Somebody speaks, writes or otherwise presents information about a wide variety of topics. Could be a journalist (or a whole outlet) or a teacher or a YouTuber or anybody really. And they’ve got good presentation and confidence and really seem to know their shit, and you think “damn this is a great source of info!” And then one day they start talking about a topic that you yourself actually know a lot about, and they get a lot of it wrong. And then you have to start questioning how full of shit they were about all the other stuff, but you just didn’t know any better?
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect deals with a similar phenomenon:
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.
A mini epistemological crisis?
It definitely is that, haha. I was just wondering if there was a catchy name for it like Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon or Dunning-Krueger or whatever. I just asked one of my friends and he was like “oh that happened to me with Malcolm Gladwell”. I feel like it’s common enough that it should have a name lol.
idk but that’s how I figured out TYT was shit.
