
Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005) - ColinWright
http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/
======
madrox
10 years ago, I was a religious Techcrunch reader. I read every article.
Eventually, I noticed something peculiar: I'd have an idea for a startup, and
six months or so later (about the time it would've taken me to do it) someone
would come out with that idea! It happened enough times that it pushed me to
stop reading the same tech news as everyone else, because I didn't want to
succumb to group think.

I've since extended that policy to most of my news...especially social
platforms like Facebook and Twitter long before fake news became a thing. The
irony is that I've been oft criticized by friends and family for being ill-
informed by not reading CNN.

I do wonder how much speculation, opinion and general exposure to ways of
thinking shape our thoughts in subtle ways. I'm generally afraid of a future
where this phenomenon becomes better understood and weaponized.

~~~
caseysoftware
Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment.

I watched an hour of CNN's every night but it was never that night's coverage.
It was from exactly two weeks ago.

It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright
wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person]
will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as
opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or
conclusions.

I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong
information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.

A few years ago, I discovered this and realized that some portion of it was
probably on purpose:

[https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-
and-...](https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-
our-thoughts)

~~~
asdff
That's the news cycle for you, it's just another time sink to monetize your
nonworking hours. There are maybe only a handful of truly significant stories
a year, the rest is niche interest stories and stuff that's not very relevant
or practical at all in your personal life. Therefore, to keep the lights on,
CNN has to keep you on the edge of your seat. They know very well no one will
remember yesterdays gaffe.

Personally, I skim the nyt newsletter over cereal and basically only
thoroughly read local news articles from the paper of record here and some
decent local magazines. Reading local stories gets you out of the little
cultural bubble you've formed around your lifestyle. I've learned my city is
an onion, a thousand cities at once. National news, on the other hand, is
designed to polarize and monetize.

------
noego
> _For example, here is The New York Times for March 6, the day Dick Farson
> told me I was giving this talk. The column one story for that day concerns
> Bush’s tariffs on imported steel. Now we read: Mr. Bush’s action “is likely
> to send the price of steel up sharply, perhaps as much as ten percent…”
> American consumers “will ultimately bear” higher prices. America’s allies
> “would almost certainly challenge” the decision. Their legal case “could
> take years to litigate in Geneva, is likely to hinge” on thus and such._

> _You may read this tariff story and think, what’s the big deal? The story’s
> not bad. Isn’t it reasonable to talk about effects of current events in this
> way? I answer, absolutely not. Such speculation is a complete waste of time.
> It’s useless. It’s bullshit on the front page of the Times._

His argument is that the media should _only_ discuss whatever has happened
already, and should absolutely never mention any expert opinion on how today's
events will impact the near future? Saying that steel tariffs will likely to
send the price of steel up sharply, perhaps as much as ten percent, is now _"
bullshit on the front page of the Times"_?

I've read almost every one of his books and loved them. But this is a great
example of how expertise in one field seldom translates to other fields.

~~~
blacksqr
We might be living in a very different country and world if the New York Times
had refrained from speculating on topics like Whitewater, Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction, Benghazi...

~~~
noego
Should NYTimes also refrain from speculating on topics like climate change?
Ie, until climate change actually happens, all mention of climate change
should be omitted entirely from all newspapers?

~~~
blacksqr
Back in the old days, there was a clearly-defined place in a newspaper for
speculation: the op-ed page. Got no problem with it there. The problem comes
when you play shell games with news and speculation on the front page.

------
cjlars
I'd be curious if everyone is also experiencing the so called "the Gell-Mann
Amnesia effect" in the same way Crichton describes.

In my own areas of expertise -- data analysis and economics -- the answer is
"Yes, very much so". Certainly there are pockets of high quality writing, but
that mostly comes from experts writing on their own blogs in their own areas
of expertise, or from periodic guest articles by the same experts. Mainstream
economics writing is, as a rule, terrible. Statistical literacy is arguably
even worse.

What's it like for everyone else? What's your area of expertise and is this
endemic to your field?

~~~
vpribish
my goodness, yes. My background is aerospace engineering, software
engineering, and finance. Here on hacker news, the software discussion is
good, aerospace is terrible, and finance/investing is teeth-gnashingly,
garment-rendingly hopeless. Despite this I do read lots of the health and
wellness discussions - and have no idea whether they are really any good.

~~~
rayiner
As an AE major, what aerospace discussion do you think is terrible?

