"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works 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 with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

It's not unique to any particular medium, news source, or person. Many, many people have an agenda and/or ignorance and portray things accordingly.. not always malicious but incomplete at best, wrong at worst.

Random independent coverage from bloggers, e.g. Popehat, tends to be much better informed than people rushing to incite us on a deadline. This goes double for anything the least bit technical, like law.

Sadly, there just aren't enough sources like that to actually dig into most stories.

Facebook and Twitter would be ghost towns without this disconnect.

The trick, which people seem to be generally bad at, is:

a) limiting the scope of authority you attribute to someone

b) not immediately discounting contradictory evidence but using it to judge whether you need to pry deeper yourself or to discount some of that authority you've vested in them

c) actually remembering how authoritative the source was when repeating the information or using it as the basis for other assumptions

d) actually looking into issues deeper that you decide to care about and find the truth, not just was some semi-authoritative mouth piece repeated to you

For example, I try to make a habit of prefixing or postfixing statements in conversation with disclaimers ("At least that's what I heard or seem to remember reading, but I'm not sure how that I'm not sure how true it is.") if I'm not fairly certain of the information.

Examine their voting record, lobby donations, and primary information and action. Decide from there.

Without that, we get the barely binary system that we have. The MSM can be lazy and non-journalistic because no one bothers to notice. No one cares.

Granted, there are definitely things that aren't amenable to this, but it's not exactly hopeless, either.

The umbrage taken by the mainstream media in the last year being called "fake news" is a bit amusing. I've often wondered what percentage of it all (and what we know of history) is complete nonsense.

So... likely quite a lot. I trust verifiable sources a lot more than I trust any outlet, even the supposedly reputable ones. I mean, just how long did it take for Jayson Blair to get caught fabricating stories in the NYT? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair

What am I missing?

And a more facile analysis obscures the fact that there is yet a bit of fact-based reporting getting lost in the noise. Authors who normally link to actual primary sources and do real analysis instead of only cheap opinion, albeit sometimes imperfectly. So more Glenn Grenwald, Popehat or Groklaw and less Fox/Buzzfeed/CNN.

There are real problems here, but political partisans tend to make more fake news instead of doing anything useful to solve it.

But even that is wrong.

Firstly fake news is exactly that - actually fabricated websites designed to look like “the Sacramento beast” or what have you, filled with content that will sound legitimate to an American conservative and trick them into clicking on ads.

That’s fake news and it’s actually not even news, it’s more like surprise literature/acting to con people.

Trump on the other hand argues for example that he has the biggest crowds, when he doesn’t by every device that recorded images of the subject.

Fake news is in this case is just a term that relies on the audience to impute meaning to it.

There is grass on the National Mall. During the Obama inauguration, people walked on it as you would expect. The damage cost several $million to fix. In photos of the Trump inauguration crowd, notice that the sparsely-occupied area is white. It was covered in translucent boxes to protect the grass. (the boxes were borrowed from stadiums that use them for events like concerts) The boxes can be walked on, but people would hesitate. They are not inviting like grass. This kept many people out of the photos.

Another issue is that the central area of the photo was blocked off into different security sectors. Due to violence, entry was often blocked. Many people showed up for the inauguration but were unable to get to where they could see it, which would be the empty areas of the photos.

In the usual pair of photos, the Trump photo is cropped relative to the Obama photo. The physical area seems to differ by roughly a factor of two.

There is also the question of time when the photos were taken.

The physical area is virtually the same. They merely appear to be taken from slightly different vantage points. Both show the area where you might reasonably expect people to observe from. They are taken at the same time of day differing by a matter of 5-20 minutes.

You aren't even nitpicking your statement about the area differing by a factor of 2 is a clear lie designed to sow doubt. Please don't bring your alternative facts here.

Those are not the usual pair of photos.

Almost like people believe the same thing said very much the same way but from a completely different source. Thanks, I'm here all weekend. ;)

> FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

He doesn't use the intellectual tone when he talks about it.

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows.

For a certain type of person -- the type that reads HN -- this scholarly style is what we expect. It lays out the biases and beliefs we hold in a manner we expect. It backs it up with some seemingly solid logic that we can relate to. We've all seen at least one badly written scientific article where we know the facts better. So we take it as fact and agree with it.

Is there any difference between them? Of course not, they're saying the same thing, but in a different linguistic style. It does take a bit of work to recognize that as most people have fairly deep biases towards linguistic style that are difficult to suppress. As an exercise to prove this to yourself, try sum up the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect in a way that would appeal to a non-academic.

Here's the interesting part: Trump picked up this linguistic style only in the last few years. While we don't like it, his voter base probably wouldn't have voted for him if he started his sentences "briefly stated". Know your audience, often the presentation of your argument is far more important than the argument itself.

