I'm a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is actually measurable for newspapers. The problem seems to me that not every topic is covered in the same way by journalists and that the journalists are usually also specializing in particular topics and don't just write anywhere.
A science journalist has usually studied some natural science but has to cover all of them and has to simplify a lot, so a trained expert will find a lot of inaccuracies. This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when". It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, which mostly come from multiple news agencies anyway, than describing news about theoretical physics to laymen in terms that are 100% accurate to a physicist.
In a nutshell, I'm not so sure that the effect really exists in any significant way.
Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies. I've never heard of any reasonable and viable alternative from critics of traditional news media. Cell phone videos by citizen reporters with hysterical voice over can hardly count as a good substitute. Neither are copy&paste news aggregators or bloggers.
At some point you've got to trust your newspaper (or read a better one!) unless there is explicit counter-evidence from elsewhere against the story. Most botched reports get corrected very fast anyway.
>This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when".
That's only true when the coverage consists of retelling such basic facts, but that's a small part of what journalists do.
Anyone with knowledge of international events and affairs can spot all kinds of errors, omissions, and plain falsehoods when articles cover such topics -- just as well as one does when it comes to say physics or computer science.
>Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies.
Most journalists and press agencies cater to the lowest common denominator. There are press sources that go far deeper [1] but those are not what people usually read for their "news".
For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT.
[1] Even if they introduce a certain delay on the news (which in most cases is irrelevant, it's not like anybody will need to act immediately upon some news regarding foreign affairs for example).
> "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when"
Quite a lot of news reporting does this, but it's extremely hard not to accidentally let "a spokesperson said X" implant the belief "X is true" in your mind unless you're very vigilant. So reporting these kind of official statements without fact-checking the underlying statement can be surprisingly misleading.
But then there's also the ability of media to just make or dig up a scandal out of whole cloth by finding people willing to make the statements they want. Today's fiasco is the Times trying to resurrect the idea that Michael Foot was a Soviet agent, a claim which they lost a libel lawsuit over decades ago. https://inews.co.uk/news/ex-sunday-times-ed-andrew-neil-lead...
> Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies. I've never heard of any reasonable and viable alternative from critics of traditional news media. Cell phone videos by citizen reporters with hysterical voice over can hardly count as a good substitute. Neither are copy&paste news aggregators or bloggers.
This is true, but why does this mean we should assign trust to newspapers? I think the reality is that a reliable source of information is not possible due to the Principal-Agent problem [0]: any information-providing body is going to have incentives to distort the information provided. Misleading headlines or "clickbait" to draw in more readers are one such incentive, and the inherent difficulty of verifying one's facts is another. The notion that there has to be something we can trust is a foolish one, and we should be skeptical of everything we read.
> This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when".
I disagree very strongly with this statement. The "facts" may be simpler in that it doesn't take research to uncover them, but the "reporting" is far more complex because there are so many and contradicting facts. Take any international conflict and you have multiple truths about which gov't decided what. Additionally the actors are motivated to create confusion.
>This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when".
People often divide news content into two spheres: Facts and opinion (e.g. editorial). News articles are believed to be facts, and then they separately have opinions and editorials. The common advice is to be wary of the latter.
In my experience, though, the news is really divided into three spheres: Facts, opinions, and context. You'll find that almost every news article contains both facts and context. The context portion of the article is there to tell you why all this matters. Contextual statements are also facts, but they do not involve the immediate events. It is in the choice of which contextual facts are included in the article that bias creeps in.
As a simple exam, in 2003 Michael Jackson was charged with child molesting. I recall almost all the articles I read mentioned in the end that he had been similarly accused in 1991. Yet none of those articles mentioned the details and outcome of that investigation.
With international affairs, once you've studied a topic for long enough, you'll quickly become aware of the contextual biases, and you'll want to scream at the authors for omitting what you think are very relevant contextual facts.
> a trained expert will find a lot of inaccuracies. This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs
Are you an expert of international events and affairs? Have you spoken to one about whether this is true? I'm not and haven't, but I would bet they have plenty of examples of terrible coverage.
(I imagine many examples would be of the form "they focused on irrelevant detail X when what matters is Y" or "they said X implies Y but it's actually unknown what the consequences of X will be" or "they only quoted people with opinion X" or "they oversimplified X to the point of caricature" or of course "that's just factually wrong, I was there and X never happened".)
I was once elected to public office. Nearly every article that involved me was wrong. Several times the article even insinuated that the situation was the opposite of reality. This wan't a partisan elected position either.
