Gell-Mann amnesia effect

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

by glastra • 8 years ago

361 162 8 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

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.

neuronic• 8 years ago

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...

spacehome• 8 years ago

Which outlets pass your filter?

justtopost• 8 years ago

Not OP, but that seems to change with each election cycle. Its alarming how malliable US media gets qhen the money starts to flow.

warnhardcode• 8 years ago

Who and what are on your long-term favorites list?

marcosdumay3• 8 years ago

Not the OP, but I wouldn't be comfortable answering that question. The problem is that each of my media sources have a long list of problems. Those may cancel out between the sources or just need some care for interpreting the contents, but passing a list of sources would be useless and potentially harmful.

peteretep2• 8 years ago

The alternative is what, exactly? It may simple be that a facile understanding of the world is perfectly acceptable for most topics.

close042• 8 years ago

I guess a good option is to pick "reference topics" as measuring sticks. Read about something you are intimately familiar with. If the reporting matches your experience you can assume it's relatively unbiased. If there's a strong mismatch you can assume it will be present when covering topics you are not familiar with and cannot judge correctly.

peteretep2• 8 years ago

This doesn't sound like how newspapers work.

Take a state propaganda outlet like RT.com. They have plenty of stories on topics I know about that are just fine.

rusk6• 8 years ago

I guess a good option is to pick "reference topics" as measuring sticks

For me this is the beauty of HN. I have a good familiarity with a lot of the topics discussed so I can generally tell who knows what they're talking about and who isn't. When the discussion veers into more general topics I can feel mostly confident (relatively speaking anyway) of the information I'm getting that's "on the level".

fsloth• 8 years ago

The alternative is having a fact based discussion of the causes and effects.

"It may simple be that a facile understanding of the world is perfectly acceptable for most topics."

I agree, for most practical things it's sufficient to register a thing has happened without deeply understanding the causal premises leading to the event, nor the implications.

rusk6• 8 years ago

That's all well and good, until people actually start interpreting the facile interpretation as fact. Newspapers often present their interpretation as definitive. Then people go and make serious decisions based on this or start campaigning or policy-makers take it as informative about what's going on in the world.

On the one hand as a reader we need to be more sceptical, but on the other, a bit more humility is needed from these news sources.

shawn• 8 years ago

HN.

krapp• 8 years ago

Hacker News is no alternative. Read any thread about any subject not related to programming, and chances are an expert in the field will show up and point out how wrong the assumptions being made about that field are. This seems to be most common in thread about subjects for which hacker culture holds traditional animosity - business, government and the military, and art or design.

That being the case, and given the contentiousness that tech-related threads also sometimes generate, it's likely most commenters' opinions on programming and CS are only slightly more informed as their opinions on everything else. I'll include myself in this set -- I've been corrected (sometimes harshly) on a number of things I assumed were true and insisted on in good faith.

Take HN with the same healthy dose of salt with which you should take all other media.

pdpi• 8 years ago

From the linked wikipedia article:

"One example is that of C. S. Lewis (who did not know of this phenomenon but nevertheless has a case of it). After reading biographical interpretations of his own works and realizing how incorrect they could be, he began to read other biographical interpretations with more caution, aware not to accept everything stated at face value."

A facile understanding might be perfectly acceptable — as long as you accept it for what it is, and allow for the idea that you might be wrong in your understanding.

mattnewport• 8 years ago

A pretty good alternative is to largely avoid consuming the kinds of media most prone to this, mostly newspapers and television news. If it's true that a facile understanding of the world is perfectly acceptable for most topics then it's also true that no understanding or awareness of those topics is also acceptable.

General news media is largely useless to actively harmful. For topics you actually care about, you're better off learning about them from specialist sources. For general understanding of the world you're probably better off reading history, science or literature. For plenty of topics you're probably better off not knowing or caring. If you think you're getting value from these types of media, it's at least worth a skeptical re-evaluation of what value they are really providing.

quickthrower2• 8 years ago

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.

lolc• 8 years ago

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."

codeulike2• 8 years ago

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*

* probably biased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

brobdingnagians• 8 years ago

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.

heavenlyblue• 8 years ago

The reason major media is considered authoritarive is because it has to reach the widest audience possible. The fact that you’re visitig NH probably implies you are already in the top 10% bracket in terms if your earnings; which probably also implies you have access to more information.

