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by nuclearnice3
1199 days ago
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Before the had the internet, back when we still had newspapers, we had a similar phenomenon referred to as Gell-Mann Amnesia. > 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’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. > 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. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ |
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I would argue that national politics and international affairs as they are covered in mass news media is a different type of coverage. It’s not about learning technical details and explaining them. It’s more about observing actions and broad sentiment and literally reporting those observations. I wouldn’t trust a reporter to get scientific details correct about some chemical process that’s the subject of some debated EPA regulation, but I could trust a reporter to summarize the debate and report on the sentiment of politicians, public sentiment based on opinion polls, etc. It would be weird to say “that newspaper screwed up the difference between a dominant 7th chord and a major 7th chord in a story about a famous songwriter, therefore I can’t trust them to report which politicians gave the most heated arguments in the debate about the EPA bill.”