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Comment by nathanvanfleet | Hacker News Reader

Slate has always been really dubious. I remember reading it for a while and feeling like its editorials were informative, and always very scandalous. But then I read an article about a subject matter I was more familiar with and I realized that it was pretty tilted. I don't bother with it anymore.

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> “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 (1942-2008)

Ref: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

Somehow people in the tech bubble like to believe that any "theory," "law," or "effect" that has a name on it is true. Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is one of the ones that simply doesn't hold up.

Why? Because it makes the false assumption that the person who wrote a flawed story also wrote every other story in the newspaper, which is both untrue and impossible. It presumes that because someone underqualified was interviewed in one article that every person interviewed in the rest of the paper was also underqualified. Again, untrue.

Worse, it doesn't understand that the editorial section is not the international section is not the comics section is not the classified ads.

It's perfectly reasonable to start each new story you read in a newspaper with a bit of amnesia. It was written by a different person in a different place in a different time. Just like if I buy a crappy video game in Target, that doesn't mean that every single video game in Target is crap.

This doesn't seem entirely true though - especially with news. There's a central organization at, say, Slate, that's responsible for hiring, editing, and fact-checking what they publish. Sure, some writers are going to be better/worse than others, but an organization that hires and retains bad writers who do bad research and editors who don't catch it, even when it's been pointed out, is an organization where you should have concerns elsewhere.

The proposition isn't that one bad article means everything will be false forever, but that you should approach all articles with some skepticism that the author/editor knows what they're talking about. Especially when you know from past evidence that they will publish things that you know to be wrong or misinformed.

It's not much different than how folks are getting concerned about counterfeit things on Amazon. I don't think that every product on Amazon is fake, and I don't think the fakes are evenly distributed across all categories. That doesn't mean I shouldn't check most things I buy to make sure they're safe when I know that Amazon doesn't seem to care if they ship me defective or counterfeit products.

You're making a straw-man of what the Effect is trying to get at. It's not saying one bad article means every single article is fully false, or that you shouldn't trust the sports scores, or Cathy is giving you bad life advice. It's just stating that we tend to not realize that one bad article may be a sign of more intrinsic bad editorial practices at a publisher.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect resonates with me. Here is why. The few times I've read an article about something with which I have intimate knowledge there have been mistakes in the article. What should one do with this knowledge? Should I ignore that the evidence I have on hand is that when the article is about something with which I know a great deal there usually are errors in it? The evidence I have suggests that reporters get things wrong frequently.

It's possible that reporters only get things wrong in the areas that I know and understand but it seems much more likely to me that falsehoods in articles are much more common than people realize.

One should be seeking out primary resources and reviewing facts independently for any non-trivial bit of news. In my experience when doing one's own research into an article you'll find that approximately 75%+ of articles contain inaccuracies and about 30% - 40% of articles are flat-out wrong.

> Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is one of the ones that simply doesn't hold up.

At most, you should trust specific journalists who are covering topics germane to their expertise.

> Just like if I buy a crappy video game in Target, that doesn't mean that every single video game in Target is crap.

Consider video game "journalism" instead and you'll have a fair comparison.

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