~~~
starpilot
The "as a pilot..." posts baffle me. It's like asking a car driver for his
thoughts on automotive engineering, or asking a random computer user about
which programming language is best for whatever. This of course is fine if the
topic is piloting, but there's a vast gulf of understanding between aircraft
pilots and aeronautical engineers.

~~~
base698
Maybe, but as a pilot you are tested in depth in systems to a degree not found
in automobiles.

Aeronautical engineers also miss a lot of the skin in the game that a pilot
would have.

------
H8crilA
Fake news is not new. It is at least as old as the oldest written texts. The
religions of the world are the largest fake news outlets out there, and those
are going along just fine. I mean they kind of have to be - even if you do
believe in one of them the rest must be concluded as millenia old fake news.

"Our times are different" thrown around without care is a very widespread
cognitive error.

~~~
xamuel
>"Our times are different" thrown around without care is a very widespread
cognitive error.

Absolutely right. The Book of Ecclesiastes talks about this at great length.
History repeats, no-one will remember those of us alive today, and the people
who follow us will also be forgotten by those who follow them.

>even if you do believe in one of them the rest must be concluded as millenia
old fake news

A religion would not last thousands of years if there were nothing to it, and
there's far more commonality between religions than meets the eye. Read the
things that Jesus Christ said, and then read the Tao Te Ching. It's astounding
how closely they agree on quite a few things. The "Test of Time" works subtly
but powerfully over thousands of years. The old religions that still exist
today contended, in their time, with hundreds or even thousands of
competitors. Those competitors all faded away.

"Sons are seldom as good men as their fathers; they are generally worse, not
better." ~Homer, The Odyssey

"Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away." ~Jesus,
The Gospel of Matthew

~~~
michaelmrose
If we were on the decline since Homer we would already be living in caves
grunting at each other. Perhaps what is being lamented is that the successful
found their offspring lesser not just because the properties that made
themselves notable weren't heritable that they ultimately arose from
circumstances they naturally strove to prevent.

If adversity results in 70% dead or broken, 20% damaged, and 10% triumphant
what survivor of adversity gambles with his loved ones. The weaker children of
better men then aren't an example of universal decline but rather the result
of softer situations.

~~~
xamuel
Caves would be a step up from tent cities, and we grunt at each other these
days in 140 characters or less--even our kings!

People follow their GPS systems off of bridges into lakes, our ancestors could
navigate by the stars. Our bards earn their fame via marketing, and sing their
songs using autotune, the bards of old memorized huge corpuses and sang them
live. Our ancestors built the Great Wall of China, the U.S. struggles to build
the Great Chain-Link Fence. Our academics hack p-values and they publish their
work behind for-profit paywalls. When Archimedes discovered how to measure
volumes of irregular objects, he ran naked through the streets shouting
"Eureka!" When was the last time anyone at the Large Hadron Collider did that?

Our self-help books are generally not worth the paper they're written on.
They're written by charlatans and marketed by professional marketers. None of
them will be remembered fifty years from now. Ancient self-help books like the
Gospels, the Tao Te Ching, the Proverbs of Solomon, these stand the test of
time and help countless people every day. They are timeless and evergreen.
They'll continue helping people a thousand years from now.

"So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: 'I will open My mouth
in parables; I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world.'"
~Saint Matthew, quoting a Psalm which was already ancient in Jesus's time

~~~
michaelmrose
You are wrong on nearly every point.

\- Most of us aren't living in tent cities.

\- We are conversing in this thread in more than 140 characters per response

\- Trump isn't our king.

\- I a poor person have more really good music on my hard drive then the
average person would have been privileged to hear in their lifetime. Most of
everything has always been crap but digital copying and cheap gear makes it
possible to filter more gems from the dross than you can probably listen to.
It has always been fashionable to compare whatever some consider the best of
the last several decades to the last several months, ignore the nature of the
comparison and bemoan modern music.

\- We struggle to build a great wall of America because its a stupid measure
to appease racists who think the brown people are coming for their country.

\- To create and distribute the written word has never been cheaper. Imagine
if you and I had to write hundreds of letters to all of the readers who have
chanced across this thread!? To compare your preferred edition of the
Christian bible solely to crappy self help books and ignore all the really
good works out there is either ignorant or deceptive.

\- Academia has never been pure. It's never been free of ignorance, bias,
pride, liars, asshats of all stripes, outright stupidity. Science is the
merely a method to gradually build upon existing human knowledge despite human
foibles.

You believe your religion and its wisdom eternal only because you lack
perspective. If the human race lasts thousands of years it will likely little
resemble we poorer cousins as ill equipped as a 3 year old is to predict
adulthood.

Open your eyes!

    
    
            I met a traveller from an antique land,
            Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
            Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
            Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
            And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
            Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
            Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
            The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
            And on the pedestal, these words appear:
            My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
            Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
            Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
            Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
            The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

