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Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

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Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#71

Post by asdff »

caseysoftware wrote: post #69
madrox wrote: post #7

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 exte…

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 fac…

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.

Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#72

Post by asdff »

noego wrote: post #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.…

I agree with Crichton here, and I'm someone who gets all my news from print. Interestingly enough, you don't see experts speculate like this in their respective fields. When postulations are made in the sciences, they are highly cautious and filled with disclaimers, just short of saying 'we are probably completely wrong until someone physically proves what we are spouting about here in the second to last paragraph of the manuscript.'

But in the nyt, you don't get these disclaimer sentences surrounding the speculation. You get "Tarrifs feared to raise steel prices as high as 10%" boldface in the headline, and that's all most people really see. If you have a communications degree, don't give me your theories on macroeconomics. Stay in your lane, and keep the analysis in the macroeconomics journals. The job of the reporter is to report, not read tea leaves.

My theory why nyt and other papers do this baseless speculation that they aren't qualified to make: game retail traders.

Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#73

Post by asdff »

caseysoftware wrote: post #70
noego wrote: post #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.…

We could settle this if the media and pundits documented their predictions and tracked how often they were correct. Imagine knowing a particular pundit was right 99% of the time! When he/she spoke, I'd listen and invest accordingly.

You could settle it right now with a clever script. Every article has an author. Start crawling.

Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#74

Post by asdff »

foldingmoney wrote: post #49
abtinf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 citizen…

>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. That's unfair. First of all, their interviewer probably demanded that they give a quotable figure, because the readers want some quick concrete takeaways and…

I am a little irked about how print often has no citations and therefore little further reading if something is really interesting. Sure there are backlinks, but if I wrote an essay like some of these journalists write an article, I'd fail the class. How hard is it to add a footnote here or there? Surely graduates of the school of journalism are familiar with Turabian.

Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#75

Post by asdff »

cjlars wrote: post #12

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 e…

I'm in biology, and articles routinely overstate findings or misunderstand the significance. I get it though. A lot of people are enthusiastic about biology, but it takes years of study to get a handle on the foundational knowledge make sense of the field, longer still to actually gauge significance of things. If you don't have that background, you are going to whiff on your summary story.

I don't mind that so much (aside from the anti-vax anti-gmo etc. etc. loony articles, those I detest of course), because that sort of ignorant enthusiasm is what got me into the field in the first place.

Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#76

Post by ArnoVW »

yellowapple wrote: post #18

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?

Correct. See acid rain and ozone depletion.

Those were problems that had economically viable solutions, and (relatively) short term impacts.

The same can unfortunately not be said of climate change.

Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#77

Post by noego »

blacksqr wrote: post #47
noego wrote: post #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.…

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...

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?

Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#78

Post by NoodleIncident »

Diederich wrote: post #59
NoodleIncident wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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/…

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".

Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#79

Post by Diederich »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #78
Diederich wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/…

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…

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.

Re: Michael Crichton: Why Speculate? (2005)

#80

Post by [deleted] »

noego wrote: post #77
blacksqr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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?

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