I wonder if Gell-Mann amnesia might be more historically contingent than people assume.
When Crichton coined the term in 2002, (scientific) information was a lot less accessible, because the internet was more niche, and social media did not exist. Traditional media (including print) was also a much larger field than today, in part because you couldn’t just check twitter to learn about current events. People had no independent means of fact-checking a claim made in their dailies. Journalists, in turn, had access to much sparser resources on any given topic and much less oversight for accuracy.
I suspect that the press was generally less accurate in Crichton’s time than today. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal survived because they were top-tier newspapers, more accurate than the rest of the press. They could rely on this reputation to survive the broader press crisis. But the many mid-size newspapers were less accurate and simply didn’t survive.
Richard Hamming provided a (formalist) response to Wigner’s argument about the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in this 1980 paper, which was helpfully expanded upon by Derek Abbott in 2013. The core point is that despite the appearances, mathematized science answers comparatively little about the world, and that both the mathematics we use and the phenomena we apply those mathematics to are probably parochial to our cognitive processes. Mathematics is, in this view, a powerful tool rather than the underlying truth of the universe, and we shouldn’t be surprised it managed to drive a few nails really well.