~~~
xamuel
Nice quote. I love the double-meaning in that poem. "Look on my Works, ye
Mighty, and despair", intended by Ozymandias to mean "despair because you are
so much weaker", but the double-meaning is "despair because my fall reveals
how all human things decay". Look upon my great scientific works, my great
technological strides, my space stations and satellites, ye Mighty, and
despair!

We could keep talking past each other. Instead, let me short-circuit that and
hand you the victory. All you need to reveal what a child and a fool I am is
to recite my own Bible back at me:

"Do not say, 'Why were the old days better than these?' For it is unwise of
you to ask about this." (Ecclesiastes 7:10)

------
jammygit
Engineers and scientists predict the future all day, and if our physical world
is any indication, it’s working. You can’t so easily say “you can’t predict
the future”

Such an attitude makes us incapable of acting in the face of negative trends.
For example, over a million species face risk of extinction right now. Do we
have to wait until they are gone before we report on it and act?

[https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-
environment/442359-nearly...](https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-
environment/442359-nearly-40-percent-of-all-species-face-extinction-unless-we-
reverse)

------
tjlav5
Coincidentally I just finished State of Fear last night, a Crichton novel
about Eco terrorism. To be honest parts of it made me uncomfortable but with
an open mind it can be a very interesting read. His idea of the PLM complex is
a pretty interesting take on our current state of affairs.

~~~
jbay808
Worth reading this response by James Hansen:

[https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200604/viewpoint.cf...](https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200604/viewpoint.cfm)

~~~
melling
That’s from 2006 and extrapolates to 2020. Has anyone updated it?

~~~
beefman
See this page

[https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/](https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/)

and in particular, this graph

[https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_...](https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_Mean_Estimates_based_on_Land_and_Ocean_Data/graph.png)

------
klagermkii
This veers far too heavily into cranky-old-man territory.

It tries to take a purely boolean result of knowing the future, when the real
power comes from increasing ones prediction odds ever so slightly. And all it
takes is very small increases in ones own odds over the average to benefit
heavily relative to blindly marching into the future.

~~~
justinmchase
I don't think so... if he was really cranky he wouldn't have called it
speculation, which is an extremely generous word for what can easily be
interpreted as intentionally manipulative narrative.

~~~
klagermkii
It seems like a pretty broadly defeatist attitude towards current actions
having agency over the future:

> We need to start remembering that everybody who said that Y2K wasn’t a real
> problem was either shouted down, or kept off the air.

> But my point is, for pending legislation as with everything else, nobody
> knows the future.

> What will be the effect of electing a certain president, or a supreme court
> justice? Nobody knows.

If his focus was purely towards the charlatans who make predictions and keep
getting it wrong with no accountability, I would agree. But he takes it a step
further by seemingly emphasizing the futility of the very act of trying to
foresee and head off potentially bad situations be it technical, legislative
or political.

~~~
0x0aff374668
This raises my hackles every time I see it (enough to create an account and
post): Y2K was ABSOLUTELY a real problem.

There was an enormous amount of money spent prepping for it years before 2000.
In 1995, a few years after I graduated from college I got a moonlighting job
cleaning databases for a UK phone company, manually editing 2 digit dates to 4
digit dates (I didn't know PERL existed at the time). Yeah, nothing major
happened Jan 31 1999, but that's because there was a real, concerted effort to
address it that wasn't trumpeted across the news media.

Not directed at you, I just needed to yell at a cloud.

