Why didn’t I know this term before? It’s useful.
The phenomenon of people believing newspapers on topics which they are not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they are knowledgeable about.
It’s also amusing, because the term was coined by Michael Crichton, who is a prime example of a beneficiary of the Gell-Mann effect — people think he’s credible on the things he wrote about, which he wasn’t.
This video creator also discusses what she calls Mann-Gell Amnesia, where a genuine expert gets all hung up on an irrelevant error in minor simplifications, not recognizing that science communication often involves making simplifications that need to be later corrected, as people get deeper into a topic.
It’s a long video, but hang in there for her explanation of why Michio Kaku is dead to her.
The irony of it is, Michael Crichton coined the term Mann-Gell Amnesia, while simultaneously making a fine case for it being a real phenomenon himself via his own works, words and deeds.
Interesting topic. Is there a shorter treatment of it somewhere? A 50 minute video is too much for me.
John D. Cook relays:
That sounds like something Crichton would do.
I got to 18 minutes. Too annoyingly rambling. She could probably have cut the whole thing down to 10 minutes.
The part that I would highlight from the video is 32:40, where she talks about the challenges of communicating to a large audience. At some point, you start catering to the tiny sliver of experts in your audience who will correct minor details that don’t matter.
I have mixed feelings about that. Unlike the examples she talks about, I don’t feel like the experts in my audience are being pedants or jerks. They’re just being experts, and they are good at spotting errors. But I can’t be so afraid of making mistakes that I never write anything at all–that’s letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. The way I see it, it’s okay to make some mistakes on a blog of little consequence. If you’re on television though, maybe do more vetting.
In my long-ago professional life I had a hungarian college living down the hall. He was one of the few who used an Apple-thingy. The uh-oh error messages were all over the place. His name was (is?) Gábor. His surname Ellman. I liked him (and his Flaming June on the wall) very much.
gellman@crompany or so.
I tought this was about him.
colleagle dammit
It’s really too bad that Gell-Mann will be far better known for this than for his work in particle physics.
@8: Not sure about that. He is credited with naming the quark.,
I watch a lot of science-related videos on YouTube, but I’ve long avoid anything with Kaku in it. The last time I watched anything involving Kaku was a discussion between him, Roger Penrose and Sabine Hossenfelder about multiverse theories, and he was just painful to listen to, wrapping everything up in his pseudo-folksy style that turns everything into word salad. It’s like he keeps trying to be Carl Sagan and failing miserably every time.
And yeah, there’s nothing worse than reading a well written science news article and then seeing it being trashed by some know-it-all in the comments because the author had omitted what they believed to be a crucial piece of information when in reality it didn’t matter at all because of the introductory nature of the piece.
They don’t seem to realize that they can still be a know-it-all (without getting personal and trashing the journalist) simply by expanding on the article in their comment for anyone who is interested in a deeper dive.
Oh, and there’s also those commenters who complain that the writer didn’t use a specified word or term correctly, and insist that their own definition is the only correct one, even though everyone else uses it differently. “Universe” is a common one in articles that discuss some form of hypothesized “multiverse.” I’ve lost count on the number of people who complain that the term “universe,” by its very definition, incorporates everything that exists, so if there is a multiverse, the that’s the universe, regardless of the fact that that’s not the way anyone else uses the term these days.
Technically, they are correct, but they are forgetting that languages are always evolving and definitions change all the time, including the definition of universe, so spending all your time on pointless arguments about outdated definitions is the most futile of endeavors which serves only to raise everyone’s hackles.
Thank you for introducing me to another fantastic science communicator. She’s got a lovely style.
Taking down both Stephen Pinker and Kaku, nice. I just subscribed. BTW, I already disliked Pinker, but I didn’t know enough about Kaku, other than he was on TV a lot.
That is indeed ironic, as it was specifically with regard to Chrichton’s novel Jurassic Park that I first noticed this phenomenon in myself, and learned to inoculate against it. “That chaos theory stuff was superficial nonsense,” I thought to myself after finishing the book, “but some of that biochemistry stuff sounded really interesting!” And then, “Hold up. I actually know a lot about chaos theory; what is the likelihood that if I knew just as much about biochemistry, that I would have a very different opinion about Chrichton’s grasp of the subject?” So I looked into it some more, and found out that sure enough, the biochemistry in JP is just as bad as the mathematical physics. Very useful life lesson.
I just watched another video by her, and it’s about spiders! No, sorry, no, it’s actually about the disgraced Jonathan Pruitt. I just thought I’d point out that one to you PZ.
