etc.’ - will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go. All the stale old phrases - ‘a book that no one should miss’, ‘something memorable on every page’, ‘of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc. Three of these books deal with subjects of which is so ignorant that he will have to read at least fifty pages if he is to avoid making some howler which will betray him not merely to the author (who of course knows all about the habits of book reviewers), but even to the general reader.Then suddenly he will snap into it. Why does this happen? For some possible insight, see this quote from George Orwell's article, " Confessions of a Book Reviewer": The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.īut when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. You turn the page, and forget what you know. 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 with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward––reversing cause and effect. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. The term was coined by Michael Crighton in his 2005 essay " Why Speculate? " From the essay:īriefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. If you have, then you've experienced the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. And did you then turn to another section and read about something you don't know well, such as foreign policy or the economy or domestic politics, and take that story more or less at face value? ![]() He was less good at finding new physical theories and getting them right, whereas I seem to have had a talent for finding out what was going on and guessing the right theory.Have you ever read an article about a topic you know well, and found that the writer got everything wrong? Not just little things, but basic things, like the decade that Kate Bush released her first album, or the sport that Joe Montana played professionally. His great talent was for finding marvelously clever mathematical tricks for expressing theories in physics and then solving problems using those tricks, which always involved a great deal of physical insight. “Dick (Feynman) and I had different talents. From the former, an interesting and somewhat provocative quote: There’s an illuminating talk by Gell-Mann on Edge (The Making of a Physicist) and a very well-wriitten biography if you’d like more details. I’ve written quite a few posts on Feynman (two of the most popular are here and here). ![]() He and the more well-known Richard Feynman were famous collaborators and later ‘rivals’. He was based at the California Institute of Technology and later went on to co-found the famous Sante Fe Institute (for the study of complex systems). You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (author and filmmaker, 1942-2008)Īs an aside, Murray Gell-Mann was an influential theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for his work on fundamental particles. 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. ![]() Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. ![]() “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows.
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