Forgive the apostrophe-trolling in the title, but the blogger known as Ace of Spades has been in fine fettle lately. See here and here.
In the second linked piece, Ace mentions the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” (named for physicist Murray Gell-Mann), which the late Michael Crichton described as follows:
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’ve had ample opportunity to verify this phenomenon on my own.
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Reminds me of Pauli’s famous quip, “It is not even wrong“.
And now you have reminded me of this classic essay by Asimov:
The Relativity of Wrong
Ace is one of the original Munuvians. Not many of them left these days.
What’s a “Munuvian”?
…I mean, I realize Ace’s URL is ace.mu.nu, and that the .nu domain is associated with the Pacific island of Niue, but what’s the history here?
Just a guess, I suspect Ace has been reading Moldbug.
I certainly wouldn’t rule that out.
Asimov’s essay, in turn, reminds me of wrongheaded leftist moral relativism.
The link I posted above to the Asimov essay was to an excerpt, not the whole thing. I’ve found a better copy and updated the link.
From Ace…”This is why we have no actual conservative movement worth a damn”. A woman stands her ground and speaks. Some try to murder her. Too many conservatives quiver and conform to the Class reaction. His piece was the part I have been looking for to fill in the blanks.
A Munuvian is, as you guessed, a blogger at a URL ending in “.mu.nu.” A whole bunch of rightie bloggers signed up en masse for that domain back in the early days of blogging; many of them, e.g. Annika, have dropped out of the blogging game, but Ace has been chugging along this entire time. Like George Burns, he intends to be around until there’s no one else left.
A Munuvian is either a native of Munuvia of, as my spellchecker claims, a common misspelling of “Minivan”.
The spellchecker is always right! What do we humans know?
Jeffery Hodges
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If we only knew what we didn’t know, we’d know enough?