Crichton why speculate

By now, under the Faludi Standard I have firmly established that media are hopelessly riddled with speculation, and we can go on to consider its ramifications. I answer, absolutely not. Such speculation is a complete waste of time. Do we all agree that nobody knows what the future holds? Or do I have to prove it to you? I ask this because there are some well-studied media effects which suggest that simply appearing in media provides credibility. There was a well-known series of excellent studies by Stanford researchers that have shown, for example, that children take media literally.

If you show them a bag of popcorn on a television set and ask them what will happen if you turn the TV upside down, the children say the popcorn will fall out of the bag.

This result would be amusing if it were confined to children. But the studies show that no one is exempt. All human beings are subject to this media effect, including those of us who think we are self-aware and hip and knowledgeable. Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. 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. 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.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus , which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper.

The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia. So one problem with speculation is that it piggybacks on the Gell-Mann effect of unwarranted credibility, making the speculation look more useful than it is. Another issue concerns the sheer volume of speculation.

Sheer volume comes to imply a value which is specious. I call this the There-Must-Be-A-Pony effect, from the old joke in which a kid comes down Christmas morning, finds the room filled with horseshit, and claps his hands with delight. His astonished parents ask: why are you so happy? He says, with this much horseshit, there must be a pony. Because we are confronted by speculation at every turn, in print, on video, on the net, in conversation, we may eventually conclude that it must have value.

Because no matter how many people are speculating, no matter how familiar their faces, how good their makeup and how well they are lit, no matter how many weeks they appear before us in person or in columns, it remains true that none of them knows what the future holds.

Some people secretly believe that the future can be known. They imagine two groups of people that can know the future, and therefore should be listened to. The first is pundits. Since they expound on the future all the time, they must know what they are talking about. Do they? This is what you would expect. Because nobody knows the future. I want to mention in passing that punditry has undergone a subtle change over the years. In the old days, commentators such as Eric Sevareid spent most of their time putting events in a context, giving a point of view about what had already happened.

Telling what they thought was important or irrelevant in the events that had already taken place. This is of course a legitimate function of expertise in every area of human knowledge. But over the years the punditic thrust has shifted away from discussing what has happened, to discussing what may happen. And here the pundits have no benefit of expertise at all. Worse, they may, like the Sunday politicians, attempt to advance one or another agenda by predicting its imminent arrival or demise.

This is politicking, not predicting. The second group that some people imagine may know the future are specialists of various kinds. As a limiting case, I remind you there is a new kind of specialist occupation—I refuse to call it a discipline, or a field of study—called futurism. The notion here is that there is a way to study trends and know what the future holds.

That would indeed be valuable, if it were possible. Expertise is no shield against failure to see ahead. That is about as wrong a prediction as it is possible to make, by a man who had every reason to be informed about what he was talking about. Not only did he fail to anticipate a trend, or a technology, he failed to understand the myriad uses to which a general purpose machine might be put. Similarly, Paul Erlich, a brilliant academic who has devoted his entire life to ecological issues, has been wrong in nearly all his major predictions.

He devoted his life to intensely felt issues, yet he has been spectacularly wrong. But what about more immediate matters, such as the effects of pending legislation? Surely it is important to talk about what will happen if certain legislation passes. Nobody knows what is going to happen when the legislation passes.

I give you two examples, one from the left and one from the right. The first is the Clinton welfare reform, harshly criticized by his own left wing for caving in to the Republican agenda. What happened? None of these things. Child abuse declined.

In fact, as government reforms go, its been a success; but Mother Jones still predicts dire effects just ahead. This failure to predict the effects of a program was mirrored by the hysterical cries from the Republican right over raising the minimum wage.

Chaos and dark days would surely follow as businesses closed their doors and the country was plunged into needless recession. But what was the actual effect? Basically, nothing. Who discusses it now? What will happen if there is an attempt to raise the minimum wage again? The same dire predictions all over again. Have we learned anything? But my point is, for pending legislation as with everything else, nobody knows the future.

The same thing is true concerning the effect of elections and appointments. What will be the effect of electing a certain president, or a supreme court justice? Nobody knows. So we elected Johnson, who promptly committed , troops to Vietnam. You get a war. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia. Everything from computerized trading to bond market vigilantes to short volatility speculators were blamed for the recent sell-off and violent spike in volatility, but truth be told, no one really knows the cause of the effect as millions of different variables are in play with every stock market tick.

We are linear thinkers who want to know the cause of every effect. The media knows this and that is why they write stories that give linear causes for highly complex effects. But truth be told, we would all be better off just ignoring the vast majority of the media babble we call news. We like to think that we practice what we preach, but we fall prey to the same traps as everyone else. Last week was stressful for us! What if the market action creates another head fake signal in our trend following models?

