Gell-Mann Amnesia

Michael Crichton described this phenomenon, naming it after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. You read a newspaper article about your field — the part you know deeply — and notice it’s riddled with errors. Misunderstood concepts, garbled quotes, false implications. You shake your head at how the reporter got everything wrong. Then you turn the page and read about Palestine, or the economy, or medicine, and suddenly treat the same newspaper as a reliable source of information.

This is Gell-Mann amnesia: the tendency to forget, on every topic we don’t personally know, that media is as unreliable there as it is on topics we do know. The errors we see in our domain don’t generalize to skepticism about other domains. We keep trusting the same source that just proved untrustworthy.

The mechanism is partly psychological — expertise in one area doesn’t transfer to skepticism in others. We lack the knowledge to detect errors elsewhere, so we can’t see them. Absence of visible errors feels like absence of errors, even after we’ve learned the source is error-prone.

It’s also structural. Every newspaper story is about someone’s specialty. Every reader experiences the story about their field as botched. But no reader sees all the botched stories — only the one in their domain. The rest look authoritative. We’re each holding a different piece of evidence that points to the same conclusion, but we never aggregate.

The implication extends beyond newspapers. Every source of secondhand information — textbooks, podcasts, experts on TV — is vulnerable to the same gap. The parts you can verify are often wrong; the parts you can’t verify are probably not better. You just don’t have the tools to see.

This doesn’t justify total skepticism — you can’t verify everything personally. But it suggests adjusting confidence downward, especially for claims that seem precise and authoritative about domains you can’t evaluate. The polished surface often hides the same confusion you found when you looked closely.