• cygnus@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, coined by Michael Crichton:

    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.

    • derbis@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Be that as it may, the more relevant effect to this article is the Dunning-Kreuger one. The author seems to have no idea that his dismissal of the limitations of manifest v3 means he is dismissing that this absolutely constrains what ad blockers can do, and very significantly. And his confident tone only adds to the discord he believes he is correcting.

    • Mothra@mander.xyz
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      11 months ago

      That’s true, however note that credibility comes attached to personal identity, as the text mentions in the last paragraph. A newspaper isn’t a person, articles are written by different journalists- however when a media shows a majority of bogus articles they quickly lose credibility too

    • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Interesting theory. A fancy way of saying the press aren’t super sleuths or credible reporters with all the facts.

      I’ve been involved in about 4 incidences that made the news. None of them. 0/4 were remotely accurate outside of the total sum of the event (there was a car crash involving two vehicles). The broad strokes are there but that’s about it.

      But then the news is a money making enterprise that has no real incentive to report the news impartially or even accurately. It kinda cuts into their profits (real reporting takes time, money, resources).

      The take home is the shit you see on the news is essentially “based on a true story”, nothing more.

      • Sonori@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        There still is plenty of proper investigative journalism, but you can’t pay a team of half a dozen experts who take six to nine months per story off the ad revenue of some website, and few people want to pay for a outlet that might publish two or three articles once a year when you could get a paper just full to the brim with dozens of current articles every hour.