Brainsteam

Gell-mann amnesia effect

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The Gell-Mann amnesia effect refers to the cognitive dissonance that experts experience when they simultaneously criticise media coverage of their area of expertise whilst also uncritically trusting media coverage about other areas that they know less about.

As sourced from this toot: 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, 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.

History

The term was originally coined by Michael Crichton1 who named it after Murray Gell-Man with whom he initially discussed the phenomenon.

Footnotes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect ↩

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