These questions and others like them are legitimate concerns, which is why we always make a concerted effort to never put too many eggs in any one single basket. Risk is simply part of investing. There are things we can do to mitigate risk, but we will never be able to eliminate it. Author Elliott Orsillo, CFA is a founding member of Season Investments and serves on the investment committee overseeing the management of client assets.

Even though most people can't imagine how that is going to happen, it will happen. Because the number of people sick of this unnatural state of opinion overload is increasing everyday.

You don't always have to mix fragments of known things Do you think you know everything or almost anything you know? Of course, that "additional" can overload you. Causality1 on Aug 26, parent prev next [—]. It's put me in the habit of being intensely suspicious of anything that makes me feel too good about myself or too outraged towards someone else. This phenomena was weaponized over a century ago. The Spanish-American war was largely instigated by propaganda so that William Randolph Hearst could sell more papers "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war".

Mass communications and mass advertising was critical to developing the mass markets of the early 20th century. Propaganda played a huge part in both World Wars, and was critical to Hitler's rise to head of the Nazi Germany. Orwell's wasn't speculation about a hypothetical future 35 years off; it was a thinly-veiled allegory of his actual experience writing cultural broadcasts for the BBC during WW2.

The history of modernity is literally the history of getting large bodies of people to think alike, to buy into particular models of reality, and to subsume their individual, family, or tribal interests under broader national interests. That's how we distinguish the "modern" world from "pre-modern" civilizations that we have largely enslaved or exterminated. On a broader level propaganda and weaponized information dates back to the ancient Romans and Greeks, but the invention of movable type, radio, and TV dramatically accelerated it.

Arguably the Internet is reversing that trend by giving a large plurality of voices an audience, but those of us who grew up in the modern era have brains so conditioned to a monopoly of worldviews that we have trouble making sense of it all. Now we read: Mr. I answer, absolutely not. Such speculation is a complete waste of time. His argument is that the media should only discuss whatever has happened already, and should absolutely never mention any expert opinion on how today's events will impact the near future?

Saying that steel tariffs will likely to send the price of steel up sharply, perhaps as much as ten percent, is now "bullshit on the front page of the Times"? I've read almost every one of his books and loved them. But this is a great example of how expertise in one field seldom translates to other fields. We might be living in a very different country and world if the New York Times had refrained from speculating on topics like Whitewater, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Benghazi Should NYTimes also refrain from speculating on topics like climate change?

Ie, until climate change actually happens, all mention of climate change should be omitted entirely from all newspapers? Back in the old days, there was a clearly-defined place in a newspaper for speculation: the op-ed page.

Got no problem with it there. The problem comes when you play shell games with news and speculation on the front page. I agree with Crichton here, and I'm someone who gets all my news from print. Interestingly enough, you don't see experts speculate like this in their respective fields. When postulations are made in the sciences, they are highly cautious and filled with disclaimers, just short of saying 'we are probably completely wrong until someone physically proves what we are spouting about here in the second to last paragraph of the manuscript.

If you have a communications degree, don't give me your theories on macroeconomics. Stay in your lane, and keep the analysis in the macroeconomics journals. The job of the reporter is to report, not read tea leaves. My theory why nyt and other papers do this baseless speculation that they aren't qualified to make: game retail traders.

We could settle this if the media and pundits documented their predictions and tracked how often they were correct. You could settle it right now with a clever script. Every article has an author.

Start crawling. Yes, it's "bullshit on the front page of the Times". Now, I happen to agree that tariffs may cause prices to increase.

I've been educated in economics and study it as a hobby; I can explain my point-of-view from the concrete facts to the high level theory.

The most definitive statement I would ever be willing to say on the subject is that tariffs always harm the economic, moral, and political interests of the citizens of the country imposing them. It is a vastly complicated question that requires detailed analysis of financial flows, specific industries, interacting policies of many nations, and geography.

And it matters a whole helluva lot. The improper speculation about the consequences of current tariffs are precisely what give Trump and his cabinet the intellectual cover to make outlandish claims like "our tariffs are being paid for by China.

That's unfair. First of all, their interviewer probably demanded that they give a quotable figure, because the readers want some quick concrete takeaways and not a lesson in economics and uncertainty. And just because they didn't give further qualification or it didn't make it into the quote doesn't mean they didn't consider all of those things.

I think you risk being guilty of making disingenuous assumptions about them in the same way that you're accusing them of making disingenuous assumptions about economics. If they only hurt American businesses and consumers and didn't affect China at all, then China wouldn't be responding with retaliatory tariffs on American goods. And I presume you don't think that China's retaliatory tariffs only hurt the Chinese.

