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Turning the Page on Credulity
01/03/2004

Donald Sensing notes Michael Crichton making a great point:

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.

Every now and then, one of the documents that I edit will essentially consist of tables and then text restating the tables, but in prose format. This is an apt metaphor for the news media. If you want to know what happened, you have to draw the facts from out of the text and reorganize them for yourself. Pick out the clues, and think of every scenario that fits. Then go to a different source and see if there are any clues that the original left out.

This, by the way, is the major lesson of news-based blogs. Journalists — even of the expert columnist type — are no better qualified to sort those clues than the average head-on-shoulders American. In many cases, the journalist distorts the clues.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:46 AM EST