Gell-Mann Amnesia

I've been thinking about Gell-Mann Amnesia a lot recently. It doesn't really have any legitimacy as a psychological idea - in fact, as far as I can tell, it is little more than an offhand anecdote made by Michael Crichton - but it's interesting nonetheless.

The concept intuitively makes sense. Not that I am really an expert in anything, but I have seen my fair share of claims-as-facts in media that I think are dubious, if not pure bollocks. Sure, maybe I am wrong in all these instances, and the writer of said comment was correct - but it usually does little to shake my faith in the rest of the information in the publication as a whole.

There are many nuances to be considered. For example, if you read something on my blog that you felt was clearly erroneous, it might greatly shake your trust in my blog as a source, to the extent that you might stop believing what I wrote altogether. Conversely, if you read an article in the New York Times that you felt similarly about, it might have a smaller affect on your feelings towards the Times as a whole. I suspect many readers of news outlets of that ilk ignore the actual author of the piece, although in the context of Gell-Mann Amnesia, it seems very important to pay attention to who that is. Which I suppose raises some questions about the differences between the group of individuals that compromise a journalistic endeavour, and the endeavour itself.

We could examine the phenomenon on a very broad scale too. I have read an inordinate number of factually inaccurate tweets - should I no longer give any credence to anything I read on Twitter? Admittedly, in that example, probably not. What about the internet as a whole? There are petabytes of blatant misinformation waiting to be consumed by unsuspecting webizens, can we believe any of it any more?

Well, that is the million dollar question. What do you think?