[xmprt]

Your comment illustrates the point even more in my opinion. You understand more about physics than politics, sports, and business, and so you're able to see how journalists can get it wrong. However, if you actually dived into the world of sports and similar fields about "human actors" there's a lot of interpersonal relations and complexity that can't be described in a 500 word article. If journalists were just reporting about the "what" then physics would be just like reporting sports scores if you just copy the result. When you try to explain the "how" and "why" then all the complexity that you described about physics applies to sports.

[majos]

Maybe my original point was vague: I'm arguing that the "what" is simpler when human actors are involved. Person x said this, did this, accomplished that. The story is for the most part straightforward and understandable. And a lot of the reporting in these areas is just "what".

But people don't even have a good handle on the "what" of a lot of science (what are these new particles? what is p vs np?) which is why we get all these analogical half understandings.

[wcunning]

I think the bigger question in a lot of human centric things is the "why" -- why did that head of state say that thing? Why does this company avoid that regulation? Why do people complain when this tax credit goes away? It's not reasonable to stop with the "what" in many situations. Or alternatively, the comparison to physics should be an article saying that the what is the spin of a single electron in an experiment, even though the experiment is about gravity -- missing the point entirely.

And backtracking slightly to my grandparent comment, Gell-Mann was coined by Michael Creighton who in the same quote compared Murray Gell-Mann's knowledge of physics to Creighton's knowledge of show business. The "what you know well enough to spot errors" can be anything as can the "what you blindly trust the reporter on out of your own ignorance."

[Erlich_Bachman]

> I'm arguing that the "what" is simpler when human actors are involved.

Where would you get that idea? It is definitely the other way around.

In hard sciences at least you can easily construct experiments and find out truths with time, which while complex, are basically predictable. In human sciences everything is much more complex and chaotic effects and problems with definitions and inherent unpredictability of humans make everything more complicated.