But then with the next breath, they’d report that these companies were obviously motivated by racism or sexism or something – even though the first bit of knowledge – they they were in it for the money – was an obvious and sufficient explanation.(4) Here, the reporters noted correctly that the insurance companies wanted to make money – in the shorthand of politics, that they were greedy. In an odd way, this story illustrates the point I want to make about how the Gell-Mann Effect is a special case of a more general characteristic of us humans: that when we learn something, we often fail nonetheless to make the obvious application of that knowledge to the next obvious case.
#GELL MANN AMNESIA HOW TO#
Not racism, not fear of poor neighborhoods, not hatred of teenage males, not dislike of cheap performance cars – but the simple fact that nobody had yet figured out how to sell insurance to certain demographics and make any money out of it.(2) Because, in the end, in the real world, businesses need to make money or they and the services they provide cease to exist. The only thing the press coverage of Prop 103 ever got right – you’ll be shocked – was that the insurance companies were in to make money.(1) They never made the connection between not offering insurance or having unaffordable rates and not making money, though – that insurance companies, *because* they want to make money, would not red-line or price themselves out of a market *unless* they could not make money at it. What was amazing to me – hey, I’m congenitally naive – was how the concerns and goals of the insurance companies were consistently misrepresented. At the time, I worked in insurance, and had first-hand access to the people and information on the ‘no’ side. I first became painfully aware of this when Proposition 1o3 was on the ballot in California back in 1988. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
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. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.Michael Crichton came up with the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, and explains it thus:īriefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions ( color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. You may wish to ask factual questions about Michael Crichton at the Reference desk. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. This page is not a forum for general discussion about Michael Crichton. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history for its talk page, see here. The original page is now a redirect to this page. Its contents were merged into Michael Crichton. The discussion was closed on 15 August 2019 with a consensus to merge. Gell-Mann amnesia effect was nominated for deletion. This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale. College Basketball Wikipedia:WikiProject College Basketball Template:WikiProject College Basketball college basketball articles If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks. This article is within the scope of WikiProject College Basketball, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of College Basketball on Wikipedia. This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.
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