twenty-seven years and one million words
The boy's cottoned to my feeble reverse-psychology ploy. To get him interested in some food on the table, I tell him to go play. When he's refusing to try something new, I steal bits of it and tell him to stick with what he knows because he won't like the new stuff.
Today at dinner he told me, "no, daddy, don't eat it!" Corralling his plate and bowl, he said, "you wouldn't like 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