I am a little irked about how print often has no citations and therefore little further reading if something is really interesting. Sure there are backlinks, but if I wrote an essay like some of these journalists write an article, I'd fail the class.

How hard is it to add a footnote here or there? Surely graduates of the school of journalism are familiar with Turabian. I'd be curious if everyone is also experiencing the so called "the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" in the same way Crichton describes.

In my own areas of expertise -- data analysis and economics -- the answer is "Yes, very much so". Certainly there are pockets of high quality writing, but that mostly comes from experts writing on their own blogs in their own areas of expertise, or from periodic guest articles by the same experts.

Mainstream economics writing is, as a rule, terrible. Statistical literacy is arguably even worse. What's it like for everyone else? What's your area of expertise and is this endemic to your field? Instead they complain about it. To be more specific, if you think reporters are getting things wrong, you can call them and tell them what the real scoop is; most reporters are very easy to get ahold of, and would to get the real scoop.

They either consider it a waste of their time, or have an agenda and are only interested in talking to reporters to advance that agenda. Economics would be a classic example of a discipline full of differing theories and schools about how to interpret the basic measurable facts or even how facts should be measured.

I don't, however, feel like that automatically invalidates the articles on other subjects. It's possible probable, even that different news outlets will have different specializations - different strong and weak categories - and that tech might be a weak spot while, say, local events might be a strong spot. After all, I certainly ain't an expert on, say, politics or medicine or economics, so why should I expect journalists to be experts in technology?

The answer to that rhetorical question, of course, is that it's the job of a news publication to hire people who can competently report on the topics they cover, or else to not attempt to cover those topics. But that still doesn't invalidate the other articles automatically; it just means I should get a second opinion :.

My background is aerospace engineering, software engineering, and finance. Despite this I do read lots of the health and wellness discussions - and have no idea whether they are really any good. As a physician, I can tell you that the health and wellness discussions in the media, Internet, and HN are horrendous.

As an AE major, what aerospace discussion do you think is terrible? The "as a pilot It's like asking a car driver for his thoughts on automotive engineering, or asking a random computer user about which programming language is best for whatever. This of course is fine if the topic is piloting, but there's a vast gulf of understanding between aircraft pilots and aeronautical engineers.

Maybe, but as a pilot you are tested in depth in systems to a degree not found in automobiles. Aeronautical engineers also miss a lot of the skin in the game that a pilot would have. NikolaeVarius on Aug 26, root parent prev next [—]. AE myself. Reading the discussion on the Max incident generally is extremely painful. Also anything involving electric airplanes.

NoodleIncident on Aug 27, root parent next [—]. It would be a lot quicker for you to have posted your own interpretation of the incident, so that everyone could compare their own views with it at once. Maybe it was more specific than that; something about requiring more force to pitch higher up?

Including presumably the original ; otherwise this system wouldn't be new, right? Not so the Max. If the aircraft was pitched up, it applied a force on the controls down. We've already established we're working with too few sensors to be safe, and the system applies force intermittently every 10 seconds, so it's hard to even tell that it's a problem.

Who cares how the software works? There was some sort of optional indicator, I think, too? The output of the broken system was also intermittent, so it was hard for pilots to quickly realize what was happening. I've only been in the newspaper once regarding a finance company collapse I was a customer and I remember two problems.

First, I was motivated by the questioning to couch my story as one of hardship it wasn't really, but clearly that is what they wanted and I complied.

Second, when it was in print they quoted me almost correctly but framed the quote entirely wrongly giving it a different meaning. I suspect that the reporter understood at the time what I had meant, but when reading her notes later on didn't remember the context and recreated a wrong context to save the quote. It's impossible to avoid the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect across all possible topics - at some point we will defer to a perceived expert, since we simply don't have the time or energy to vet everything ourselves, and that's totally ok and normal.

However, when we open our mouths about something to other people, we better have put in that due diligence, or we'll propagate that misinformation. I've been working in tech for a long time, and have several areas of expertise; distributed systems, realtime systems, visual simulation, etc, and I've also been studying economics for a long time.

My bullshit detector goes off frequently, but much more so when reading things about "soft sciences", like economics, where there is much more room for opinion. In areas where you can run repeatable experiments, you prove your statements that way, but when no proof is possible, and all evidence is observational, the BS spews much more freely. Yes I had this exact experience. Since the news can't report correctly the things I do understand I have to assume they are misreporting the things I don't understand.

Generally this means if I want to learn about a new subject I need to find the experts in the fields blog or read a book. I'm in biology, and articles routinely overstate findings or misunderstand the significance. I get it though. A lot of people are enthusiastic about biology, but it takes years of study to get a handle on the foundational knowledge make sense of the field, longer still to actually gauge significance of things.