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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

And yet we manage to keep ourselves reasonably informed. I subscribe to one of the major papers, and avail myself to a variety of mainstream sources. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times, over multiple decades, that I've ever looked back on an issue and felt that I had actually been misinformed. "You made one tiny mistake so your entire organization is discredited" would have been an unreasonable reaction.

So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.

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Saddam had current stockpiles of WMDs. (No, he'd long ago gotten rid of them.)

The attackers on the US compound in Benghazi were regular folks upset about the film "Innocence of Muslims". (They were organized Islamist militants, including groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda.)

"Hands up, don't shoot!" (There's no evidence Michael Brown ever said that.)

Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. (The contents have been repeatedly authenticated.)

Those are four massively popular lies that the media told over 20 years, of which you should be aware. I regularly see media outlets peddle falsehoods that they have been told are false, but I don't know what your specific knowledge is.

> So I think that Gell-Mann Amnesia, while amusing, is overblown.

I think you're proving it true right now.

Regarding a topic that you never come into personal contact with, your entire knowledge of it throughout your life will be media-mediated. How, then, would you ever learn what you had been misinformed of?

Hindsight. You learn more things later, that allow you to look back on the past.

How often do you learn new things later that, even as transmitted through untrustworthy media, allow for clear falsification of the former media presentation?

This isn't zero but it's not very common either. Usually, the domain in question is sufficiently subtle that you can't make a rigorous prediction from an untrustworthy media presentation at all; thus, the media accounts are effectively unfalsifiable (unless you go out and seek personal experience).

> Usually, the domain in question is sufficiently subtle that you can't make a rigorous prediction

Is it really a big deal then? Experts really care about the details so they will notice inaccuracies, but does that mean that they really matter to the point that the entire notion of journalism and media itself should be discredited?

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