------
cannonedhamster
Guy who literally made his career on fear mongering in fiction and speculation
gets mad if other fields do it. No self reflected irony at all there. I have a
hard time reading this as anything other than a continuation. He has a habit
of not seeing the forest through the trees. Instead of focusing on the fact
that human caused extinctions have created a literal new age of extinction, he
focuses on a specific point because his goal is to discredit science. It's why
so many of his books focus on scientists being arrogant egotists. In fairness
he wrote this before it became a political taking point, but his type of
rhetoric directly lead to the political environment we have now. He's an
example of everything he claims is wrong. He demonizes sources with proven
track records and he doesn't understand. Why should we take his opinion
seriously?

~~~
Diederich
> Guy who literally made his career on fear mongering in fiction ...

Can you expand on that? I presume you're talking about his book, "State of
Fear". I guess "Andromeda Strain" could be in that category. I found most of
his books interesting, educational and often insightful.

~~~
NoodleIncident
Isn't the premise of every one of his books "scientists fuck it up, leading to
exciting circumstances"?

Even if he has written books that don't follow this pattern, Jurassic Park
surely does; I'm not sure why you didn't mention it yourself

~~~
Diederich
> Isn't the premise of every one of his books "scientists fuck it up, leading
> to exciting circumstances"?

Some of his books have the premise that some scientists are short sighted and
myopic, while others aren't. We can briefly talk about Jurassic Park the book,
which I assume you have read. The movie shares only the most broad story arcs
with the book.

....and I started typing a synopsis...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(novel)#Plot_sum...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_\(novel\)#Plot_summary)
is pretty good.

To your point: yes, there's a group of scientists that fucked up, and there's
another group of scientists that are trying to honestly work things out.

I'd say the biggest antagonists in Jurassic Park are big corporate interests.

Upon reflection, aside from his first couple of books, that seems to be a
common theme.

~~~
NoodleIncident
I used the word "scientists" and that's probably my fault. I don't think it
substantially changes the argument that Jusrassic Park is "fear mongering",
though, especially in the context of the original article.

The the corporation and its scientists are tied together in that they try to
predict the future, which as Crichton kindly explains, is completely
impossible. The corporation believes that investing money will lead to profits
later, and the scientists it employs believe that their safety measures and
female-only population will prevent things from going wrong.

The "good" scientists only react to events in the past and the present;
observing the dinosaurs as they are, taking action against immediate threats,
and reconstructing the series of events that led to the catastrophe. The chaos
mathematician may as well be a self-insert in the context of this article; he
spends half his time explaining to people that nothing can ever be predicted,
with mathematical "proof".

~~~
Diederich
Yes, there are antagonists in the novel Jurassic Park who are scientists, just
as there are in State of Fear.

It hardly generalizes to everything Michael Crichton has written though.

~~~
NoodleIncident
Again, the original topic was "fear-mongering", and I accidentally made a
statement specific to "scientists". Not all fear-mongering is related to
science, and not all scientists in his books are fear-mongered about. It was a
mistake.

------
yellowapple
Re: Y2K, wasn't it not a (major) problem specifically _because_ the world
panicked over it and fixed all those two-digit year fields in their databases?

~~~
tempestn
Some of the panic and mainstream speculation was ridiculous (airplanes falling
out of the sky, etc.), but yes, a ton of work went into fixing the various y2k
bugs in a large percentage of the world's software, which is why the event
passed so smoothly. We can only hope that a similar mobilization results in
people of the future opining on how climate change wasn't such a big deal
after all, but given the current trends* I'm not betting on it.

*Despite Crichton's assertions, we do know some things about the future. The sun will come up tomorrow; soon it will be autumn and then winter (at least here in the northern hemisphere), and given the current atmospheric level of greenhouse gasses and the amounts being emitted, the earth will continue to warm beyond the current level. We can in fact very accurately model the amount of warming over the long term, although of course we can not precisely predict the day to day or even year to year changes, as there are a number of other factors that add randomness to the result over the short and medium term. To use an analogy, if I plug my bathtub drains and turn on the faucet, I can predict that absent some intervention there will be mopping in my future.

------
jacobsenscott
As a programmer, I've noticed that while the media is often wrong about
technical details, they are also often ahead of me in terms of the social
impacts of technology. I thought since they didn't know how FB and Twitter
work under the hood they would also be wrong about the social devastation it
would cause. Turns out I know more computers. They know more about people.

~~~
dymk
those platforms were vehicles for the media to spread misinformation and fear
- yet you blame the platforms more than you blame the authors for the
devistation?

