Depth of field

I quite enjoy Michael Crichton's "Gell-Mann amnesia effect". It's the strange forgetfulness that happens when you're an expert reading the news. You read some article on a topic in your field, and you are just blown away by how wrong it is. I mean, how could they make such a mess of it? But then you turn around and read another article on a different topic you don't know that much about and assume it's reliable. I watch computer scenes in TV shows and laugh at how ridiculous they are, but medical scenes seem perfectly realistic. It's like there's some powerful disconnect stopping you from making an analogy between your expertise and someone else's.

Crichton's argument is that this is to do with trustworthiness, or that it's something particular to the media. I think it's more that we don't see the parallels between the depth in things we know about and the things we don't. When you hear someone who isn't an expert trying to explain something you know a lot about, you can probably guess they're going to get it wrong before they even open their mouths. There's just a lot of complexity to it that's easy to miss, and you know because you spent time and effort mastering that complexity. Someone else's field, though, doesn't evoke that same sense. A simple explanation of something that you don't know is easy to believe, because it's easy to believe that something you don't know is simple.

A little while ago I experienced this in a big way when talking to my hairdresser. It turns out he goes to overseas conferences overseas about hair, signs up for hair workshops and sometimes goes out to watch live hairdressing demonstrations. Live hairdressing demonstrations! It seems mindblowing to me that anyone could care about hair that much, or find so much depth in something that, to me, seems so shallow. I mean, you take the hair, you cut the hair. What's the big deal? And yet I'm sure anyone who wasn't familiar with the complexity in software development would say the same thing. They'd be totally bamboozled by the amount of thought we put into editor choice or tabs vs spaces, to say nothing of the decisions that are actually important.

So I think the solution to the Gell-Mann effect is to learn to build that analogy and equate the depth you find in your own field with the depth of unfamiliar fields. If you understand that religious studies is as rich and complex a topic as computer security, if you believe that it has the same obscure and trivial disagreements and fundamental paradigm-shaking moments, and if you recognise those same easy traps that look like understanding but are really just easy posturing, it should be a lot harder to fall for the next Dan Brown book.