El-More hyperacuity

We notice that journalists aren't experts when we are experts in that field. But the narcissism of small differences can also make us overestimate the incorrectness of reporting about our field.

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. 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.

― Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park), coining the term “Gell-Mann Amnesia”

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I’ve experienced Gell-Mann amnesia many times myself, and it can be startling to realize how coarsely journalists understand the topics they are reporting on. It is correct to update that they are probably missing as many details in other domains as they are in the domains you know well.

But it’s really not fair to assume that your reactions and communication style are “correct” just because you’re the subject matter expert in this field. An educated reader can have an excessive allergic reaction to popularized or accessible writing because they are applying standards from a very different context. Experts have weird hangups and blindspots. They want far more precision than may be good or necessary for teaching a lay audience the basic ideas (the journalist is the expert here on mass communications). They can have trouble speaking flexibly without jargon and insist on distinctions without a material difference at the level being discussed. They are the people most deeply mired in the stupid, ego-driven politics of their field and they listen out for those shibboleths. Frankly, self-identified experts have the most invested in gatekeeping their topic—kind of sus!

In short, it’s possible for expertise to bias a reader to be unfairly nitpicky toward a news article just as ignorance can bias a reader to attribute expertise to the writer.

I was looking for a term to describe the on-topic hyper-reactive flip side of the off-topic Gell-Mann amnesia when I had this exchange with Delen Heisman on twitter.

And so I’m calling it El-More hyperacuity! Keep an eye out for it.

(standard disclaimer, post-publication editing)