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Opinion: You may not know as much as you think

Everybody is an expert in something. A good ditch digger will take only a few seconds to watch someone who has never used a shovel flail around to know that the incompetent has no business trying to create a trench. Any welder or farrier can do the same, and so can any truly practiced professional of any skill set, including the academic and scientific skills.

Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. Author John Horgan, staff writer for Scientific American, in his book, “The End of Science,” notes that Gell-Mann thought all science writers were “ignoramuses” who always got things wrong and had no business writing about science. In Gell-Mann’s opinion, think of Gell-Mann as the ditch digger and Horgan as the person who could not pick out which end of the shovel is the handle.

Ben Rhodes was President Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor. Rhodes at one time bragged to the New York Times how easy it was for the administration to dupe reporters when shaping a news story to their liking. Rhodes told the Times, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

I recently read an article in my local paper about a major problem that was impacting operations at a large military base. The article was several thousand words long and discussed the reporter’s difficulty in obtaining interviews with senior members of the military. The reporter had finally arranged such a discussion and was touting the fact that this would be the first interview conducted with “the Brass” on the post. What followed was a rather lengthy conversation with the unit command sergeant major. Whatever lofty pinnacle a command sergeant major inhabits, he most assuredly is not a member of “the Brass.”

Which brings us to the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.”

The Amnesia Effect was named after Murray Gell-Mann, and the phrase was coined by “Jurassic Park” author Michael Crichton.

Crichton describes the act of feeling skeptical as you read a newspaper article about an area in which you have expertise and then completely forget that skepticism as you read the next article, that you know less about. The point being that some different expert feels the same way about the new article, while they feel no skepticism about the article that worried you.

“This article about the military is baloney, but this article about space travelers building the pyramids is spot on.” If they could get one article so wrong for one, why don’t we assume they could get it so wrong for all?

Rube Render is a former Clovis city commissioner and former chair of the Curry County Republican Party. Contact him:

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