The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a phenomenon where experts correctly identify flaws and discredit media stories about their field of expertise, but somehow suffer a sort of “amnesia” when they believe or find valuable stories in the same media about fields where they are not experts.
Explanation
When you are an expert in a field and a reporter writes an article about your field, you find the article has many inaccuracies and dismiss the article, the reporter, and the media outlet.
This is because there is an asymmetry of information between the reporter, who covers many topics and is not a field expert in any of them, and you, who knows a lot about the field in question.
However, when the same reporter in the same outlet covers and writes about another topic, in which you are not an expert, the information asymmetry flips, now the reporter is more knowledgeable than you, however shallow, about the underlying subject.
When a reporter is conveying a story about a subject where you didn’t have that information, it would be natural to find that information valuable, even if you know it may have flaws as in the one in your own field of expertise.
Taking this concept further, if you were to get totally correct and deep information from a reporter about a subject you don’t know, perhaps the information would not be easy to understand by you as your brain does not have the schemas necessary to process it logically.
Conclusion
If all of the above is correct, then the flow of information across fields of expertise may be better processed and transferred by people with shallow expertise in all fields so they can naturally simplify it for all consumer types to understand it intuitively and digest it more easily.