Now suppose someone reported on a game without seeing it and getting the narrative from different fans up in the stands.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but of course, sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Or are you concerned that you'll move towards the apex of the Dunning Kruger chart?

That's not a good metric. A better metric would be, "are they trustworthy and correct?"

> Or are you concerned that you'll move towards the apex of the Dunning Kruger chart?

Disqus is over there.

The Dunning Kruger joke was only partially a joke - I was trying to explain that there are levels of expertise. My view is that anything that increases my knowledge is good; I was trying to elicit a response as to why someone might think otherwise.

So well-meaning idiots trump experts that might be trying to trick you?

When the fire was reported by the student newspaper, the only details they got correct was the date and that there was a fire. The journalist spoke with me and with the student whose dorm room burned. Nothing we said made it into the article. It was far more interesting to invent a story about how nobody knew if he was in his room when the fire started, than the prosaic truth that I knew he was in the library.

This happened in 1990 and the cause of the fire was a pc catching fire while engaged in the slow and perilous task of reformatting a hard drive.

IMO the correct response is not to reject the source but to give it less weight, add other sources and realise you'll only ever get an approximation of the truth at best.

So true. Back in the 1950s, a fighter plane off an aircraft carrier had its wings fall off and fall into the ocean. That model of aircraft had had a couple incidents before where the wings came off. Numerous experienced and educated witnesses were interviewed, including the captain of the carrier, who all said the wings fell off.

Except for one lowly seaman on the deck, who said the aircraft was intact when it hit the water.

The airplane was eventually retrieved from the sea floor, and it was proven the wings were on it when it hit the water.

The other experienced officers all (quite sincerely) observed what they expected to see.

I'll believe forensic evidence every time before I believe eyewitness accounts.

I'm not convinced I understand what purpose being informed of global politics or local dramas serves, other than maybe having something to talk about with friends and colleagues.

Most news coverage is relevant to someone, but utterly irrelevant for the majority. As a non-US citizen, the US presidential election can be summarized by who won and what changes they intend to make. I don't need 24-hour coverage of he-said/she-said style reporting.

On the other hand, it can be useful to subscribe to some industry-specific news source to be aware of general trends. But then you're not following the news in general, but just the tiny sliver that actually affects you, which makes it much easier (not less) to stay informed.

Most general news articles are actually much more useful once they are archived (and no longer news), since then you can just seek them out when their topic has become relevant to you, and it lets you make actual use of the constant recaps the news cycle tends to include for context.

With regard to not having a voice, probably doesn't matter if I don't, but I'll concede it's probably a poor choice for the populace at large.

You are basically asking what it would be like to live like most of Humanity before the advent of mass media. Did not seem they had far worse problems than we do or that they were incapable to adapt. I'd return the question to you, how was mass media improved your life in any meaningful way and can you prove it was not just noise?

The printing press, like writing before it and phone/telegram/TV/internet after it, was a fairly transformational technology, but it's hard for me to imagine living without large-scale reliable distribution of knowledge. The concept of history as an accessible field of study for the average person is a pretty big one.

The ideas that led to modern democracy spread through a network that utilized the printing press and discussed the nature of existing society quite a bit. The general view of the vast majority of the pre-modernity era is summed up with well-known cliches like "dark ages" or "nasty, brutish, and short." There's some dispute about what the true "happiness" level was in early societies, but it's interesting to note that very few anti-technological movements achieved much of note, speaking to the definite appeal of technology.

My own personal talents never would've had a chance to flourish in a hunter/gatherer, agrarian, or feudal type society. So no thanks from me. I'm glad every day I was born where/when I was. Maybe a hundred years later would've been an interesting gamble if I could choose, but now's good. :)

I don't read news and don't watch TV for at least 3-4 years and I became much happier person because of this decision.

Printing press availability and mass media are two distinct events in History. I'd say mass media pretty much started in the 20th century with Radio and TV. Paper was not something that everyone purchased before for news. TV/Radio made information pretty much free in that regard.

Where is the quote from? Edit: from another comment: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

Michael Crichton. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann#Quotes_about_...

So he basically did the same thing he criticizes reporters for.

(Which isn't totally fair imo, because the news should be held to a higher standard than a book about a dinosaur park)

The Paul Krugman model (PhD, nobel prize winner, professor at MIT/Princeton, writing for the NYT) is quite rare. And even then, he doesn't exclusively write about his field of expertise.

You mentioned reporting though... reporting facts is actually the one thing that journalists do often get right, and that's largely viewed as something holy. Analysis of journalism often finds that western journalists are incredibly accurate in their reporting, but they (un)wilfully frame stories, omit (sometimes by ignorance) important details or focus on meaningless anecdotes.