> I'm a bit skeptical about this one and wonder to what extent the effect is actually measurable for newspapers.
I notice the effect all the time reading any coverage of legal or regulatory issues in mainstream newspapers. I pretty much just flip past any such article these days--it's too painful. As to the alternatives, they're domain specific. For legal stuff, there are specialized legal journals. Blogs are top notch too--anything you read on PopeHat is 10x better than the NYT.
It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right
I don’t disagree with this simple statement per se but I disagree with its implications.
You can still paint a false picture by choosing which facts to report and which to ignore. I see it every day in the gym with one television that plays CNN next to one that plays Fox News. Watching the TV on the left gives me the impression Trump is a hooligan constantly on the verge of being impeached. The TV on the right tells me the economy is roaring and everything is great.
> It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right,
Even a cursory skimming of Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky will dispel you forever of such a notion. The motivations for inaccuracies of political journalist are different from that of a science journalist but the result is the same.
It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, which mostly come from multiple news agencies anyway
In a nutshell, I'm not so sure that the effect really exists in any significant way.
In the case of "worldly facts" news, the really significant part is often the emotional impression of the text. The way this plays out in physics/science, world news, and politics are all going to be somewhat different. It results in factual errors more often in science news, which often amounts to making people feel like they're informed, but the emotional games played in more political news are different. (The exceptions are climate science and evolution, where the topics are more politicized and the emotional games are more political.)
I doubt even in the case of international affairs things are any better in the manner traditional media is covering it. Eg: See the coverage of Syria, there seems to be hardly any first hand reporting appearing, most reports read like analysis written from afar.
Political reporting is 10% facts and 90% narrative. In fact, the facts themselves are reported very selectively, largely based on what fits into the desired narrative.
You can round up 100 protestors anywhere, for any issue. Why does the media cover some protests but not others? Why does the media never report on public suicides and bank robberies (to avoid encouraging copycats) but they report every mass shooting, complete with a gory scoreboard? Why was the bloodiest war since World War II virtually unreported on in the US? Why were Donald Trump’s bizarre antics more comprehensively reported than the policy proposals of any of the Presidential candidates?
These days I mostly use the effect in reverse - my basic assumption has become that most media reporting is crap and unreliable. And when I come across some piece of media (magazine/podcast/etc.) that actually covers stuff I know and does it well (including being honest enough to not bite off more than they can chew), they instantly get promoted to long-term favourites list - the rare few I can listen to without having my bullshit filter on all the time.
This sounds great and probably works well for you in practice. But I get a deep sense of dread from your comment, knowing that there are individuals who go to comparatively great lengths to filter online content according to reasonable standards.
The roots are to be found in recent political events and the apparent susceptibility to "active measures" by state actors and private entities alike.
This strongly suggests the vast majority of people spends near zero energy in trying to separate bullshit from thoughtful content. It's all about how loud and how often you blurt a story out there and how brazen you are in spreading it (troll farms, bots).
We are currently experiencing a true crisis of Western democracy that results from evolutionary advantages of bullshit information in a global information ecosystem. These affects seem to emerge when blending global connectivity with human psychology...
This seems like a fancy name for a hunch that may or may not actually be true.
This could be a form of confirmation bias - like how it seems to rain when you havent got your umbrella, because confirmation bias makes you remember the times you got caught in the rain more strongly then the times you actually had your umbrella and stayed dry.
Similarly if someone is of the opinion that everything in the media is made-up, confirmation bias will mean they really notice articles that are wrong on areas that they know about. Whereas articles that are broadly correct in areas they know about will just pass by unremarkably.
Then then on top of that, you've got the premature extrapolation that because you've spotted one incorrect article by one journalist, all the other articles by all the other journalists must also be the same.
Not that I think the media are always right by any means.
Obviously the media I consume are carefully picked so that I know I'm getting a reasonable sketch of reality, whereas the stuff everyone else is consuming is clearly made up dangerous nonsense*
I was thinking it was more of a false appeal to authority, perpetrated by ourselves on ourselves. We tend to think of major media as very authoritative (even if we don't admit it to ourselves), and therefore tend to accept what they say. Books and permanent media seem to lend themselves to this. If something has a nice cover and was published and is widely distributed, we tend to think of it as authoritative and believe it more strongly, even when the evidence under a little thought might lead us to be more dubious.
