The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.
Also common in news. There’s an old saying along the lines of “everyone trusts the news until they talk about your job.” Basically, the news is focused on getting info out quickly. Every station is rushing to be the first to break a story. So the people writing the teleprompter usually only have a few minutes (at best) to research anything before it goes live in front of the anchor. This means that you’re only ever going to get the most surface level info, even when the talking heads claim to be doing deep dives on a topic. It also means they’re going to be misleading or blatantly wrong a lot of the time, because they’re basically just parroting the top google result regardless of accuracy.
One of my academic areas of expertise way back in the day (late '80s and early '90s) were the so-called “Mitochondrial Eve” and “Out of Africa” hypotheses. The absolute mangling of this shit by journalists even at the time was migraine-inducing and it’s gotten much worse in the decades since then. It hasn’t helped that subsequent generations of scholars have mangled the whole deal even worse. The only advice I can offer people is that if the article (scholastic or popular) contains the word “Neanderthal” anywhere, just toss it.
Are you saying neanderthal didn’t exist, or was just homo sapiens? Or did you mean in the context of mitochondrial Eve?
All of these things, actually. The measured, physiological differences between “homo sapiens” and “neanderthal” (the air quotes here meaning “so-called”) fossils are much smaller than the differences found among contemporary humans, so the premise that “neanderthals” represent(ed) a separate species - in the sense of a reproductively isolated gene pool since gone extinct - is unsupported by fossil evidence. Of course nobody actually makes that claim anymore, since it’s now commonly reported that contemporary humans possess x% of neanderthal DNA (and thus cannot be said to be “extinct”). Of course nobody originally (when Mitochondrial Eve was first mooted) made any claims whatsoever about neanderthals: the term “neanderthal” was imported into the debate over the age and location of the last common mtDNA ancestor years later, after it was noticed that the age estimates of neanderthal remains happened to roughly match the age estimates of the genetic last common ancestor. And this was also after the term “neanderthal” had previously gone into the same general category in Anthropology as “Piltdown Man”.
Most ironically, articles on the subject today now claim a correspondence between the fossil and genetic evidence, despite the fact that the very first articles (out of Allan Wilson’s lab and published in Nature and Science in the mid-1980s) drew their entire impact and notoriety from the fact that the genetic evidence (which supposedly gave 100,000 years ago and then 200,000 years ago as the age of the last common ancestor) completely contradicted the fossil evidence (which shows upright bipedal hominids spreading out of Africa more than a million and half years ago). To me, the weirdest thing is that academic articles on the subject now almost never cite these two seminal articles at all, and most authors seem genuinely unaware of them.
There’s an old saying along the lines of “everyone trusts the news until they talk about your job.”
This is something of a selection bias. Generally speaking, if you don’t trust a news broadcast then you won’t watch it. So of course you’re going to be predisposed to trust the news sources you do listen to. Until the news source bumps up against some of your prior info/intuition, at which point you start experiencing skepticism.
This means that you’re only ever going to get the most surface level info, even when the talking heads claim to be doing deep dives on a topic.
Investigative journalism has historically been a big part of the industry. You do get a few punchy “If it bleeds, it leads” hit pieces up front, but the Main Story tends to be the result of some more extensive investigation and coverage. I remember my home town of Houston had Marvin Zindler, a legendary beat reporter who would regularly put out interconnected 10-15 minute segments that offered continuous coverage on local events. This was after a stint at a municipal Consumer Fraud Prevention division that turned up numerous health code violations and sales frauds (he was allegedly let go by an incoming sheriff with ties to the local used car lobby, after Zindler exposed one too many odometer scams).
But investigative journalism costs money. And its not “business friendly” from a conservative corporate perspective, which can cut into advertising revenues. So it is often the first line of business to be cut when a local print or broadcast outlet gets bought up and turned over for syndication.
That doesn’t detract from a general popular appetite for investigative journalism. But it does set up an adversarial economic relationship between journals that do carry investigative reports and those more focused on juicing revenues.
I love that this mirrors the experience of experts on social media like reddit, which was used for training chatgpt…
it’s much older than reddit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
i was going to post this, too.
