A closer look
Gell-Mann amnesia effect describes the phenomenon where you read a news article about a subject you are an expert in, realize the journalist has absolutely no idea what they are talking about, and then turn the page to believe every single word they write about foreign policy. Coined by author Michael Crichton, this bias highlights our incredible capacity to selectively forget that media organizations are entirely capable of incompetence the moment they switch to a topic we know nothing about. You will aggressively mock a publication for misunderstanding the basic mechanics of your specific software engineering job, only to confidently quote that exact same publication at a dinner party when discussing macroeconomics. We willfully suspend our disbelief because the terrifying alternative is admitting that nobody actually knows what is going on and the vast majority of our worldview is built on poorly researched guesswork
