Here’s how it was originally described:
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. 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.
“In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.” — Sadly, this part has been solidly disproven.
Interesting… But what has Mark Rutte to do with that?
No, seriously, I have been very confused for a moment after seeing the photograph… ;-)
Eh.
If you have any familiarity with academic research then you know almost anything can pass peer review.
Being published doesn’t make something true, you still have to read. And evaluate the article especially the methods.
This is about newspaper articles. But agree with what you say.
Journal quality can buffer this by getting better reviewers (MDPI shouldn’t be seen as having peer review at all, but peer review at the best journals–because professors want to say on their merit raise annual evals that they are doing the most service to the field by reviewing at the best journals–is usually good enough at weeding out bad papers), but it gets offset by the institutional prestige of authors when peer-review isn’t double-blind. I’ve seen some garbage published in top journals by folks that are the caliber of Harvard professors (thinking of one in particular) because reviewers use institutional prestige as a heuristic.
When I’m teaching new grad students, I tell them exactly what you said, with the exception that they can use field-recognized journal quality (not shitty metrics like impact factor) as a relative heuristic until they can evaluate methods for themselves.
The original describes a newspaper, and those are written by multiple people. The editors are even different. For example, I trust the Associated Press more than my local paper.
I do wonder if that plays in.
Odds are fairly high that your local newspaper is printing mainly wire stories anyway, from AP, Reuters, whatnot.
And AP ain’t printing your local news
Oooohhh! Here’s a good one on this subject! https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0
This reminds me of a great video about this sort of principle in reverse: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0