SmokeyDope’s Law
Also common in news. There’s an old saying along the lines of “everyone trusts the news until they talk about your job.” Basically, the news is focused on getting info out quickly. Every station is rushing to be the first to break a story. So the people writing the teleprompter usually only have a few minutes (at best) to research anything before it goes live in front of the anchor. This means that you’re only ever going to get the most surface level info, even when the talking heads claim to be doing deep dives on a topic. It also means they’re going to be misleading or blatantly wrong a lot of the time, because they’re basically just parroting the top google result regardless of accuracy.
One of my academic areas of expertise way back in the day (late '80s and early '90s) were the so-called “Mitochondrial Eve” and “Out of Africa” hypotheses. The absolute mangling of this shit by journalists even at the time was migraine-inducing and it’s gotten much worse in the decades since then. It hasn’t helped that subsequent generations of scholars have mangled the whole deal even worse. The only advice I can offer people is that if the article (scholastic or popular) contains the word “Neanderthal” anywhere, just toss it.
Science journalism in a nutshell.
Credit to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
I’m curious. Are you saying neanderthal didn’t exist, or was just homo sapiens? Or did you mean in the context of mitochondrial Eve?
SientistsScientists confirm it: we are living in a simulation!You fucking know it man. Deep in your heart you know it. The thing is, it doesn’t matter.
All of these things, actually. The measured, physiological differences between “homo sapiens” and “neanderthal” (the air quotes here meaning “so-called”) fossils are much smaller than the differences found among contemporary humans, so the premise that “neanderthals” represent(ed) a separate species - in the sense of a reproductively isolated gene pool since gone extinct - is unsupported by fossil evidence. Of course nobody actually makes that claim anymore, since it’s now commonly reported that contemporary humans possess x% of neanderthal DNA (and thus cannot be said to be “extinct”). Of course nobody originally (when Mitochondrial Eve was first mooted) made any claims whatsoever about neanderthals: the term “neanderthal” was imported into the debate over the age and location of the last common mtDNA ancestor years later, after it was noticed that the age estimates of neanderthal remains happened to roughly match the age estimates of the genetic last common ancestor. And this was also after the term “neanderthal” had previously gone into the same general category in Anthropology as “Piltdown Man”.
Most ironically, articles on the subject today now claim a correspondence between the fossil and genetic evidence, despite the fact that the very first articles (out of Allan Wilson’s lab and published in Nature and Science in the mid-1980s) drew their entire impact and notoriety from the fact that the genetic evidence (which supposedly gave 100,000 years ago and then 200,000 years ago as the age of the last common ancestor) completely contradicted the fossil evidence (which shows upright bipedal hominids spreading out of Africa more than a million and half years ago). To me, the weirdest thing is that academic articles on the subject now almost never cite these two seminal articles at all, and most authors seem genuinely unaware of them.
This is something of a selection bias. Generally speaking, if you don’t trust a news broadcast then you won’t watch it. So of course you’re going to be predisposed to trust the news sources you do listen to. Until the news source bumps up against some of your prior info/intuition, at which point you start experiencing skepticism.
Investigative journalism has historically been a big part of the industry. You do get a few punchy “If it bleeds, it leads” hit pieces up front, but the Main Story tends to be the result of some more extensive investigation and coverage. I remember my home town of Houston had Marvin Zindler, a legendary beat reporter who would regularly put out interconnected 10-15 minute segments that offered continuous coverage on local events. This was after a stint at a municipal Consumer Fraud Prevention division that turned up numerous health code violations and sales frauds (he was allegedly let go by an incoming sheriff with ties to the local used car lobby, after Zindler exposed one too many odometer scams).
But investigative journalism costs money. And its not “business friendly” from a conservative corporate perspective, which can cut into advertising revenues. So it is often the first line of business to be cut when a local print or broadcast outlet gets bought up and turned over for syndication.
That doesn’t detract from a general popular appetite for investigative journalism. But it does set up an adversarial economic relationship between journals that do carry investigative reports and those more focused on juicing revenues.