Sorry to hear, my acquintance with him is via the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
"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 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. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. 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."
I like that quote of Crichton's too, but since it has nothing to do with the actual Murray Gell-Mann or his life—only his name, which Crichton made use of in a particularly arbitrary way—I think we should treat it as off topic in this thread.
Lest anyone think that dang is being uncharitable here, Crichton himself admitted as much immediately before giving his oft-quoted definition [1]:
"Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call 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.)"
It's why I probe newspapers on articles on subjects I know more about (in my case, well, physics and machine learning). I see what are the errors, what is the level (and quality) of simplifications, etc.
If it is poor, I don't expect other articles to be of higher quality.
Is it reasonable to assume that a newspaper's contents will have uniform quality? I always figured articles of general interest (politics, big world events that make the front page) were more vetted than articles of niche interest (most science articles). Also, journalists largely have humanities backgrounds, and so news articles related to those topics will derive from that expertise.
This is a great summary of why we shouldn't be reading news. If it's not credible, it's just entertainment. But if we forget that it's entertainment, and we usually do, then we are by definition taking it seriously again.
Sadly this is not just limited to news.You dont need to go very far , here in HN I have experienced plenty of times. There are still very valid comments, and thanks God for that, but I think they are a much smaller proportion of what most of us suppose.
Newspaper and HN are two very different things. Newspaper articles are supposed to be accurate and curated. Editors have control over them. That is not the case with HN.
Comparison between comments on HN and comments on (online) newspaper articles would be more apt. In this case, HN would lead by very large margin, as far as quality of comments are concerned.
Even if we ignore his contributions to physics, that observation seems so central to HN discourse (even if usually in ironic fashion) that a black bar may be warranted?
Michael Crichton should not be treated as an authority on the reliability of sources. He believed until his death that global warming is a communist hoax.
That’s is a really nice quote and basically the reason why I don’t feel too bad about Trumps fake news claims. Anyone competent in any subject area reads wildly inaccurate articles all the time.
"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 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. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. 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."
— Michael Crichton