------
AgentOrange1234
> He was wrong about diminishing resources, he was wrong about the population
> explosion, and he was wrong that we would lose 50% of all species by the
> year 2000. He devoted his life to intensely felt issues, yet he has been
> spectacularly wrong.

Spectacularly wrong... by about 20 years.

------
mlthoughts2018
Why does anyone feel a need to go further than “speculation is entertaining”
or “speculation sells”?

------
fraggle222
Wait a sec, didn't the steel prices increase (and didn't the tarrifs cause
lots of other issues)? Was that coincidence?

Here's an analysis :
[https://www.tradepartnership.com/pdf_files/2002jobstudy.pdf](https://www.tradepartnership.com/pdf_files/2002jobstudy.pdf)
, written in Feb 2003 (Tariffs were imposed in 2002, which was when NY times
article was written [https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/06/us/bush-puts-tariffs-
of-a...](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/06/us/bush-puts-tariffs-of-as-much-
as-30-on-steel-imports.html))

Their summary:

"We found that:

• 200,000 Americans lost their jobs to higher steel prices during 2002. These
lost jobs represent approximately $4 billion in lost wages from February to
November 2002.3

• One out of four (50,000) of these job losses occurred in the metal
manufacturing, machinery and equipment and transportation equipment and parts
sectors.

• Job losses escalated steadily over 2002, peaking in November (at 202,000
jobs), and slightly declining to 197,000 jobs in December.4

• More American workers lost their jobs in 2002 to higher steel prices than
the total number employed by the U.S. steel industry itself (187,500 Americans
were employed by U.S. steel producers in December 2002).

• Every U.S. state experienced employment losses from higher steel costs, with
the highest losses occurring in California (19,392 jobs lost), Texas (15,826
jobs lost), Ohio (10,553 jobs lost), Michigan (9,829 jobs lost), Illinois
(9,621 jobs lost), Pennsylvania (8,400 jobs lost), New York (8,901 jobs lost)
and Florida (8,370 jobs lost). Sixteen states lost at least 4,500 steel
consuming jobs each over the course of 2002 from higher steel prices.

• While insufficient data exist at this time to measure the precise role steel
tariffs played in causing such significant price increases, relative to the
other factors, it is clear that the Section 201 tariffs played a leading role
in pushing prices up. Steel tariffs caused shortages of imported product and
put U.S. manufacturers of steel-containing products at a disadvantage relative
to their foreign competitors. In the absence of the tariffs, the damage to
steel consuming employment would have been significantly less than it was in
2002.

• The analysis shows that American steel consumers have borne heavy costs from
higher steel prices caused by shortages, tariffs and trade remedy duties,
among other factors. Some customers of steel consumers have moved sourcing
offshore as U.S. producers of steel-containing products became less reliable
and more expensive. Other customers refused to accept higher prices from their
suppliers and forced them to absorb the higher steel costs, which put many in
a precarious (or worse) financial condition. The impact on steel-consuming
industries has been significant. In making policy for the revitalization of
manufacturing, including the steel industry, our conclusions suggest that the
effects across the full industrial spectrum should be considered. The lessons
of the impact of higher steel costs should counsel a good deal of caution when
import barriers are considered."

Oh and the chart they publish of prices from 2002 shows the following:

HR Sheet metal: went from about $220 to $300 ($ per ton) an increase of 36% HD
Galvanized metal: went from $330 to $460 an increase of 39% CR Sheet metal:
went from $305 to $405 an increase of 32%

------
bitwize
Because news media is not in the business of facts as such, they are in the
business of a _story_. The buzzword today is "narrative". They will fit their
reporting into a compelling or provocative narrative to move more newspapers
and magazines. Hence, news about Bush's tariffs must not be reported alone,
but must be contextualized in terms of a narrative about what a dangerous man
he is and how he undermines his own goals when it comes to preventing
terrorism. This will sell more copies of the _Times_ both to people who agree
with the narrative and people who are looking to challenge it.

You can see this unfolding right now. The _New York Times Magazine_ , for
instance, is currently running stories about slavery and plantations, and
tying those into modern stories about race, justice, and capitalism, as part
of its "Project 1619" which is explicitly about selling the narrative that USA
culture is a slaver culture. This "hot takey" interpretation of American
history is being promoted because it will sell more magazines than a more
nuanced view of history.