I can say that, when I worked in the semiconductor industry, there was never a single article on the semiconductor industry (in a mainstream news publication) that did not have significant errors. Moreover, what we know of the economics of newsgathering suggests that in many cases the article was largely written for them an interested party, thus worse than sloppy: intentionally misleading, because basically disguised advertising.
People sure do love their favorite media outlets. It’s always the “other guy” who gets it wrong. Allow me to bore you to death with the facts: journalists of all types are human and work in an industry with a very short attention span. They all get it more wrong than right.
A few personal experiences:
I took the stand as a witness in a murder case. The shit the papers printed had nothing to do with reality.
I ran a nonprofit after we lost our child to cancer. We got a lot of press, a lot of incorrect press.
I was in Iraq as a soldier in ‘04 - ‘05. We had satellite news and everyone back in the US was learning about a conflict on Mars as far as I’m concerned. The entire discussion had almost nothing in common with the facts on the ground.
In Iraq I even had cameras show up to something I was directly involved in after we already cleaned it up and left. They were egregiously wrong about that particular situation.
I’m friends with a TV news reporter in a major market. She’s on every night. The things she’s told me about how the news desk operates...
Market and sports analysis written by bots, virtue signaling “intellectuals”, beat reporters who are lazy/tired/hurried/being told what to write, humans having bias.
Honestly it’s all garbage. I just try to read primary sources when I can and when I have time. People think being well read in the media talk of the day is some sort of badge of intellectual self reliance. Nothing is further from the truth.
Having worked at Yahoo, Nokia and now Amazon, I always am amazed at how much Machiavellian scheming is assigned to what is many times a bunch of techies making stuff up as they go along. Having made the sausage, I can't tell you how many times I've read some news and thought, "If they only knew."
The financial crisis made me realize that this is pretty much true for most areas except, I hope, for bridge-builders and rocket scientists.
Oh, the rocket scientists made it up as well. See https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... for an entertaining and enlightening history. All sorts of things, such as rocket fuel that was produced in large quantities and put into storage containers before discovering that after sitting on its own for a few years, it became dreadfully unstable.
My favorite "WTF" experiment was a calculation that adding mercury to rocket fuel would result in better thrust. This went all the way to a full rocket test, proving that the calculation was absolutely correct. Then the line of research finally got abandoned because spewing horrible poisons into the air is not something that we want to do...
I'm always amused how everything created on the market is most of the time thought of by their creators as some unholy kludge that by all purposes should not work at all.
There's a dual effect: If you find a news source that consistently gets things inside your field of expertise right, then that's a data point suggesting that they might be right about other fields as well.
Not necessarily of course: eg Dutch news broadcaster NOS got significantly better tech reporting after hiring a particularly good journalist (Joost Schellevis), but their other reporting didn't suddenly get less biased by him joining.
That's plausible if the new news source is *general interest and is good in your arbitrary (form their perspective) area of expertise. But it's bad advice if the editor of your favorite automotive maintenance journal pens an article about biology or international relations.
Stating a "wet streets cause rain" is too obvious and will be picked up as a fallacy. But to really con people say: "there is wet streets and again the rain appears" so the reader makes the false arrow of causation in their mind although you didn't say it.
The newspapers I read tend to get things right at least in my area of expertise. Even when they reported on events or initiatives I was directly involved in, they got the (sometimes incharitable) facts right. The ones that don't, I don't read.
It does seem strange to continue reading a source that gets things wrong all the time. A friend's commentary on those: "Just consider them entertainment. Some readers want to be entertained in ways reality can't offer them."
The problem I have with this is that there clearly are fields of interest, knowledge that are harder than others. Both to understand and to explain to laymen.
Gell-Mann of course had a fundamental understandingf of modern physics including many counterintuitive effects. A journalist would not have that knownledge, and given the task to (in fairly short time) write an article for an audience that in general neither has that fundamental understanding. So, of course the journalist will make mistakes, misunderstand aspects of the field when writing an article. Physics is hard.
But, politics, road safety, sports are interests that one quite probably can claim are less hard to grasp. And areas a newspaper journalist quite probably also have more knowledge about. So, the amount of errors and mistakes when writing an article abpit something in these fields should be fewer. And Gell-Mann would probably be able to spot them.
This is related to the Gell-Mann-Griffin amnesia effect;
whereby immediately after reading about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, the reader forgets about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This effect and it's related origin's anti-memetic properties lead to the constant rediscovery and dissemination of materials related to said effects.
I experienced this first hand once when I was interviewed by the Washington Post on quantified self. The reporter ignored a lot of information I provided to make the article about whether quantified self was worth a damn.