For example, there was a time when in my region the local news kept reporting that 'real estate boom: 60% of homes are being sold for or above the asking price'. All news agencies took it over, a rare few even omitting 'for or' and just reported '60% above asking price'. If you looked carefully, they cited data from a RE agent association that had an interest in making it seem as if you could make an easy buck by buying a home before it rose even more. The association's media reports focused on the 60% figure, but didn't mention the flipside of the underlying data: about 40% of homes were sold below the asking price and 40% were sold for approximately the asking price. In other words, news agencies could have also reported the exact same data by stating '80% of homes were sold for or below the asking price'.

I'd been reading these news reports (among others) for a year before I decided to buy a home and had a certain impression of the RE market going into it (a sellers market, had to bid aggressively and wave various rights to recourse to convince a seller). Not until I dove into the data did I find the reporting mischaracterised the market, despite citing factual data. The reason I think in this case and others, is that the journalists aren't RE agents, they're mostly just 29 year-olds with a journalism degree reporting on the 8 different industries they were assigned to, from RE to dairy to, relying heavily on industry associations' brief media reports and representatives to shape a narrative.

I hate to be so skeptical of the mainstream media, but it's hard not to whenever they report on something I know about they seem to get it all wrong.

I stopped assuming any veracity in reporting from _any_ source and quite quickly saw that there was very little accuracy anywhere. There were of course opinions - or voiced ‘opinions’ I understood the motivation for, but with the facts missing, that’s all I was consuming. The opinions of reporters or the ‘opinions’, carefully guided by the media bosses or governments. Interesting? Not when they were so predictable.

That’s when I became one of those hipster/snob/weirdo people who doesn’t consume standard news anymore, and can only barely stand some tech publishing.

We remember the times when you're sure an article is wrong, we have amnesia towards all the of the other times.

And lo! Polls say that Journalists are less trusted than politicins and used car salesmen. And I know that must be true because I read it in a newspaper somewhere.

You left us all hanging. Why is this the top comment?

Then they'd talk to a PR person who is only interested in guiding the narrative to whatever makes the company look better.

So yeah, employees aren't fully informed, and while Corporate may be fully informed, they are rarely going to tell the full story -- the truth probably lies somewhere between what employees are saying and what Corporate says (if they say anything at all, and in this case, it seems they did not respond to requests for comment)

So please take the skepticism that your management is feeding you with a grain of salt. The news media's business model hinges on its reputation of being truthful and accurate. If it was regularly publishing "disturbingly misinformed and one-sided" articles, it would be out of business.

This is quite normal behavior when weather events in the area are expected, but lately it has been occurring regardless of weather. From my outside observer position, it could be a simple miscalculation of how much to order, someone getting burned by ordering too much and stock went bad, or any other reason of which I have no inside knowledge.

Is this attention to "Whole Paycheck" unfair or are people just super attentive due to the new ownership and judgements being rushed to be "ahead of the curve"?

I wouldn't say I even particularly care about Whole Foods' reputation, it's more the false narrative that bothered me and I just happened to know how wrong it was. Must be so much worse for employees at the big tech companies or others that are in the news all the time.

The only time I've seen shelves that bare were at Kmart and Sears locations before they went bankrupt and shut down.

There was one picture of an empty banana set with a pineapple in the wrong spot - that's what I was referring to before.

The sole picture in San Francisco was the reset I mentioned.

Not sure why you defend your employer here. If the problem is real - which I'm in no position to judge - it would be in his best interest to notice it.

The OTS system in the article also allows for exceptions - if there were bananas available the store could have stocked up on them. It's just so wrong on many levels - I could spend all day pointing them out, but this thread is getting bigger than I thought and I don't know if I can spend much more time on it. I was going to edit my original comment with more information but it doesn't look like I can anymore.

Strawman. I said nothing of the sort. I'm taking the article at face value. The article reports that regularly, stores of your chain are understocked that much that you are losing money and customer loyalty. It is not saying those are special rare issues.

Now, there are two options: The article is wrong, or it is right. If it is wrong, then you need to change nothing internally. Customers will see in their nearest store that the stock is alright, some might even come out in support, a small welcome challenge for PR. But looking at this thread, at the comments not being a discussion about journalistic objectivity below your top-comment, there is some support for the thesis of the article. If the article is right, the system needs to be changed if you want to compete with the other stores that actually succeed in stocking the items customers came to the shop for. In that case, the impression I would get from the attitude you are reflecting here (and which according to the article is the one of management) is that parts of WF are burying the head in the sand, which would likely be disastrous for your company.