Scott Simmons@13–
I don’t recall there being much wrong with the biochem in Jurassic Park — it’s pretty superficial, mostly talking about essential amino acids as a tool to prevent the dinosaurs surviving if they escape. Crichton would have done a bit of biochem as an undergrad. Maybe you’re including the genetic engineering under biochem, in which case I agree it’s full of silly flaws. Possibly my favourite being the idea that the genes they couldn’t recover being patched with amphibian and reptile genes, which is why some of the dinosaurs were unexpectedly venomous. But how did the scientists know which genes were missing and what to replace them with? And what was with splicing random genes from the wrong clades? It’s like ‘reconstructing’ the lost verses of Sappho by pasting in random lines of Old Kingdom hieroglyphics and Oracle Bone Chinese.
As for the chaos theory, it sure was superficial nonsense. Crichton seems to have genuinely believed that chaos theory is nothing more than a mathematical validation of Murphy’s Law. I doubt he’d even read any SciAm or New Scientist articles on it, because what he wrote had zero bearing on the actual theory.
I forget who said it (not Crichton) but I’ve always liked it – every media report, on a topic or event you have knowledge of, will get it wrong.
I have had similar conversations about William Lane Craig. I recall telling someone: his use of math and science to support his apologetics is only impressive to you because you don’t know a lot about math and science.
My wife does Mann-Gell on me in social situations. I try to dumb down software development explanations in conversation and avoid jargon. My wife interrupts to “correct” me. “Its not 7. Its 6.987354” sort of thing. Its a wee bit aggravating.
Not everyone likes errors in explanations.
For me, simplifications are fine, but errors in the simplifications aren’t.
That is, science communication may often involve making simplifications, but when those simplifications contains errors, then it’s worth pointing them out.
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Michio has been a wooist for pretty much as long as I remember; I put him in the same category as Paul Davies.
Goddists lap up his ejaculations with pleasure:
https://www.christiantoday.com/article/top.scientist.finds.proof.that.god.exists.says.humans.live.in.a.world.made.by.rules.created.by.an.intelligence/87994.htm
John @19:
Same here! My own little bête noire is the ubiquitous “particle-antiparticle pairs popping in and out of the vacuum because the uncertainty principle”. It’s utter nonsense, but lapped up enthusiastically by almost everyone and their dog, including some physicists.
I blame Stephen Hawking, who certainly knew better, but pushed the bullshit anyway.
It seems to me that a simplification necessarily requires approximations and omissions. It depends on whether you count those as errors.
My rule for acceptable simplificaton is: does it leave the reader with a reasonable approximation, or does it lead to significant misunderstanding? (I accept that there is no hard defining line; it’s more of a spectrum.) For instance, I don’t think you can really understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle if you don’t know the equation, but you don’t need to know the equation to recognise when the HUP is being twisted to sell quantum woo.
Having said that, the greatest problem in public understanding of science at the moment is not over-simplified pop-sci pieces, it’s rampant deceit on social media and many news outlets that doesn’t even remotely approximate the truth.
Dr. Collier calls out three ideas, or effects. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is where you read an article that contains BS but you continue reading the magazine or whatever as if the nonsense didn’t invalidate the rest of the publication. The converse is getting hung up on simplifications, which she distinguished from real mistakes requiring corrections, and the inverse, which is where people like Kaku take advantage of the fact that people won’t be able to spot the nonsense.
She’s currently my top favorite science communicator, ever since she did a piece on string theory while playing a video game. Since she’s about the age of my own kids, I have mentally transferred her crazy competence to them all as well.
Why wouldn’t I?
Re 15:
IIRC, that was specifically lysine? In the end, it turns out small carnivorous dinosaurs can acquire dietary lysine in the wild by eating … beans and chicken.
However, my understanding is that “essential” amino acids are actually abundantly present in all kinds of animal foods, meaning that you wouldn’t expect carnivorous animals to be dependent on lysine biosynthesis in any circumstances, and they likely wouldn’t have functional lysine biosynthesis to begin with because they’re evolved to eat a lysine rich diet.
Another biology related thing is the actual cloning of the dinosaurs, which is just handwaved away in the novel. There is a brief mention of inserting dino DNA into crocodile eggs, which are then encased in artificial plastic shells. OTOH, it is also suggested that there are tiny artificial (?) embryos that can be stored in a freezer before, I guess, implanting them into crocodile eggs. All of this is super implausible.
chrislawson @22:
Yet the number of people who sell, and buy, the nonsensical picture described in my #20 is astounding. It’s often accompanied by laughable phrases like “borrowing energy from the vacuum”.
To be clear, it is not an approximation of anything. It’s complete fiction.