Now, their personal experience with the process of “peer-review” probably involves a Kafka-esque train of running a study, collecting data, “curating” the data, performing secondary analysis, submitting to a journal, getting a rejection, revising, submitting again, encountering reviews which seem to barely be in English, getting rejected again, submitting to a conference, resubmitting to a lower quality journal (citing the conference paper now), getting reviews which don’t say anything at all, and finally publishing. Though, I think it requires an extension which might discomfort the very same “experts” who would be the type to have such a amnesiac experience.Ĭonsider an academic who works in the experimental sciences, particularly the kind of trials which occur in medicine. My discovery of the above described phenomena of “Gell-Mann Amnesia” has been a bright spot on my intellectual journey these last two or so years. 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.
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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. Because of Gell-Mann Amnesia, I had forgotten her susceptibility to spreading myths and rumors the further I moved away from my area of expertise - and facts about her country were about as far away from my area as you could get.“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. After a while, I realized this mother-in-law was the same mother-in-law who regularly forwarded us Internet conspiracies and urban legends. When I would relate these "facts" back to my wife, she would always get a skeptical look on her face and express extreme doubt in the veracity of the claim. On a recent trip abroad to my wife’s home country, my mother-in-law kept telling me all these fascinating "facts" about her homeland. It can occur any time there is an illusion of authority, which roots it in Cialdini’s third principle of persuasion. A personal anecdote will serve to make my point.
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This effect isn't limited to journalists and newspaper readers. to people who are on the outside of the subject matter along with them. Journalists are really good at sounding like they know what they are talking about. Yet I read articles about other industries all the time and fail to question the accuracy of what I'm reading. I have never read a news article that got it right when covering my industry. It's a form of proximity amnesia, and you know it to be true. But apparently it doesn’t hurt their credibility in the end because of this curious human exploit called Gell-Mann Amnesia. The result is oversimplification, misconception and, yes, downright errors. They rely on sources and work on tight deadlines. Journalists are seldom experts, or even very knowledgable, in the topics they are asked to write about. As a former journalist, I can sympathize with the reporters. You turn the page, and forget what you know. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories.
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(I refer to 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 is as follows. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. In his 2005 essay, “ Why Speculate?” the late, great author Michael Crichton coined a human exploit he named for the physicist Murray Gell-Mann: