Bush’s action “is likely to send the price of steel up sharply, perhaps as much as ten percent.” American consumers “will ultimately bear” higher prices. The column one story for that day concerns Bush’s tariffs on imported steel. For example, here is the New York Times for March 6, the day Dick Farson told me I was giving this talk. Let’s look at the so-called serious media. Everybody knows there’s no news on Sunday.īut television is entertainment.
The Sunday morning talk shows are pure speculation. Today, of course everybody knows that “Hardball,” “Rivera Live” and similar shows are nothing but a steady stream of guesses about the future. I merely refer to it now to set standards. It went out with the universal praise for Susan Faludi’s book Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 1991, and which presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false.īut that’s old news. The requirement that you demonstrate a factual basis for your claim vanished long ago. Again, in keeping with the general trend of speculation, let’s not make too many fine distinctions.įirst we might begin by asking, to what degree has the media turned to pure speculation? Someone could do a study of this and present facts, but nobody has. By the media I mean movies television internet books newspapers and magazines. To keep within the spirit of our time, it should really be off the top of my head.īefore we begin, I’d like to clarify a definition. Some of you may see that I have written out my talk, which is already a contradiction of principle. This is not my natural style, and it’s going to be a challenge for me, but I will do my best.
GELL MANN AMNESIA SERIES
In keeping with the trend, I will try express my views without any factual support, simply providing you with a series of bald assertions. I will join this speculative trend and speculate about why there is so much speculation. What does it mean? Why has it become so ubiquitous? Should we do something about it? If so, what? And why? Should we care at all? Isn’t speculation valuable? Isn’t it natural? And so on. My topic for today is the prevalence of speculation in media. In essence, people recognise that the media gets virtually everything wrong in media reports they know something about but credulously accept media accounts about everything else where they actually themselves know nothing. I will highlight the Gell-Mann effect where it occurs in the speech. The flip side, of course, is that if you agree with everything a media outlet says, you are probably not an expert who has finally found a journal targeted at experts, you are probably in an echo chamber.The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect originates with a speech by Michael Crichton. However, Gell-Mann amnesia is something that most people can easily focus on to improve their information hygiene, and it is a useful thing to keep in mind when you notice a news source often starts talking nonsense when they cover your specialty subject. This is probably most appropriately categorized as a form of attentional bias, as we are only applying our critical thinking skill in those cases where the environment - specifically, the subject matter - makes it easy. You turn the page, and forget what you know." 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. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward - reversing cause and effect. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows.
This gave him reason to believe that he was probably being frequently misled when reading outside his area of interest.
Namely, he noticed (and discussed with Murray Gell-Mann, hence the name) that when he was reading the news, he was often very critical about articles in areas he understood well, and uncritical about areas he knew little about. Gell-Mann amnesia is Michael Crichton's rather arbitrary name for a very specific cognitive bias.
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