If major newspapers wrote in the language like of Foreign Policy - people wouldn’t read it. So what is authoritative? Authoritative for the ingelligencia, or authoritative for the masses?

jerf• 8 years ago

"We tend to think of major media as very authoritative (even if we don't admit it to ourselves)"

One thing I've increasingly noticed over the past couple of years (and I think it's personal development, not any particular combination of news of the day) is the way the way we trust the mass media can make stories just disappear by simply not covering them. I'm not even merely talking about political stories disappearing or the media exerting bias; I mean even bigger than that. How many times have you read something interesting and would be interesting in reading about a followup story in a month or two? How often do you see that followup story? For instance, in the domain of science articles, how many times do you read about some preliminary result vs. an article discussing the field's reaction to some preliminary result?

People simply and almost blindly take their cues about what's important from what the mass media is talking about, but if you examine even just what the mass media is putting out on its own terms it's hard to conclude that it's the truly most important stuff.

Note my point here is about people moreso than the media. The media is forced to be biased by limited bandwidth. If you want to argue that they're biased beyond what that justifies, I will be right there with you, but that's not what my point here is about. My point here is that regardless of exactly how the bias manifests, how casually we tend to accept the mass media's output as the definition of what is important today, what the agenda is, what we all have to talk about, what we're going to screech at about each other on social media, etc.

marmaduke• 8 years ago

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

what is the pre-existing belief? did you mean to say sampling bias?

codeulike2• 8 years ago

Hmm yeah maybe. For it to be confirmation bias you have to start out with the idea that it always rains when you havent got your brolly

samatman• 8 years ago

Folklore. One might hear one's parents saying such a thing many times before one is old enough to carry an umbrella.

rbanffy2• 8 years ago

What are the odds of every James Bond movie getting all the tech stuff ludicrously wrong and, yet, getting all the spy parts perfectly right?

saagarjha2• 8 years ago

James Bond is a fictionalized account. There was never any pretext of it attempting to be accurate.

smsm424• 8 years ago

Nobody expects James Bond movie to be factually correct. People do expect news media to be at least close to it. However, frequently they are worse than fiction movies (at least some of the fiction movies don't go out of their way to distort the narrative at the service of whatever agenda item the reporter feels like pushing).

rossdavidh• 8 years ago

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.

rusk6• 8 years ago

Personal anecdote: Growing up, from maybe late teens up past 30 I'd say, I was a fanatical adherent of the Irish Times. It's considered to be "centre-right" in its editorial but was also a quality publication, with great editorial and journalistic standards, and still is by far the best Irish daily newspaper (the standard otherwise is not great).

I would devour it. Gobble down her op-eds. Take my thinking from it, even proudly claiming to shocked friends from time to time that it's "where I get my opinion". I was pro-business, anti-union - a champion of conservative values and believed that society adequately served the honest and hard-working.

I bought it every day. I'd proudly strut about with it tucked under my arm. They could have told me black was white and I'd have lapped it up.

About 10 years ago a few things changed, and I can't say what exactly. The editor turned over from a lady who was a distinguished journalist to "some other old guy" - maybe that was it. Maybe it was the financial crisis brought about a lowering of quality standards or a need to compromise values. Or maybe it was the change in government that brought about a regime that was more harmonious with their editorial ideals. The Irish Times has strong ties both presently, and historically with the current ruling party but all through my youth they were in opposition and perhaps this gave the IT a rebellious note.

Maybe I was just getting older and wiser.

Probably all this coming together; but I started to notice the cracks more and more. Not just partiality, but sloppy, careless reporting. Some stuff just downright and even dangerously wrong at times.

They used to be subscriber-only but had some years hence gone purely ad-driven; when they started to go back to being subscriber only I jumped on it because I hoped that subscriber-driven revenue would improve journalistic standards. I enthusiastically battled in the comments section with the freeloading whingers as I saw them.

I signed up for the online edition and to have the weekend edition delivered (getting the delivery to actually come was a litany of operational issues that I won't get into now).

