Gell-Mann amnesia and its opposite

Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to describe forgetting how unreliable a source is in one area when you trust it in another area. In Crichton's words:

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 [Gell-Mann]'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. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

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.

I think about the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect when I read news stories that totally botch science or statistics. Most of the time when I read a news story that touches on something I happen to know about, it's at best misleading and at worst just plain wrong.

Yesterday I had the opposite experience. I was trying out a new podcast, not one focused on science or statistics, that was mostly correct when it touched on statistical matters that I've looked into. They didn't bat 1000, but they did better than popular news sites. That increased my estimate of how likely the podcast is to be accurate about other matters.

By the way, why is the effect named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann? Crichton explained

I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.

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