. I don't think there's any information presented that you have to take the writer's word for: https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/05/17/hendricks-not-paying-p...
> These are areas where I have no choice but to trust the media, because none of these entities are open enough for me to personally look at them and fact check what is happening.
Your trust mechanism seems to be fail-open. A very dangerous default config.
People in general aren't particularly credible, for a variety of reasons.
As I've gotten older I like to think that I've gotten better at questioning/doubting anything anyone (with the exception of several close and long term friends and relatives) tells me, especially if it is second hand information.
A lot of this was learned through various 'inconvenient' experiences over the years. Most people don't double check their sources and just parrot out things they've heard. Confidence is not correlated with accuracy.
> Confidence is not correlated with accuracy.
Indeed. Quite possibly the opposite is true i.e. that inaccuracy is correlated with confidence (for second hand reports).
I had similar thoughts and then quit reading news ever since.
Opinion pieces are even worse they are never fact checked.
its a crazy world that we live in
While in a perfect world, we would have factual arguments laid out in opinion pieces. They are merely that, someone's opinions and are even more playground space for self-proclaimed pundits than actual journalism.
I have found interviews and podcast to be a better source now.
'Opinion pieces ... are never fact checked' - did you fact check that?
Yes, i did but a few times that's enough to make up my mind
> I had similar thoughts and then quit reading news ever since.
You didn't. You're commenting on a news article. What you mean is that you quit reading [that|these] specific source(s).
I did not read the article but the title and the top comment here before commenting.
I follow scientists/engineers on youtube thats all to get all the knowledge i need.
Through debunked videos i've come to know the state of current journalism.
> its a crazy world that we live in
It’s a lazy world we live in. In times of fast journalism, there is not time waste of fact check. The news are bets to a large extent.
Media's credibility comes not from what it gets wrong, but rather that it may have any uncanny ability to say what is right.
The problem is that media is often right and wrong about things that are very far away from me, so I don't really see the win in "getting the scoop" on anything. For example, the NYT is really good at predicting when there's going to be a high-profile WH resignation or firing come up. It's not like I was going to get that information from original research or critical thinking. But again, unless you're a big player, what are you going to do with the inside scoop on world events?
Arguably, if you did really care about these things, then the degree to which any source provides signal is the degree to which you will tolerate noise.
Media's role is not to provide the truth. Their primary role is to make governments and corporations trustworthy and hold them accountable to the world. Nobody holds "the truth", but bits, pieces, opinions may be reported.
Also, authority routinely lie and exhaggerate. If not held accountable, they get away with it too!
The only thing more powerful than speaking Truth, is love.
That’s a sort of idealized version of what most people will think the media is supposed to do at least. But it’s not even close to what they actually do in practice. When it comes to powerful institutions or people, nearly all media outlets are terrible at taking sides. They have one side they will slander ruthlessly on every issue, and another they will fawn over and cover up for. Furthermore, any mission they have to scrutinize will often end up taking a backseat to generating advertising revenue.
There are laws the media must follow. There is a truth they must tell, legally and also the stuff that gets clicks and views is true for it's audience in a salient way.
Authority has the power to control, it's part of the job description and politics resolves the truth of that domain.
Why do you want something 'more powerful' than truth? You just excised yourself from philosophy, religion, god, law, ect in dismissing truth.
We all want 'true' love anyway so the distinction is poor.
1 reply →
I'm surprised Crichton thought Murray Gell-Mann was more famous than he was! I would think the reverse (and the Crichton Amnesia Effect is a great name).
But dropping his own name can ascribe no more importance to himself. Dropping in another famous name, and one from a complete different field no less, ascribes greater credibility than Michael Crichton alone can manage.
Gell-Mann would be more famous if anyone could remember his name... :P
Murray Gell-Mann is more credible.
Great quote - wish I could upvote more than once!
Sadly Wikipedia removed the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect wiki page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
It looks like they merged it into it's author's main page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
As always, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Affectation is in full effect here at HN.
You realize this isn't a piece of serious research, right?
You realize Michael Crichton purposely used Gell-Mann's name knowing it'd lend more weight because he's a "scientist," right?
You do realize Gell-Mann's field has nothing to do with any of the fields that would study this phenonemon if it were anything other than a cocktail party story, right?
