twenty-eight years and a million words
This morning, Kenny solved a two-part problem.
At the daycare, I gave him his towel to place on its hook. He toddled over to the row of hooks, but discovered that another child had put a towel on his hook! Giving it a moment's thought, he reached up and put the mis-placed towel on another hook, then put his own away.
No fuss, no drama, just got on with it.
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