In my statistics undergrad, we were told to find a science article, find the study the article was about, and reinterpret the results to see how well the article did. The article always overgeneralized study conclusions. Every time.
I have no great hatred for the press, and I don’t call anything I dislike Fake News, but I do wish I felt like I could trust reporting more than I do.
> 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.
Turning the page of a newspaper is often a big deal:
* if you turn from the front page to any other page, the sensationalism of the headlines decreases while the overall quality of the coverage increases. Save for the rare case of actual investigative journalism that starts on the front page.
* if you turn from the op-ed page to a news-bearing page, you're changing from reading bold-faced, unapologetic propaganda to reading news stories.
I think Chomsky either wrote or said that the most effective way to get news from a newspaper is to start from the back and reading to the front.
Anyhow, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect seems not to take any of these truisms into account. (Nor the fact that people who read newspapers and periodicals also have a genre literacy, including foreknowledge of the most reputable reporters, reporters backgrounds, conflicts of interest, etc.)
Just to test out the Gell-Mann logic, let's change the content:
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the low quality of a poem, and then turn the page to 20th century poets, and read as if T.S. Eliot's work was somehow more serious than the baloney you just read."
"At some point you've got to trust your newspaper (or read a better one!) unless there is explicit counter-evidence from elsewhere against the story."
Gell-Mann has fascinated me for years (even before I knew it by name). It stemmed from reading news articles about technology in the newspaper (even pre-internet) and other conventional news sources. They never seemed to get it right, and it was frustrating. Particularly galling was the use mis-use of "hacker".
As I got older, and eventually had a cadre of friends and acquaintances in various professions - nurse, doctor, lawyer, CEO (food), COO (software development), environmental scientist, hydrologist, industrial engineer, insurance salesman, high level manager, and most notably, a journalist.
Querying them specifically on Gell-Mann, the results were pretty much unanimous. They all felt like the conventional media mis-reported their fields of expertise. Being introduced to the Gell-Mann concept was an eye-opener for some of them, while others had intuitively understood it, as I had.
Consequently, I follow no out of domain news sources. If I want to know something, I read something in depth from within the industry it is covering. I choose carefully, and try discredit what I've read.
I have to say, it was particular satisfying not paying attention to the last election. One of my friends, a self-avowed news-monger, remarked to me casually a few days before election day, "Hillary cancelled her post-election party." I said, "She knows she's going to lose." He said, "You're crazy, everyone has her in a landslide." I said, "You might be misinformed."
Gell-Mann amnesia effect is the same with movies or other information that is packaged for mass consumption or pop culture, getting details wrong might be a simplification for understanding and consumption, or a first impression that might not give the full picture but allows mass consumption of the idea to get closer to the truth.
In movies, if you are in a field portrayed in the movie, you see how much was wrong regarding that field or subject in the popular or surface level understanding of a subject. But then go on to believe the suspended or simulated reality the movie portrays on other fields or subjects that may also be off base but in the general direction.
Communication sometimes has to be a simplification or a surface level knowledge set that is understandable or consumable by all people or the target market, especially people that might not know about a particular subject. So you might read an article or see a part of a movie that is wrong, but the general gist is correct or the view represented might be people's first take on a subject, but the more detail one knows it might skew farther from that initial idea.
Similar to the way hackers are portrayed in movies, hackers do things with machines and software that are amazing in real life, but it is a cartoon version in the movies. Space travel movies are also usually guilty of this. The Martian was lauded for the more scientific and reality based takes on aspects of the movie, but also it was still packaged for consumption to get a point across.
When it comes to news and facts, incorrect details are bad when articles are wrong or get detailed parts incorrect, but many times first impressions are wrong or first takes on subjects are off base slightly, ultimately the truth comes out or is refined to closer to correct. Journalists might not fully understand a subject enough or may be missing parts to fully get all the details correct, eventually through more work though these ideas are corrected. The journey to truth and fact is iterative.
People simplify to get to a point where they can understand something to then find out the truth through more discovery, it is a work in progress, kinda like finding out about our place in the universe, initially people thought Earth was the center of all that is. The pursuit of knowledge and fact is getting a foothold to climb closer to the truth bit by bit, unless the bias is intentionally to mislead or spread disinformation.
This is a pretty good explanation for why 'fake news' is a thing.
