![]() ![]() This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale. This article has been rated as B-Class on the project's quality scale. Chicago Wikipedia:WikiProject Chicago Template:WikiProject Chicago Chicago articles The natural follow-up question for one who discovers the truth of the original Gell-Mann Amnesia effect would probably be, “why then bother even reading newspapers?”.This article is within the scope of WikiProject Chicago, which aims to improve all articles or pages related to Chicago or the Chicago metropolitan area. Its a kind of expert-to-expert as opposed to expert-to-journalist/communicator extension. The proposed extension of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is that an expert who is appropriately cynical and jaded about the literature within their own field of work takes for granted the authority and accuracy of the end products of the same corrupted and broken processes when they occur in another field. The orginial Gell-Mann Amnesia effect described the situation where an expert correctly dismisses the silly versions of the story related to their field of expertise that journalists concoct, but then buys hook, line, and sinker the journalists’ accounts of events in areas outside of their expertise. You go straight to the source, you read the actual paper on PubMed!Īnd while you read it, you forget every cynical instinct you learned going through the process yourself! You assume they trials were run correctly, that the data was curated appropriately (not massagued!), that the review process was competent, that what is described in the paper is basically what did in fact occur in the experiment… everything that you know to rarely be true of papers in your own field is assumed to 100% the case for this paper in another field… Hell, you’re aware of the concept of Gell-Mann Amnesia. You know not to take the journalists’ word for what it says. ![]() In fact, you correctly come to believe that many of the experts in your field are in fact probably frauds and certainly doofuses.īut you’re scrupulous, when a new study hits the wire and lights up facebook. ![]() You read the papers that touch on your field yourself and find that a significant portion of them are utter garbage and often even the simple data presented is incoherent. A good degree of cynicism is built up, and especially when it comes to papers within your own area of expertise, peer-review doesn’t count for much of anything at all to you. When examining ones own experience in the process, one doesn’t come away thinking that “peer-review” is very useful or effective in accomplishing its purported task. Then getting a paper from your advisor to review for a low-tier journal that seems to barely be written in English, doing a half-hearted job, finding some errors and inconsistencies, recommending rejection, being told by the editor “thanks for your notes” but they are publishing it anyway… Now, their personal experience with the process of “peer-review” probably involves a Kafka-esque train of running a study, collecting data, “curating” the data, performing secondary analysis, submitting to a journal, getting a rejection, revising, submitting again, encountering reviews which seem to barely be in English, getting rejected again, submitting to a conference, resubmitting to a lower quality journal (citing the conference paper now), getting reviews which don’t say anything at all, and finally publishing. Though, I think it requires an extension which might discomfort the very same “experts” who would be the type to have such a amnesiac experience.Ĭonsider an academic who works in the experimental sciences, particularly the kind of trials which occur in medicine. My discovery of the above described phenomena of “Gell-Mann Amnesia” has been a bright spot on my intellectual journey these last two or so years. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” 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. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows.
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