Gell-Mann Amnesia
October 10, 2018·5 comments·Politics
You've been wrong about how you trust information. When you read an article about something you know intimately, you spot the errors immediately. The facts are backward. The motivations are inverted. The implications are backwards. Then you turn the page and read the next story as if it's reliable. You forget what you just learned.
• The credibility gap is one-directional. Everyone with expertise in their field has had the experience of seeing their domain covered catastrophically wrong by journalists. Yet almost no one carries this realization forward to articles about unfamiliar topics.
• We're wired to believe confident assertion. The presentation itself, when delivered by someone positioned as authoritative, becomes the fact. This is how narrative functions in the information ecosystem, regardless of what's actually true.
• Entertainment is not separate from this dynamic. The cultural products we consume construct reality at the same time they reflect it. The mechanisms that shape news also shape how we see ourselves through stories and film.
• Everyone playing the game knows the game is rigged. Institutions, journalists, filmmakers, commentators. Those with power to shape narrative are actively constructing it. Those without the power are being constructed by it.
• The question becomes whether we can recognize we're being played while we're still being played. Skepticism itself becomes exhausting and difficult once you see the mechanism. What does it mean to consume information critically in a system built specifically to bypass critical thinking?
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Comments
When I read stuff in the papers on a topic I know a lot about, and it’s wrong, I have to wonder how much of what they write about stuff I don’t know much about is also wrong.
When I worked at Time Inc. many years ago, one of the ways newbies were introduced to the business by old hands was with the caveat that Time was a great magazine until it wrote about something you knew a lot about. Briton Hadden and Henry Luce were arguably the greatest Missionaries of the twentieth century.
Understand the need to be skeptical, guess I struggle where skepticism becomes paranoia? I find it exhausting sometimes to go through life trying to calculate all the angles and hidden agendas. No point in being naive though.
“…and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate…”
This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s conclusion of ‘default to truth’ from his recent book “Taking To Strangers.” I finished it today. It deserves another read, or at least additional consideration and reference in my life. As always, I find Gladwell’s writing, analysis and conclusions inspiring.
Same with the Epsilon team.
That’s exactly what I thought when reading the note. I think the example of Harry marcopoulos (sp} in Gladwell’s book is really instructive. He was ultra skeptical about everything. which helped him uncover the Madoff fraud before anyone else. years before anyone else. at the same time it kind of crippled him professionally and personally because he never defaulted to truth.
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