"Michael Crichton concluded in the same essay that there is absolutely no value in the media, as society continues to seek information from the same source that was entirely wrong on the topic in which one retains expertise"
While I do observe this in theory, in practice I've found that some newspapers/magazines/websites just do a better job in certain subjects than others. One wouldn't expect Top Gear to be 100% correct in an article about floral arrangements, after all. I've noticed this a lot for local news channels; they're great at covering local events (that's their specialty) but terrible at covering world events (which is very much not their specialty; the better ones stick to the key points instead of trying to go in depth, which is smart).
So a publication totally butchering a subject is certainly cause to get a second opinion for other subjects, but not necessarily cause to discard the publication's take on those other subjects outright.
"The media" is such a nebulous phrase. I tend to avidly follow particular journalist's work - Ed Yong in science, for instance. I think this is more reliable than ascribing wholesale to a particular publication or "the media."
The effect is definitely real - it happened to me many times, when I trust journalists in topics in which I have no expertise, sometimes much more than I should have, to my eventual regret. All while knowing to be extremely careful trusting anything in the press - especially non-specialized press - in my area of expertise, since the coverage is so universally bad that it's a cause for celebration when at least something correct and non-distorted comes through. I know that, and then kinda forget that, because questioning literally everything is kinda exhausting.
I am not sure what you mean by counter-example to the effect - I do not think the idea is that it's always happens. It's just the name and description of the thing that sometimes happens.
I'm sure the effect is exaggerated because it gives people the warm fuzzies to know they're smarter than those newspaper dolts, but demonstrating a few news articles were correct doesn't seem like it proves all reporting is correct.
Although perhaps there is actually the opposite effect. Now people read an article in their field, notice some flaws, and conclude all reporting is terribly flawed?
But really, one month you read a wired article about kaminsky and the keys to the internet, and then you read an article about hacking slot machines, and you think, oh yeah, I'm sure this accurate?
[+] [-] jonathanstrange|7 years ago|reply
A science journalist has usually studied some natural science but has to cover all of them and has to simplify a lot, so a trained expert will find a lot of inaccuracies. This is not true for the journalist who reports international events and affairs - these are based on much simpler facts such as "which government decided what" and "which spokesperson of some organisation said what when". It's much easier to get worldly facts like this right, which mostly come from multiple news agencies anyway, than describing news about theoretical physics to laymen in terms that are 100% accurate to a physicist.
In a nutshell, I'm not so sure that the effect really exists in any significant way.
Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies. I've never heard of any reasonable and viable alternative from critics of traditional news media. Cell phone videos by citizen reporters with hysterical voice over can hardly count as a good substitute. Neither are copy&paste news aggregators or bloggers.
At some point you've got to trust your newspaper (or read a better one!) unless there is explicit counter-evidence from elsewhere against the story. Most botched reports get corrected very fast anyway.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
That's only true when the coverage consists of retelling such basic facts, but that's a small part of what journalists do.
Anyone with knowledge of international events and affairs can spot all kinds of errors, omissions, and plain falsehoods when articles cover such topics -- just as well as one does when it comes to say physics or computer science.
>Another issue is, of course, from where else you would get accurate news if not from journalists and press agencies.
Most journalists and press agencies cater to the lowest common denominator. There are press sources that go far deeper [1] but those are not what people usually read for their "news".
For science, for example, you can go directly to the journals and hardcode scientific outlets. For most regular news you can go directly to the wire services, read accounts from people on the ground, and read deeper outlets with more analysis than mass market newspapers like the NYT.
[1] Even if they introduce a certain delay on the news (which in most cases is irrelevant, it's not like anybody will need to act immediately upon some news regarding foreign affairs for example).
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
Quite a lot of news reporting does this, but it's extremely hard not to accidentally let "a spokesperson said X" implant the belief "X is true" in your mind unless you're very vigilant. So reporting these kind of official statements without fact-checking the underlying statement can be surprisingly misleading.
But then there's also the ability of media to just make or dig up a scandal out of whole cloth by finding people willing to make the statements they want. Today's fiasco is the Times trying to resurrect the idea that Michael Foot was a Soviet agent, a claim which they lost a libel lawsuit over decades ago. https://inews.co.uk/news/ex-sunday-times-ed-andrew-neil-lead...
