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Speaking of a famous Australian scientist we both happened to be acquainted with, someone once said to me: “At first, he talked about stuff I didn’t know about, and I thought he sounded really impressive. Then he talked about stuff I did know about – and I realised that he was just full of shit”.
This is an important point, which applies not just to celebrity scientists, but to every “expert” touted by the media – not to mention the media themselves.
No one can possibly be an expert on everything, but most of us know quite a lot about at least one thing. If you catch someone out telling obvious lies about something you know a lot about, why should you believe what they say about anything? Especially about all the things you don’t know about?
Yet we persist in believing people we already know are liars. This is what is known as “Gell-Mann Amnesia”.
Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist, one of the great minds of the 20th century. Michael Crichton defined Gell-Mann Amnesia as follows:
You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Another acquaintance once told me how he was astonished to read an account in the press of a minor incident he had been involved in. Nearly everything in the press was flat-out wrong. Flabbergasted, he contacted the media outlet to try to correct the story. He was told, in short, to get lost.
If you or your company has EVER been the primary subject of a newspaper article, you know exactly what Crichton is talking about. The article is simply wrong. Not just wrong in minor detail, but wrong in motivation, cause, implication, fundamental facts … everything. You read it and you think, “how can I get this travesty of an article edited/retracted/rewritten? how is it possible that the writer got this situation so wrong?”
And yet, despite having this searing experience with media articles where we actually have meaningful personal knowledge, we believe without hesitation the next story we read where we don’t!
As a trainee journalist, one of the first principles we are inculcated with is: never report opinion as news. Yet somehow, that has all gone out the window.
It’s not that there is no place for opinion in the media: clearly there is. In fact, it’s what you’re reading now.
But opinion is not news. News is “Just the facts”, as Joe Friday would say. Journalism students are taught about what Kipling called his “six honest serving men: What and Why and When And How and Where and Who”. Unfortunately, most of them seem to have got stuck at the Why – and confused their own opinion for facts.
As politics gets more and more hyper-polarised, the confusion of fact and opinion gets ever more inseparable and hysterical.
This is why it’s so important to consume EVERYTHING with a critical eye. Because we are being played, constantly and by everyone. Even in our entertainment. ESPECIALLY in our entertainment. It sneaks up on us without our conscious awareness, because its purpose is to sneak up on us without our conscious awareness.
And what’s the dominant entertainment in the world today? It’s not Hollywood any longer. It’s not movies. It’s social media.
Epsilon Theory
“Question everything” might seem like a recipe for solipsistic paranoia, but, in fact, it’s the mission statement of critical thinking. Too many of us have forgotten it. Especially when what we want to believe is more comforting than harsh facts.
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