Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to describe forgetting how unreliable a source is in one area when you trust it in another area. In Crichton’s words:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]’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.
I think about the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect when I read news stories that totally botch science or statistics. Most of the time when I read a news story that touches on something I happen to know about, it’s at best misleading and at worst just plain wrong.
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/#:~:text=Michael%20Crichton%20coined%20the%20term%20Gell-Mann%20Amnesia%20effect,an%20article%20on%20some%20subject%20you%20know%20well.
Read this, take notes, it will be on the final exam
Liberals are like a "Slinky". Totally useless, but somehow ya can't help but smile when you see one tumble down a flight of stairs!
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