[+] [-] dooglius|7 years ago|reply
This is true, but why does this mean we should assign trust to newspapers? I think the reality is that a reliable source of information is not possible due to the Principal-Agent problem [0]: any information-providing body is going to have incentives to distort the information provided. Misleading headlines or "clickbait" to draw in more readers are one such incentive, and the inherent difficulty of verifying one's facts is another. The notion that there has to be something we can trust is a foolish one, and we should be skeptical of everything we read.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
[+] [-] quirkot|7 years ago|reply
I disagree very strongly with this statement. The "facts" may be simpler in that it doesn't take research to uncover them, but the "reporting" is far more complex because there are so many and contradicting facts. Take any international conflict and you have multiple truths about which gov't decided what. Additionally the actors are motivated to create confusion.
[+] [-] BeetleB|7 years ago|reply
People often divide news content into two spheres: Facts and opinion (e.g. editorial). News articles are believed to be facts, and then they separately have opinions and editorials. The common advice is to be wary of the latter.
In my experience, though, the news is really divided into three spheres: Facts, opinions, and context. You'll find that almost every news article contains both facts and context. The context portion of the article is there to tell you why all this matters. Contextual statements are also facts, but they do not involve the immediate events. It is in the choice of which contextual facts are included in the article that bias creeps in.
As a simple exam, in 2003 Michael Jackson was charged with child molesting. I recall almost all the articles I read mentioned in the end that he had been similarly accused in 1991. Yet none of those articles mentioned the details and outcome of that investigation.
With international affairs, once you've studied a topic for long enough, you'll quickly become aware of the contextual biases, and you'll want to scream at the authors for omitting what you think are very relevant contextual facts.
[+] [-] Strilanc|7 years ago|reply
Are you an expert of international events and affairs? Have you spoken to one about whether this is true? I'm not and haven't, but I would bet they have plenty of examples of terrible coverage.
(I imagine many examples would be of the form "they focused on irrelevant detail X when what matters is Y" or "they said X implies Y but it's actually unknown what the consequences of X will be" or "they only quoted people with opinion X" or "they oversimplified X to the point of caricature" or of course "that's just factually wrong, I was there and X never happened".)
[+] [-] pwned1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|7 years ago|reply
I notice the effect all the time reading any coverage of legal or regulatory issues in mainstream newspapers. I pretty much just flip past any such article these days--it's too painful. As to the alternatives, they're domain specific. For legal stuff, there are specialized legal journals. Blogs are top notch too--anything you read on PopeHat is 10x better than the NYT.
[+] [-] 300bps|7 years ago|reply
I don’t disagree with this simple statement per se but I disagree with its implications.
You can still paint a false picture by choosing which facts to report and which to ignore. I see it every day in the gym with one television that plays CNN next to one that plays Fox News. Watching the TV on the left gives me the impression Trump is a hooligan constantly on the verge of being impeached. The TV on the right tells me the economy is roaring and everything is great.
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|7 years ago|reply
Even a cursory skimming of Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky will dispel you forever of such a notion. The motivations for inaccuracies of political journalist are different from that of a science journalist but the result is the same.
[+] [-] stcredzero|7 years ago|reply
In a nutshell, I'm not so sure that the effect really exists in any significant way.
In the case of "worldly facts" news, the really significant part is often the emotional impression of the text. The way this plays out in physics/science, world news, and politics are all going to be somewhat different. It results in factual errors more often in science news, which often amounts to making people feel like they're informed, but the emotional games played in more political news are different. (The exceptions are climate science and evolution, where the topics are more politicized and the emotional games are more political.)
[+] [-] billfruit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|7 years ago|reply
You can round up 100 protestors anywhere, for any issue. Why does the media cover some protests but not others? Why does the media never report on public suicides and bank robberies (to avoid encouraging copycats) but they report every mass shooting, complete with a gory scoreboard? Why was the bloodiest war since World War II virtually unreported on in the US? Why were Donald Trump’s bizarre antics more comprehensively reported than the policy proposals of any of the Presidential candidates?
[+] [-] cerebrum|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sundarurfriend|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neuronic|7 years ago|reply
The roots are to be found in recent political events and the apparent susceptibility to "active measures" by state actors and private entities alike.
This strongly suggests the vast majority of people spends near zero energy in trying to separate bullshit from thoughtful content. It's all about how loud and how often you blurt a story out there and how brazen you are in spreading it (troll farms, bots).
We are currently experiencing a true crisis of Western democracy that results from evolutionary advantages of bullshit information in a global information ecosystem. These affects seem to emerge when blending global connectivity with human psychology...
[+] [-] spacehome|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeulike|7 years ago|reply
This could be a form of confirmation bias - like how it seems to rain when you havent got your umbrella, because confirmation bias makes you remember the times you got caught in the rain more strongly then the times you actually had your umbrella and stayed dry.
