Don’t Believe What You Read?

No matter how you feel about how the recent election turned out, I hope that you will remember that epistemic spillovers are a thing and try to remain objective about non-political decisions no matter who your decision involves. One person who will is Matthew, who responded that he loved learning about the idea, and also that it was an interesting complement to the idea of Gell-Mann Amnesia. Well, I didn’t know what that was so he pointed me in the right direction:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well…You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues…You read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then 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. 

This hit close to home because I was immediately reminded of the long form analysis (and accompanying discussion) a guy did on Brent and Permanent Equity a year or so ago. When that came out, we couldn’t believe that (1) the guy didn’t talk to us and (2) how much in the piece wasn’t quite right. It was a great example of a “searing experience” with a media article where we had “meaningful personal knowledge” that was wrong.

Now, I don’t think there was any malintent here or anything like that. Rather that, when one doesn’t have deep expertise or personal experience in a subject, it's difficult to accurately report on details and the nuance. But if that’s true, why should we believe much of anything that we read (shoutout fake news!)?

A good answer to that is because we have to. We’re mostly hardwired to take things at face value and accept shortcuts because the world is a vast place, but learning as much as you can about it is worthwhile, so doing otherwise would be incredibly inefficient. Further, most things that are wrong (like facts about Permanent Equity) are either correctable or inconsequential, so it’s more efficient to let them slide until one needs to do otherwise.

Yet you can see the inherent danger of so much misinformation in the world when it comes to items that are not correctable and/or consequential. In these instances, accuracy and deep expertise matter, so we should take the time to understand them and get them right even if that’s inefficient. Further, there can be thin margins between being a mark, naive, a thoughtful inquisitor, a skeptic, a conspiracy theorist, and a quack, so stay self aware.

Also there’s the pickle of consequences and permanence being hard to predict ahead of time, so good luck with that part too.

Tim


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