If you'd be uncomfortable casually mentioning trickle-down economics as serious national policy, you ought to be just as uncomfortable with your Gell-Mann Amnesia Affectation here.
It's not that complicated a concept and the flavoring of it doesn't matter beyond being a nice story. It's a simple logical conclusion that needs no additional justification. In the end, all of us here have been a victim of that sort of thing and we all probably became aware of it at least once while also completely prepared to make the same mistake at some other time.
> In the end, all of us here have been a victim of that sort of thing and we all probably became aware of it at least once while also completely prepared to make the same mistake at some other time.
At least in the U.S., it's the exact opposite problem that is eating away at democracy.
There are literally tens of millions of people who refuse to believe any story from any news source because they wildly overestimate the corruption of journalism across the board.
Where's the pretentious tag for that phenomenon?
1 reply →
'Media' isn't the same as 'investigative journalism' (where a lot of fact-checking occurs).
Investigative journalism, I hope so. But general journalism...
I'm afraid I've traveled enough to say petty wars are often reported night-day level of wrong (at least for all the ones I have experienced)
It seems we want to believe we are good, and 'they' are bad, but frankly we don't care either way, so long as we make money
> Investigative journalism, I hope so.
I work for one (not involved in the actual stories) and I can guarantee that the process I've seen is pretty meticulous.
> But general journalism...
There's a separation that needs to be done here as well between news and columns / opinion pieces. News are supposed to answer what's known as Five Ws (Who, What, When, Where, Why), while columns/opinion pieces are rarely expected to be held to same standards, are often inaccurate, and subjective by their nature (they are opinion pieces after all). Unfortunately they're almost always published under the same brand, but usually when I see people complaining about journalism, they don't make that distinction.
That isn't to say news in itself is not biased, because even picking what's newsworthy is a process that relies on bias.
7 replies →
That we allow naysayers to be fired, is on US.
> 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.
Alas, not so sure that part is still true.
[looks back at 2020]
It never was true for some people I know, for example my parents.
My parents have such a bias towards their and their ancestor’s culture/religion, that anything said in favor of it will be believed instantly, and anything critical of it will be met with hostility.
I do not dare point out to them basic falsifiable truths about things such as medicine (e.g. this simple action will cure cancer or reverse male pattern baldness).
My parents are very gullible people. Skeptical about exactly the wrong things, repeatedly wrong year after year, yet ever so trusting of the same bullshit sources and rhetoric, as long as it resonates with their prime belief about the superiority of their culture/religion.
I see this in mainstream US too, with the antivaxxers who got a C in high school biological or 5G crazies who couldn’t pass a physics class.
Once someone has formed an identity around some core assumptions of the world, anything that challenges it will be seen as an attack on one’s ego.
> Once someone has formed an identity around some core assumptions of the world, anything that challenges it will be seen as an attack on one’s ego.
That's hard to escape, and it might well be a quite useful mechanism in many cases, but multiply that by filter bubbles and echo chambers, and it can become difficult for otherwise reasonable people to have conversations about many topics. It happens here too but I would say less than in other parts of the worlds. Here = HN. Worlds = Parallel realities that get created that way ^
Related ;
Beware online "filter bubbles" ( 2011 )
https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time...” - Abraham Lincoln
I'm inferring from your brackets that you're referring to public figures.
If this is what you intended then I would suggest that they are more media than "ordinary life". If anything, I feel like they further highlight the accuracy of the effect.
Fits my 2020 experience. At the start of 2020 this described perfectly my view of Trump. At the start of 2021 it describes perfectly my view of everyone.
No it does not, Trump is not in your personal life.
When he wrote "state of fear" he had dunning-kruger syndrome
I would argue some media outlets are more reliable than others, as can be established for oneself by looking at their track records and following the money. I think this ^ applies as is to mainstream media in general, pick your flavour, but some organisations are trying to do journalism right. You ought to be careful before defaulting to not believing anything you read. I think using your discretion in selecting trusted sources goes a long way in ensuring some level of information integrity. Add to that a layer of fact-checking resources, using your common sense and trying to read between the lines, and you might end up with a coherent world view that you can use to interface with other people. Getting your propaganda from multiple sides can also add scope to your experience of the world from what other people write about it. That being said, I reckon it's a complex mess ... my $0,02.