Similarly if someone is of the opinion that everything in the media is made-up, confirmation bias will mean they really notice articles that are wrong on areas that they know about. Whereas articles that are broadly correct in areas they know about will just pass by unremarkably.
Then then on top of that, you've got the premature extrapolation that because you've spotted one incorrect article by one journalist, all the other articles by all the other journalists must also be the same.
Not that I think the media are always right by any means.
Obviously the media I consume are carefully picked so that I know I'm getting a reasonable sketch of reality, whereas the stuff everyone else is consuming is clearly made up dangerous nonsense*
* probably biased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
[+] [-] brobdingnagians|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marmaduke|7 years ago|reply
what is the pre-existing belief? did you mean to say sampling bias?
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|7 years ago|reply
A few personal experiences:
I took the stand as a witness in a murder case. The shit the papers printed had nothing to do with reality.
I ran a nonprofit after we lost our child to cancer. We got a lot of press, a lot of incorrect press.
I was in Iraq as a soldier in ‘04 - ‘05. We had satellite news and everyone back in the US was learning about a conflict on Mars as far as I’m concerned. The entire discussion had almost nothing in common with the facts on the ground.
In Iraq I even had cameras show up to something I was directly involved in after we already cleaned it up and left. They were egregiously wrong about that particular situation.
I’m friends with a TV news reporter in a major market. She’s on every night. The things she’s told me about how the news desk operates...
Market and sports analysis written by bots, virtue signaling “intellectuals”, beat reporters who are lazy/tired/hurried/being told what to write, humans having bias.
Honestly it’s all garbage. I just try to read primary sources when I can and when I have time. People think being well read in the media talk of the day is some sort of badge of intellectual self reliance. Nothing is further from the truth.
[+] [-] russellbeattie|7 years ago|reply
The financial crisis made me realize that this is pretty much true for most areas except, I hope, for bridge-builders and rocket scientists.
[+] [-] btilly|7 years ago|reply
My favorite "WTF" experiment was a calculation that adding mercury to rocket fuel would result in better thrust. This went all the way to a full rocket test, proving that the calculation was absolutely correct. Then the line of research finally got abandoned because spewing horrible poisons into the air is not something that we want to do...
[+] [-] lliamander|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomatotomato37|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] skrebbel|7 years ago|reply
Not necessarily of course: eg Dutch news broadcaster NOS got significantly better tech reporting after hiring a particularly good journalist (Joost Schellevis), but their other reporting didn't suddenly get less biased by him joining.
[+] [-] gowld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] quickthrower2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolc|7 years ago|reply
It does seem strange to continue reading a source that gets things wrong all the time. A friend's commentary on those: "Just consider them entertainment. Some readers want to be entertained in ways reality can't offer them."
[+] [-] JoachimS|7 years ago|reply
Gell-Mann of course had a fundamental understandingf of modern physics including many counterintuitive effects. A journalist would not have that knownledge, and given the task to (in fairly short time) write an article for an audience that in general neither has that fundamental understanding. So, of course the journalist will make mistakes, misunderstand aspects of the field when writing an article. Physics is hard.
But, politics, road safety, sports are interests that one quite probably can claim are less hard to grasp. And areas a newspaper journalist quite probably also have more knowledge about. So, the amount of errors and mistakes when writing an article abpit something in these fields should be fewer. And Gell-Mann would probably be able to spot them.
[+] [-] tekromancr|7 years ago|reply
whereby immediately after reading about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, the reader forgets about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This effect and it's related origin's anti-memetic properties lead to the constant rediscovery and dissemination of materials related to said effects.
[+] [-] madrox|7 years ago|reply
In my statistics undergrad, we were told to find a science article, find the study the article was about, and reinterpret the results to see how well the article did. The article always overgeneralized study conclusions. Every time.
I have no great hatred for the press, and I don’t call anything I dislike Fake News, but I do wish I felt like I could trust reporting more than I do.
[+] [-] jancsika|7 years ago|reply
Turning the page of a newspaper is often a big deal:
* if you turn from the front page to any other page, the sensationalism of the headlines decreases while the overall quality of the coverage increases. Save for the rare case of actual investigative journalism that starts on the front page.
* if you turn from the op-ed page to a news-bearing page, you're changing from reading bold-faced, unapologetic propaganda to reading news stories.
I think Chomsky either wrote or said that the most effective way to get news from a newspaper is to start from the back and reading to the front.