It is easy to optimize for the wrong metrics, especially big corporations. Short term shareholder value, cost reductions - cost reductions were echoed by management in the article as motivation for the OTS system. Combine that with a good portion of institutional inertia and wrongly placed respect for authority, and this is how companies die. Which, again, might not be at all what is happening here (and Amazon and stuff, I know). It just looks like an example of it, which I think is interesting.

The article is wrong about the regularity of the issue, the "weird control systems" (not sure what connection you're seeing with employee protection laws), and the causes.

But you misunderstand me if you think I'm burying my head in the sand. I don't deny that Whole Foods has issues with its ordering processes. In fact, I think the company has been going in the wrong direction there for a long time. The article is just so, so off-base - originally I didn't intend to argue with it, but now I've become this guy: https://xkcd.com/386/

It will be interesting to see if Amazon can improve the situation through automation. Generally I've seen stores that use automated ordering systems be far worse with their out-of-stocks (Kroger, for instance).

Edit: Just to clarify, the connection with the control scheme and the supply issues as laid out in the article is that it forces employees and store manager to blindly follow the system. Employee protection laws in other countries would prevent "three strikes out" schemes, if the strikes are for "infractions" as small as having one of 400 boxes facing the wrong side, which is one example in the article. That just wouldn't fly in a german court of law, for example, where something like this definitely would end up.

But I agree, absolutely possible that there are other explanations (including that there is no problem at all), but a wrongly prioritized supply chain scheme/software fits very well to the shown and described issues.

It's not a regional issue, it's systemic.

Even 30 years ago when I was a student worker in a food store that sort of task only happened after 22:00 when the last customers had left.

The thing is too, it's a snapshot. We don't know how long it looked like that, what time of the day it was, whether someone called out sick, etc.

This week I was sick and went to whole foods like 3 times over 5 days to get soup. The soup shelf became more and more empty over time and didn't seem to be getting restocked which struck me as odd.

Nearly everyone who has personal knowledge of something reported is similarly disturbed. That they rarely then remember that the same level of error applies to all the other things reported, outside their areas of personal knowledge, has been termed the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect by Michael Crichton:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

As one gets older (& a bit more cynical), you learn to apply this credibility discount to more journalism. But don't just use this insight as a synergizer for confirmation bias! That is, don't just remember, "this is mostly bungled reporting" on stories with details/implications that go against what you wish were the case. The stories supporting your cherished beliefs are mostly bungled reporting, too.

Because the article is right. At least in some stores around SF the stock situation is dire. Some days I can’t even buy whole milk.

If even one store did ok, we could see an employee from there posting here. Not sure that is information; more like a data point.

Redundant, you are reading Business Insider.

Because it doesn't mean anything. No large company will respond to supply chain questions.

> But are you store employee or a corporate headquarters employee?

What is the relevance?

One of the points of the article is that corporate isn't aware of these problems.

Let's take this from the other side. Your employees have gone to the press, and the press is asking you for your side of the story. Why would you give the press anything to write about? Pictures of empty shelves have much more impact than in-stock statistics. You clam up, try to find the employee (probably disgruntled) and terminate him/her.

In other words, corporate not responding is not a signal one way or another, it's the sign of a mature company. Not to kick a dog, but Uber might have responded and made things worse.

There are a few details about it that can be irritating, but the comments from employees in the article are extremely misleading. If they're having a hard time passing their inspections it's because they're doing something very wrong - no one is failing an inspection for having 1 box facing the wrong way like it says in the article.

Usually when I see (or say) something like that it's an exaggeration with a significant amount of truth behind it.

So by your logic, any accusation has the cachet of a significant amount of truth behind it?

The press needs clicks. Their needs (more click and revenue) is diametrically opposed to our needs (a somewhat unbiased view of reality).

Just by saying "<outlandish accusation> has to be backed by something" is ridiculous. It can be backed by nothing. As long as you click through, they get what they want.

>>Maybe she should have reached out to Whole Foods corporate and asked for comments?

When ever you want the truth, just call their PR department.

A PR department is still better in my books compared to a few disgruntled employees from a few high traffic stores after a major change in both store traffic and company processes.

All companies go through growing pains and scaling issues, and I hardly expect much insight on those issues from the teenage stock boy at a Whole Foods.

The stock boy probably has more insight to that than any of us, and anyone at corporate. Indeed I'd expect only their direct manager, if anyone, to have a better insight on what is on the actual shelves.

Corporate will tell you what should be there; stock check will tell you after the fact what was there, ...

PR has their own bias but if they tell lies they can be sued for hiding/misrepresenting the truth, because they represent the company's official stance. Unless the company is doing something wrong that they need to cover up, I can't think why a PR answer could not be close to a honest answer.

From the article, "Whole Foods did not respond to several requests for comment on this story."

Wegmans/Fairway/Shoprite would destroy WF unless it quickly fixes this issue.