Gell-Mann Amnesia (#124)

Do you sometimes read newspapers? Then you know this phenomenon for sure.

Imagine you're an expert in a field, let's say, Swedish politics. You open the newspaper, turn to international affairs, and you read the article about the Swedish elections. And then you realize, they got it all really wrong. Facts are misinterpreted, wrong conclusions are drawn, you're getting annoyed with the low-quality journalism. So you turn the page and ...

... swoosh ...

you forgot all about it. You read another article about a topic you're not an expert in, and suddenly you believe everything it says. As if the quality magically increased when turning the page.

That's when you suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia, named after nobel prize laureate and physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

And for your daily anti-amnesia fix, here's a backlink to the somehow related Sinatra inference from fact #89, remember?