Beware Simple Stories

I think everyone should know of the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. To quote from Michael Crichton:

> 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 call 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 works 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 with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story 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.

Very intriguing when you think about it.

Funny thing is Gladwell admits he doesn't think coherency or consistency matter, he just wants to sell books:

"As I’ve written more books I’ve realised there are certain things that writers and critics prize, and readers don’t. So we’re obsessed with things like coherence, consistency, neatness of argument. Readers are indifferent to those things." - Malcolm Gladwell

Edit: I stand by my interpretation. Gladwell's books aren't useful sources of knowledge, but they ARE a commercial gem. He takes a clear intuitive idea, and wraps enough text around it to fill a book. So high-concept that anyone can discuss his books at a cocktail party, even if they havent read it. Maximum virality. It does sell a lot of books.

This is very important.

Kahneman/Gladwell etc are selling attractive and novel conceptualisations and stories, not complete science.

A lot of what they are saying attracts attention and becomes more likely to be researched further. This is important and great and sometimes leads to disproofs such as the example here.

There is a bias here: the ideas presented in popular science books are more likely to be disproven, just because they are more likely to warrant further study. It's not that the ideas are necessarily more likely to be false - this is an important distinction and I think the article misses this point.

But, even when disproven, the popular science books still remain on the shelf and the wrong ideas from them still get repeated widely. On forums including HN.

The authors still want to sell their old books, even when they contain ideas now known to be wrong. And the stories they tell are still attractive, even if they are misleading a whole generation of people.

Whenever something becomes mainstream it's because it has been stripped of deeper context to appeal to the consuming masses. Pop Science will inevitably piss off scientists just like art critics will scoff at inexperienced amateurs or public commentary. Bite-sized feel good scientific content fashioned for larger audiences can come across more concrete than it should - you're right on that. If it comes at the expense of a more "scientifically minded" public, i'm fine with that. We're better off in the world of TED than we were before it.

This sounds just like an article I read a few days ago:

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/04/29/beware-the-too-comp...

The greatest enduring benefit of having studied and trained as a journalist is the experience gained as 'the gatekeeper' of information, and therefore the ability to interpret news more thoroughly. That, and the fact most news is depressing garbage as nutritional for your brain as sweetener is for your gut, is why I only skim the news these days.

Most journalists / writers are decent people aiming to communicate as much as they can, as clearly as they can, with overly tight time-frames and (less so online) limited news-holes.

They won't write "may be X" if they can write "is X" - therefore, "may be" (and related modifiers like could, perhaps, up to, close to etc) mean "not definitely" and are usually safe to ignore.

They won't paraphrase someone if they have a direct quote just as specific - therefore, any general comments have been created to attempt to fit what someone said into the narrative angle of the piece. They may be inaccurate (and few things frustrate me more than the outragists of the world turning a newspaper story into somebody's direct quotes).

If the headline / lede seems outrageously unfair and Occams Razor suggests there must be more to the story, then there will usually be additional information in paragraph 5 that makes the story less outrageous and more normal. Genuinely shocking stories (whistle-blowing, massacres, genocide) don't need to lead with the outrage. Genuine stories also stick around for days with new information or different angles - therefore it's safe to conclude outrageous headlines are burying the mundane facts and can be ignored, until they show up many days in a row.

Obviously these are generalizations, they don't account for truly terrible writing like the Daily Mail, gossip magazines, and current affairs television, and anyone who reads enough news with a critical eye probably comes to the same conclusions (ie, nothing special about me). What this awareness gives you of course is the ability to unwind a complex narrative out from a simple story.

So don't "Beware Simple Stories" - rather, develop your own expertise in interpreting them.

> We can measure the rate of learning. Google scholar counts the number of times a paper is cited by other papers. I believe that well-informed scholars who cite the original paper ought to cite the subsequent papers.

Possibly related, but Google and the very concept of PageRank was born out of Page and Brin's work on Backrub, which attempted to surface the importance/relevance of an academic paper based on which other papers cited it.

TED sells tickets. Malcolm Gladwell sells books and appearances. They won't do that as well as they do now if they didn't embellish their stories with facts and points that the general masses relate to. On the bright side - Anything these people do to shift the attention of this generation from cars, hoes and money is a step closer to a somewhat brighter future for all of us.

I get the criticism because I imagine most of us work in a field other people do not understand the complexity of and would like to over simplify. However, I would rather they have a cursory understanding of what I do, what problems I am trying to solve and the challenges I face than have none. I feel the same about many areas. I think that environmental change is a problem, but I can do little to actually solve the problem other than attempt to understand it and influence policy with my votes or money. I am interested in various scientific fields, but hardly an expert, so I follow them at a surface level. It's not perfect, but I think it's better than nothing.

As the saying goes, all complex questions have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.

Lots of good points that I definitely agree with.

> They are wrapped with a crudely drawn distribution curve on the cover and published to a tourism market...

This reminds me of the lessons of Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan/Antifragile) who makes similar points about naive interpretations of statistics and their naive applications to most areas involving decision making.

I did really enjoy Blink though... I'm ashamed to say that I've barely started Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman's more scientific take on the same stuff) still.

What the author seems to miss is that before he could describe decay pathways he had to learn what an isotope was. We shouldn't mistake the simplestory-tellers for tenured scholars - their job is not to render dissertation. It is to provide insight appropriate to the audience's level of understanding.

Wow, that is some huge text. Computed font-size 31px.

I would put a concise, simple point here summarizing the article, but...