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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

A valuable lesson AI taught me is how bad articles on Bloomberg and Forbes are. They probably have always been this bad, but I were unaware of that until they started writing about AI (because, admittedly, I subconsciously thought well-known = good).

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There’s something called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect where people often see what you have but then go back to assuming the other stories are all reliable.

I used to love Private Eye and they have done great journalism that’s highly acclaimed, but the only thing they wrote that I really knew about (literally the office I was in) was outrageously wrong and would have been so easy to verify (ask literally anyone in the BBC building we were in to go to that floor, or take a tour or write an email). Can’t read it any more.

Here's Wikipedia's entry on the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, because I've found it a very useful concept to know. Despite my media experiences, I still keep falling for it. And I love that we're still referring to it as Gell-Mann Amnesia here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible. He explained that he had chosen the name ironically, because he had once discussed the effect with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have".

> "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have".

Ahh, yes, the SyneRyder effect.

Everything I've known anything about first hand has been utterly garbled - or was completely made up - when written up in Private Eye.

Odd take, as this was actually a pretty good article. The GP appears to be mostly bemoaning the fact that it's targeted at a lay audience.

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