But nothing improved. They spent a bit more money on the site, and rebranded the print edition. That was it. They started introducing more and more obtrusive advertising, and the coverage just got more and more partisan and pro-establishment until one day, they printed just outright lies about the outcome of a trial I had been following closely.

That was it. I was done. The desperate bastards couldn't even give me a way to unsubscribe online. I actually had to ring them up on a number that I found buried in the terms and conditions. Even then on the phone they wanted to know the whys and wherefores and if I'd be back. They were pleasant and polite as was I with them.

Since then I've watched them spiral down down down. They're at a point now where they're presenting different agendas to different "segments": Online subscriber-only articles tend to be more progressive in their outlook. The free-access stuff is grotesquely click-baity. The print edition caters to the stuffy older more conservative readership.

This is a newspaper that claims to be the "Newspaper of Record". It saddens me that it's still far and away the best daily on Irish newstands though.

Sorry for the rant. It's kind of like when Luis Figo went to Real Madrid. One Barca fan recorded as saying "We hate him so much because we loved him so much".

circlefavshape• 8 years ago

IIRC the op-eds were always fairly variable in quality. Surely you haven't forgotten Kevin Myers?

rusk6• 8 years ago

I invoke Gell-Mann amnesia :-) - also worth noting that he got the boot before I attained full adulthood.

scandox• 8 years ago

Kevin O'Sullivan - I'm sure he's a nice man - just didn't have any guts or vision. First day of his editorship they ran the first ever hint of Advertorial I ever saw there: a lottery ad in columns that slightly bled down into an article.

Geraldine Kennedy had some serious backbone and she wasn't driven by business considerations. On the other hand the corporate side made some horrific blunders during her tenure though I don't know to what extent she was involved with that.

rusk6• 8 years ago

Pretty much my thoughts.

Regarding Ms Kennedy, I imagine her to be a newswoman first and foremost and I wouldn't expect her to have to take responsibility for the business end of things. That would be the board in my view of things, and also in my view its the board that is steering things from the aft these days. Geraldine was a blip, we're seeing IT's real colours (blue) these days.

IT is still suffering from a few spectacular business blunders in the late 90s/00s, but who knows how many people personally benefited from these mistakes. That's modern Ireland.

gowld4• 8 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M

"In this timeless clip, Prime Minister, Jim Hacker explains to Sir Humphrey and Bernard the importance of the papers and who reads which one."

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751828/quotes

Sir Humphrey: The only way to understand the Press is to remember that they pander to their readers' prejudices.

Jim Hacker: Don't tell me about the Press. I know exactly who reads the papers.

* The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country.

* The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country.

* The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country.

* The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country.

* The Financial Times is read by people who own the country.

* The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country.

* The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard Woolley: Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as she's got big

cptnapalm• 8 years ago

Such a wonderful show and several actual prime ministers have said, more or less, "yes, this is what it is actually like."

philwelch2• 8 years ago

Sometimes I think that the British tradition of journalism (have a bunch of competing newspapers with known biases) is better than the American (have an oligopoly of newspapers, each of which claims to be impartial but has the same center-left bias).

skrebbel• 8 years ago

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.

gowld4• 8 years ago

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.

w_t_payne• 8 years ago

This is why we have institutions with processes that attempt to manage and improve quality.

jonathanstrange6• 8 years ago

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.

300bps• 8 years ago

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.

coldtea3• 8 years ago

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).

jonathanstrange6• 8 years ago

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.

If you have the time, sure. Journalists do this work for you and are trained to do it, but of course there is nothing wrong with going closer to the source. Only few people can afford this luxury, though. I sometimes do this for topics I'm really interested in, but certainly not for every daily news. For the ones who don't have the time, resorting to reputable newspapers is by far the best choice.

Edit: In your reply you were shifting the goalpost. I was talking about news, not "what journalists do". Writing an editorial or opinion piece or broad analysis is not reporting news. Just wanted to make this clear.

cwmma• 8 years ago

one of the big things that news papers do is pick through various sources and figure out which are important and which aren't, if you go directly to the source and you aren't careful, you can get stovepiped[1].

More generally who the hell has time to go directly to the wire and read all the raw sources and figure out which are accurate, which are relevant, and which you should care about? Journalists, do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepiping#Stovepiping_pre_an...

zeveb• 8 years ago

it's not like anybody will need to act immediately upon some news regarding foreign affairs for example

Well, that's not quite true: there are organisations which need to act immediately upon news of foreign affairs. Those organisations are nation-states, and they tend to have well-funded and -staffed intelligence operations for precisely that reason.

mncharity• 8 years ago

There are press sources that go far deeper

I wonder if "deeper" isn't the critical dimension for the facepalms of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Perhaps instead it's "cluefullness"? Channeling consensus expertise from a robust professional community. Much long-form journalism is just as cluelessly facepalm-intensive as TV news. Random-person-in-the-field handwaving (Foreign Affairs, or Atlantic), or "cocktail-party consensus" (Economist, or often NYT), seem no less G-M-ish. And in contrast, a brief and "shallow" one-liner might still reflect the correctness and insight of deep and robust community expertise.

You can experience G-M facepalms without your own expertise, by finding forums where some professional community hangs out. So when US Navy ships are colliding, you contrast press coverage with discussion on a professional maritime forum. When a SpaceX-launched satellite fails, you contrast press coverage with a private spaceflight forum, or even /r/spacex. The magnitude of the facepalm signal is very not small.

Some of the more clueful journalists, are embedded in such professional communities. Which suggests a metaphor. As the old press shut down its foreign desks, something was lost. Coverage became less insightful, less nuanced. A reality-check was removed, so facepalms increased. For myself, most journalism, about most topics, about science and technology, economics, governance, and much else... feels like the foreign desk has been closed.

There's still "in-country" trade press, and newsletters. So perhaps there's a market opportunity here? Channeling expertise to a broader audience, without the focus on transient "news" and investigative journalism. Instead of hanging small bits of broken insight upon the "hook" of current events, perhaps make insight the focus?

pjc50• 8 years ago

"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...

cerebrum• 8 years ago

Iraq has WMDs.

angstrom• 8 years ago

That’s closer to manufactured consent. No evidence, vague justification and mainstream parroting to reinforce the narrative.

dooglius• 8 years ago

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

rayiner3• 8 years ago

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.

billfruit• 8 years ago

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.

quirkot2• 8 years ago

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.

stcredzero2• 8 years ago

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.)

BeetleB• 8 years ago

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.

Strilanc• 8 years ago

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".)

13415• 8 years ago

I think he was talking about the news content, not about analysis.

pwned1• 8 years ago

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.

abdullahkhalids• 8 years ago

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.

philwelch2• 8 years ago

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?

lamby• 8 years ago

So, after reading about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect I now no-longer... (etc.)

chimprich• 8 years ago

This article seems to be based on a Michael Crichton speech. Crichton himself had some controversial and unscientific views on climate change; maybe this was what he had in mind when he wrote the speech. Perhaps, contrary to this opinion, he should have been less sceptical of the media.

The article seems quite poor. Of two supporting references it uses, one seems to contradict the effect (C.S. Lewis became more sceptical) and the other suggests Hitchens referred to this effect in an interview that came years before the speech.

mherdeg• 8 years ago

In Crichton's 2002 speech which cites the Gell-Mann amnesia effect ( http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/ ) he argues that:

(1) newspapers and other media sources should not quote experts who predict that the 2002 United States steel tariffs will affect GDP or employment, because no one can predict the future, and you should ignore any predictions you read experts making which are quoted by newspapers. Note that in retrospect ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tarif... and links ) research has showed that the tariffs adversely affected GDP and employment, as some experts predicted.

(2) other predictions which people made are wrong and, with the benefit of hindsight, they should not make them. Note that Crichton cherry-picks only those predictions which turned out to be inaccurate.

In retrospect there is a bit of irony in his being forced to "predict" certain future predictions which would turn out to be wrong. The one specific future prediction he happened to choose happened to be somewhat accurate.

Yes, Crichton does use the latter half of the speech to argue that global climate change is not happening, or if it is happening it's good for humanity, and anyway it's considerably less important to humanity's fate than changes in the Earth's magnetic field strength.

What he does not say in his speech is "I have analyzed predictions made in news articles for the past X years, and judged the accuracy of N predictions -- Y% of them were accurate. Frustratingly none of them expressed any degree of confidence in their predictions so I treated all equally for this analysis. This percentage is [no worse than guessing | worse than guessing, so you should expect the opposite of what is predicted with weak/strong confidence | better than guessing, so you should expect what is predicted with weak/strong confidence]. Here are my data so you can see for yourself."

Did Crichton do his homework? Or did he just give up in dismay and cherry-pick some examples of failed predictions? His argument is rhetorically compelling but it's based on anecdotes rather than data and it's hard to trust.

A very quick Web search shows that with respect to opinion columnists (not the same as newswriters), this work has been done at an undergraduate level -- see https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/pundits-as-accurate-as-c... , https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accura... -- and has found that some specific opinion writers tend to make predictions which are accurate and some do not.

EGreg3• 8 years ago

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result - Einstein

Democracy is the best system of government, except for all the others - Churchill

With the News Media, it seems to be the combination:

News based on Capitalism and Competition is the worst system for making sense of information, creating echo chambers and clickbait to pay its bills in a race to the bottom, but we will still keep turning to it to inform our democracies.

How about something new for a change, namely COLLABORATION like wiki or open source news, and replacing the journalists risking their lives on the ground with citizen journalists that have cellphones. This is 2018 and people document every phenomenon anyway. All we are missing is collaboration.

This being HN, let’s hack it together. If you want to build a site like that together, contact me (greg at the domain qbix.com)

roter• 8 years ago

WikiTribune is similar to what you are proposing on the collaboration side. "Come collaborate with us, because facts really do matter" [0].

[0] https://www.wikitribune.com/

EGreg3• 8 years ago

There is also wikinews.com

But I think we can make something way more popular and comprehensive, catering to every category of news and in nearly every region and scale.

agurk• 8 years ago

To nitpick the quote is actually "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".

fzeroracer• 8 years ago

'Open-source news' has the very same problem that open source in general does. It's relatively easy for standards to be adopted, co-opted by companies and people with agendas and then the open-source basis abandoned.

For example in your scenario how do you stop state actors from infiltrating and perpetuating stories or views that are positive to them? As you've no doubt seen recently, facts are surprisingly malleable with the right viewpoint and those citizen journalists can submit one-sided videos removing or altering context.

In an ideal news media world the role of a journalist should be to provide full context for why something matters while performing their own independent investigations. Meanwhile, the people reading said media should have the proper education and critical thinking skills trained to analyze multiple pieces of information to understand biases.

EGreg3• 8 years ago

How exactly do people stop these things from happening currently? Because they happen all the time.

https://news.avclub.com/behold-this-chorus-of-local-news-tea...

ryanmarsh• 8 years ago

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.

drawkbox• 8 years ago

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.

justin_vanw3• 8 years ago

"there is no value in media"

So much this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

What is reported is decided based entirely on what will hold the most attention for the advertisements. If media outlet attempts to act according to any other rule they are displaced by one which will maximize eyes on advertisements. (This is much like politicians who base every decision on getting more votes against politicians doing anything else.) The exception to this rule is when the media is directly used to further other interests of the large corporations which own it.

rbanffy2• 8 years ago

Capitalism is a wonderful thing, but only when the social benefit of a service is well aligned with the profit of realizing that benefit. When they are completely misaligned, they may pretend to do a job while they are actually doing a very different one.

justin_vanw3• 8 years ago

"Capitalism" is totally orthogonal to this, any alternative to capitalism requires the use of force to confiscate carrots from one person to give carrots to someone else, by definition (replace carrots with whatever you grow on your farm or make at work all day). This sort of scheme is so unnatural to human psychology that it can only persist where there is a total lack of any criticism, which means there is no 'media' whatsoever in non capitalist countries, there is only state propaganda.

You might say "what about slavery", and you would be correct, except that this makes my point perfectly. It was illegal to teach a slave to read, at a time when the only media was newspapers and the written word. Why did they have to prevent slaves from having access to media? Because the system was so unnatural to human psychology that it could only persist while there was no media whatsoever.

So talking about 'media' in an environment besides 'capitalism' doesn't even make sense.

nemild• 8 years ago

Partly for this reason, I’ve written a media literacy guide:

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...

redleggedfrog8• 8 years ago

"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."

tptacek9• 8 years ago

Can you source the claim that the Clinton campaign believed it would lose going into election night? That's the opposite of my understanding.

redleggedfrog8• 8 years ago

Yeah, me, I'm the one who said that. :^)

chasingthewind• 8 years ago

Consequently, I follow no out of domain news sources.

I wonder if this has the opposite risk of creating a kind of "journalistic capture" where the reporting of the journalists who are experts on the topic can be too highly influenced by the industry they're covering.

"Hillary cancelled her post-election party."

A quick search suggests to me that it's well documented that she canceled some kind of party at the Javits Center on election day rather than days in advance. Do you have anything offhand that speaks to this? Am I perhaps searching for a different party than the one you're describing?

redleggedfrog8• 8 years ago

"where the reporting of the journalists who are experts on the topic can be too highly influenced by the industry they're covering."

Yes, I worry about that, too. I try to balance it out best I can.

"A quick search suggests to me that it's well documented that she canceled some kind of party at the Javits Center on election day rather than days in advance."

Nope, I suspect that's the one. Sorry about the time-frame lapse. Should have Googled it myself.

jmgao• 8 years ago

Some googling seems to indicate that they cancelled a fireworks display: https://nypost.com/2016/11/07/clinton-calls-off-election-nig...

bmmayer1• 8 years ago

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"

faitswulff• 8 years ago

"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."

aj7• 8 years ago

Whataboutism is its cousin.

blululu2• 8 years ago

A little tangential, but is this effect actually documented by Murray Gell-Mann himself? From what I can see I find no evidence to suggest that he actually experienced this effect. If so, it seems like Chriton's anecdote is using some deceitful rhetoric.

gowld4• 8 years ago

What's deceitful? It's named after something Chrichton observed in Gell-Mann.

blululu2• 8 years ago

I can see no source claiming that Gell-Mann ever experienced this effect first hand. In which case Chrichton's may have nothing to do with the physicist and the effect is merely a fabrication of the writer's imagination. In any case, we should really ask 'is science journalism really that bad?'- do experts in the field find it to be incorrect.

JoachimS• 8 years ago

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.

gowld4• 8 years ago

This may be falling victim to another form of flawed thinking: that long-time passing familiarity with an issue is useful expertise. We know how to drive our cars on the roads, but that doesn't mean know how our cars and roads and city-wide traffic management works

mywittyname• 8 years ago

I think anyone whose explained something technical to a layman has appreciates this. Often times, I will give a technically incorrect explanation of something because it delivers the point while avoiding as much complexity as possible. Recently I was explaining the Year 2038 problem to someone and said it was an issue with 32-bit computers because that side-stepped several related topics that are less relevant to the audience.

I'd have gotten a hundred down votes if I explained the issue that way here. But the person I was talking to was satisfied with a shallow explanation and at least understood the problem at a high level.

JackFr• 8 years ago

there clearly are fields of interest, knowledge that are harder than others. Both to understand and to explain to laymen.

See Richard Feynman, "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize."

marcosdumay3• 8 years ago

But, politics, road safety, sports are interests that one quite probably can claim are less hard to grasp.

I don't like to, but I have to add a bit "citation needed" at this point.

jcriddle4• 8 years ago

Trust in media has been dropping: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/226472/sides-aisle-ag...

yellowapple• 8 years ago

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.

russellbeattie• 8 years ago

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.

btilly3• 8 years ago

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...

saagarjha2• 8 years ago

Rockets seem to have all sorts of other toxic materials in them though: hydrazine comes to mind.

smsm424• 8 years ago

I just saw the two first photos and I already feel I'll like this book. Good job for the authors.

lliamander• 8 years ago

"The true optimists are the conspiracy theorists, because they believe the people in charge actually have a plan."

tomatotomato37• 8 years ago

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.

daveguy• 8 years ago

This is a political statement masquerading as a wikipedia article. You should always take a single article with a grain of salt, whether they are talking about palestine, physics or show business. Entertainment reporting, even in a reputable source, generally doesn't have the same rigor applied as stories about war and politics. You didn't just "learn" something by identifying a single poor article you know a lot about. All articles should be read with some skepticism and multiple sources should be used and chosen carefully. Avoid the VOX and FOX sources and you'll probably have a pretty realistic view of world events. Also, know the difference between the opinion section (and prime-time opinion "news" shows) and the news sections (and news shows).

SlowRobotAhead• 8 years ago

Avoid the VOX and FOX sources

That's exactly the problem. Who do you like?

Because I've seen HORRIBLY inaccurate articles on guns done by BBC and NPR who routinely has Michael Bloomberg on as an "expert" in the field when he happens to be the single source of almost all gun control money in the USA right now.

There is no white whale. There are stories that Fox has absolutely gotten right. The are things Vox or Vice get right. CNN this last month refuses to acknowledge they made up a claim from an anonymous source. NYT and WaPo have run articles dangerously close to fake news and retracted them.

If you followed the 2016 election, you should be aware that there is no unbiased news. Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept article which I typically like have some extremely biased articles by the other authors. Mind boggling they're on the same site.

It extends past news as well.

Who seriously thinks it's "right" in terms of bias to have the cast of Avengers in a commercial telling me I need to vote for Clinton? There are the same people that feign protest against things like Citizen's United.

In the Wikileaks Podesta emails it was discovered that The Colbert Report as far back as 2013 was running content designed by Clinton's campaign as an intro to her running. If no one remembers the last six months of Jon Stewart's Daily Show, I'll remind you it was The Trump Show, I am under no illusion that was by someone's design as Viacom who was for Clinton.

I don't think there is a solution to "just don't listen to Vox or Fox".

"Turn on the TV, hear a bunch of what the fucks, dude is dating so and so, blabbering about such and such, and that's not Jersey Shore, homie that's the news. The same people that's supposed to be telling us the truth"

jancsika2• 8 years ago

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.)

jancsika2• 8 years ago

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."

madrox• 8 years ago

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.

sparkzilla• 8 years ago

Who reads an actual newspaper these days?

cambalache• 8 years ago

Yeah, but this happens everywhere, in real life, online communities etc, here in HN.

tekromancr• 8 years ago

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.

sytelus• 8 years ago

I'm surprised no one has coined the full recursive version of the effect :).

tptacek9• 8 years ago

Why are people so sure that this effect is real, and not just a cognitive illusion caused by Sturgeon's Law?

It's really easy to cite counterexamples to it. Even in our field, and in very mainstream press outlets.

smsm424• 8 years ago

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.

tedunangst• 8 years ago

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?

tptacek9• 8 years ago

Wait, it's not my argument that all reporting is correct! It's my argument that 90% of it is crap.

redwards510• 8 years ago

I'm sorry do I have this wrong? You read one story in source X from author A which you determine to be incorrect based on your own personal knowledge. Now we should assume everything published from source X is wrong because author A was incorrect? Is that what this is trying to say?

Journalists get things wrong. Doesn't mean I am going to completely ignore the nytimes from then on.

Or am I just a sucker now, according to Michael Chriton.

marcosdumay3• 8 years ago

You know deeply about subjects X, Y and Z. There's an information source where every time you read about X, Y or Z, the article is wrong. You know that because you know X, Y and Z.

There are also subjects A, B and C. You know next to nothing about them. When you read something about them on that same source, you can't know if it is correct. So why would you even expect it not to be wrong too?

jonstewart• 8 years ago

The Crichton amnesia effect is when you forget how susceptible Michael Crichton was to embarrassing prejudices himself. Rising Sun and Disclosure... are... just... yeesh.

karmakaze• 8 years ago

I can't help but feel the effect at work in the comments. "Oh it can't all be like that." Either that or HNers just like to be contrarian.

SZJX• 8 years ago

That's why any sensible person would know not to trust the mass media at all or at least view every coverage with a load of skepticism. It's obvious from how the way they cover tech and programming is full of misunderstandings and forced narratives. Easy to imagine how things can be similar for other fields as well.

Gell-Mann amnesia effect

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