The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Intersection of Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Posted on | March 22, 2025 | 13 Comments

Emma Vigeland and Sam Seder on Election Night

If you were in need of expert guidance, wouldn’t you seek out someone smarter and more knowledgeable than you? Wouldn’t you try to research their background to determine if they were qualified to advise you? Or at least ask around for recommendations from friends? If you were looking for insight on the current political situation, who would you trust?

The headline refers to two well-known cognitive biases: “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities” — sometimes oversimplified to “why dumb people think they’re smart.” And the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect refers to the fact that, when the media reports on a subject we know well, we easily spot their errors, and yet continue to trust them to report accurately on everything else — we forget how wrong they were, thus suffering a sort of amnesia about media inaccuracy.

Why are people still watching The Majority Report? Some recent episodes (e.g., “Chuck Schumer Is a Disaster,” March 19) have gotten more than 100,000 views, which is a rather substantial audience for a YouTube channel. Where is the evidence that Sam Seder actually knows anything about politics or public policy? Is he any more knowledgeable or insightful on this subject than the typical member of his audience? And what about his youthful protégé Emma Vigeland? What sort of credentials does she bring to the table as a political commentator?

Yes, on the eve of the 2024 election, Emma Vigeland predicted that Kamala Harris would win all seven “battleground” states — Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada — as well as Iowa, for a total of 325 Electoral College votes.

As Maxwell Smart would say, “Missed it by that much.”

Emma Vigeland was not just slightly wrong, but completely wrong.

Emma suffered a credibility-destroying humiliation and yet, she’s still blabbering away on YouTube every day, and tens of thousands of people are still watching. The question is, why? What would cause someone to spend their leisure hours watching a political pundit with a track record of catastrophic error? If you are sincerely interested in politics, wouldn’t you prefer to become better informed by watching someone who actually knew what they were talking about? What kind of people would choose instead to become misinformed, by relying on a source like Emma Vigeland who is demonstrably ignorant of basic electoral politics?

Emma said Kamala Harris would “eke out a victory in Iowa” — Trump won Iowa by a 13-point margin. How can you possibly be that wrong, and still be taken seriously as a commentator on American politics?

Emma Vigeland has proven herself to be of “limited competence” in politics, a field in which she preposterously claims to possess expertise — a classic example of Dunning-Kruger Effect, and the fact that she still has an audience is proof of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. No matter how wrong a liberal pundit may be, liberals don’t care — they’re like a junkie craving another fix of the drug that’s killing them.

Watch the “highlights” (if such is the proper term) of Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland’s Election Night live podcast:

 



 

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Category: Media Bias

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