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Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
#32I'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 e…
It's impossible to avoid the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect across all possible topics - at some point we will defer to a perceived expert, since we simply don't have the time or energy to vet everything ourselves, and that's totally ok and normal.
However, when we open our mouths about something to other people, we better have put in that due diligence, or we'll propagate that misinformation.
I've been working in tech for a long time, and have several areas of expertise; distributed systems, realtime systems, visual simulation, etc, and I've also been studying economics for a long time. My bullshit detector goes off frequently, but much more so when reading things about "soft sciences", like economics, where there is much more room for opinion. In areas where you can run repeatable experiments, you prove your statements that way, but when no proof is possible, and all evidence is observational, the BS spews much more freely.
Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As an AE major, what aerospace discussion do you think is terrible?
AE myself. Reading the discussion on the 737Max incident generally is extremely painful.
Also anything involving electric airplanes
Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
#34Coincidentally 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.
Worth reading this response by James Hansen: https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200604/viewpoint.cf...
Yeah, I feel weird about the book. The devil's advocate stuff about climate science is NOT helpful or intellectually honest...but I find the broader argument about the media living from crises to crises very compelling.
(Also, the actual plot of the book was super annoying haha)
Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As an AE major, what aerospace discussion do you think is terrible?
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.
Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
#36> 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.
Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
#3710 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 exte…
> I'm generally afraid of a future where this phenomenon becomes better understood and weaponized.
This phenomena was weaponized over a century ago. The Spanish-American war was largely instigated by propaganda so that William Randolph Hearst could sell more papers ("You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war"). Mass communications and mass advertising was critical to developing the mass markets of the early 20th century. Propaganda played a huge part in both World Wars, and was critical to Hitler's rise to head of the Nazi Germany. Orwell's 1984 wasn't speculation about a hypothetical future 35 years off; it was a thinly-veiled allegory of his actual experience writing cultural broadcasts for the BBC during WW2.
The history of modernity is literally the history of getting large bodies of people to think alike, to buy into particular models of reality, and to subsume their individual, family, or tribal interests under broader national interests. That's how we distinguish the "modern" world from "pre-modern" civilizations that we have largely enslaved or exterminated.
On a broader level propaganda and weaponized information dates back to the ancient Romans and Greeks, but the invention of movable type, radio, and TV dramatically accelerated it. Arguably the Internet is reversing that trend by giving a large plurality of voices an audience, but those of us who grew up in the modern era have brains so conditioned to a monopoly of worldviews that we have trouble making sense of it all.
Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
#38Guy 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 be…
> 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.
Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
#39As 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.
Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)
#40> 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.…
Yes, it's "bullshit on the front page of the Times".
Now, I happen to agree that tariffs may cause prices to increase. I've been educated in economics and study it as a hobby; I can explain my point-of-view from the concrete facts to the high level theory. The most definitive statement I would ever be willing to say on the subject is that tariffs always harm the economic, moral, and political interests of the citizens of the country imposing them.
If someone tells you, without further qualification (as is nearly always the case for TV and newspaper pundits), that a tariff of x% will cause a price change of y%, they are either incompetent or they are lying to your face in order to advance a hidden agenda. It is a vastly complicated question that requires detailed analysis of financial flows, specific industries, interacting policies of many nations, and geography.
And it matters a whole helluva lot.
The improper speculation about the consequences of current tariffs are precisely what give Trump and his cabinet the intellectual cover to make outlandish claims like "our tariffs are being paid for by China."