Anyhow, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect seems not to take any of these truisms into account. (Nor the fact that people who read newspapers and periodicals also have a genre literacy, including foreknowledge of the most reputable reporters, reporters backgrounds, conflicts of interest, etc.)
[+] [-] jancsika|7 years ago|reply
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the low quality of a poem, and then turn the page to 20th century poets, and read as if T.S. Eliot's work was somehow more serious than the baloney you just read."
[+] [-] nemild|7 years ago|reply
https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....
There’s also one specific to the tech industry:
https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/softwar...
[+] [-] redleggedfrog|7 years ago|reply
Gell-Mann has fascinated me for years (even before I knew it by name). It stemmed from reading news articles about technology in the newspaper (even pre-internet) and other conventional news sources. They never seemed to get it right, and it was frustrating. Particularly galling was the use mis-use of "hacker".
As I got older, and eventually had a cadre of friends and acquaintances in various professions - nurse, doctor, lawyer, CEO (food), COO (software development), environmental scientist, hydrologist, industrial engineer, insurance salesman, high level manager, and most notably, a journalist.
Querying them specifically on Gell-Mann, the results were pretty much unanimous. They all felt like the conventional media mis-reported their fields of expertise. Being introduced to the Gell-Mann concept was an eye-opener for some of them, while others had intuitively understood it, as I had.
Consequently, I follow no out of domain news sources. If I want to know something, I read something in depth from within the industry it is covering. I choose carefully, and try discredit what I've read.
I have to say, it was particular satisfying not paying attention to the last election. One of my friends, a self-avowed news-monger, remarked to me casually a few days before election day, "Hillary cancelled her post-election party." I said, "She knows she's going to lose." He said, "You're crazy, everyone has her in a landslide." I said, "You might be misinformed."
[+] [-] drawkbox|7 years ago|reply
In movies, if you are in a field portrayed in the movie, you see how much was wrong regarding that field or subject in the popular or surface level understanding of a subject. But then go on to believe the suspended or simulated reality the movie portrays on other fields or subjects that may also be off base but in the general direction.
Communication sometimes has to be a simplification or a surface level knowledge set that is understandable or consumable by all people or the target market, especially people that might not know about a particular subject. So you might read an article or see a part of a movie that is wrong, but the general gist is correct or the view represented might be people's first take on a subject, but the more detail one knows it might skew farther from that initial idea.
Similar to the way hackers are portrayed in movies, hackers do things with machines and software that are amazing in real life, but it is a cartoon version in the movies. Space travel movies are also usually guilty of this. The Martian was lauded for the more scientific and reality based takes on aspects of the movie, but also it was still packaged for consumption to get a point across.
When it comes to news and facts, incorrect details are bad when articles are wrong or get detailed parts incorrect, but many times first impressions are wrong or first takes on subjects are off base slightly, ultimately the truth comes out or is refined to closer to correct. Journalists might not fully understand a subject enough or may be missing parts to fully get all the details correct, eventually through more work though these ideas are corrected. The journey to truth and fact is iterative.
People simplify to get to a point where they can understand something to then find out the truth through more discovery, it is a work in progress, kinda like finding out about our place in the universe, initially people thought Earth was the center of all that is. The pursuit of knowledge and fact is getting a foothold to climb closer to the truth bit by bit, unless the bias is intentionally to mislead or spread disinformation.
[+] [-] bmmayer1|7 years ago|reply
"Michael Crichton concluded in the same essay that there is absolutely no value in the media, as society continues to seek information from the same source that was entirely wrong on the topic in which one retains expertise"
[+] [-] yellowapple|7 years ago|reply
So a publication totally butchering a subject is certainly cause to get a second opinion for other subjects, but not necessarily cause to discard the publication's take on those other subjects outright.
[+] [-] jcriddle4|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faitswulff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|7 years ago|reply
It's really easy to cite counterexamples to it. Even in our field, and in very mainstream press outlets.
[+] [-] smsm42|7 years ago|reply
I am not sure what you mean by counter-example to the effect - I do not think the idea is that it's always happens. It's just the name and description of the thing that sometimes happens.
[+] [-] tedunangst|7 years ago|reply
Although perhaps there is actually the opposite effect. Now people read an article in their field, notice some flaws, and conclude all reporting is terribly flawed?
But really, one month you read a wired article about kaminsky and the keys to the internet, and then you read an article about hacking slot machines, and you think, oh yeah, I'm sure this accurate?