Knowing Things Is Hard

Gell-Mann Amnesia: if someone is wrong about things we know a lot about, we rarely assume that their views on topics we don’t know about are just as wrong.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the art

Partisanship: many people much of the time are more interested in supporting their faction than finding the truth. Many of the customs of science were created to keep debates from becoming dominated by parties outside of science, but parties within science can emerge (eg. debates about the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain).

Telephone, Game of: as stories are retold or texts are copied they change.

Books Feed Books: often this how-to book retells that how-to book even if no skilled worker actually does it that way. If there are 10 books on a topic, someone will probably write the eleventh because there is clearly an interest and they have models to follow.

Anecdote: its wise not to trust them unless you have checked an original source. All too often the story that you use to represent a situation in miniature was made up by a journalist in 1928 or an opera writer in 1782. See Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes for more details.

Big Data Can be Bad Data (Michael E. Smith): Putting math in it does not make it science if the numbers were made

Power of Fiction: many people’s understanding of the world they live in owes a lot to fiction. Even if you know how something worked in a past society, someone in the past may have had different ideas if they had little or no direct experience. And many people still get their ideas about the past from Asterix comics or Shakespeare plays or computer

Defensiveness: its embarrassing to be wrong in public, so once you have publicly committed to a position its hard to change your mind.

Kaiser Josef Wrote Don Giovanni Syndrome (Phil Paine): we often give rulers credit for things that just happened when they were alive. If you asked the oligarchs of any declining place, they will tell you that they and their ancestors were the source of all wealth and creativity, when in fact the elites took over as the growth and newness were falt