Crichton on science and fear
Worth watching:
It’s part of a much longer speech that Crichton gave a few years ago. The entire speech can be watched here (hat tip: SteveH).
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Worth watching:
It’s part of a much longer speech that Crichton gave a few years ago. The entire speech can be watched here (hat tip: SteveH).
The global catastrophe Crichton eventually settled upon for his novel ‘State of Fear’ was neither a nuclear plant accident nor an earthquake — it was a tsunami.
there are so many of these and almost all of them are socialist or statists… so that’s a clue…
1. Although not a partisan afaik, Crichton was a de facto patriot and a citizen of the world. He is missed. RIP.
2. The effect he describes works both ways. For example, although Holocaust denial has not yet spread to educated Western elites, my impression is that anti-Semitism has revived in Europe.
I really didn’t notice or pay attention to this man untill State of Fear came out. When i did i was riveted by his combination of incredible creativity while hanging onto a level headedness about the real world. Definitely he was a unique and gifted man. And one we will sorely miss in this battle for our country.
Thanks for featuring him Neo.
By coincidence I watched this video earlier today and thoroughly enjoyed his presentation. Crichton was a deep thinker and researcher. His fiction typically involved an element of science which was then extrapolated upon to create an intriguing tale. He wrote many fun, fast paced, and intelligent novels. State of Fear was one of his best.
Great. I’ve always known about him but never really investigated because he was a current author of fiction. Now I will. Linear thinking in a non-linear world. Simple and powerful. Can’t get more fundamental than that.
Thanks for the h/t! I wanted a little more Crichton
-never let a crisis, or state of fear, go to waste-
even if you have to create it yourself
I listen to this speech and long for a patriotic President that would call out out our destructive media in the same way. Which would surely prompt cries of shooting the messenger. But it’s time we recognised they aren’t just the messenger anymore. They increasingly create the messages out of whole cloth and do it from a socialist/marxist perspective. We deserve so much better than these indoctrinated ideologues purposely seeking to demoralise our country.
Read “Congo” and the Jurassic Park novels. Lousy science, poor legwork. In “Congo”, he had the c130 being the world’s largest cargo plane.
In JP II, he had a solar powered golf cart/motorcycle zooming all over the countryside, even at night, based on a day’s worth of solar on the roof of the thing.
Also, I was a quarter into a fantastic time travel novel when his Timeline came out. I had better characters and plot. Even started out the same way. But I was busted.
That said, we don’t have the proper treatment of science in this country. That includes skepticism, theory of the replicable–or not–experiment, context, and various other things.
I recall in 1960 HS chem using cheap orange tableware to practice with radiation counters. The prof told us that many folks eat off that stuff with no adverse effect. IOW, saying “radiation” isn’t the same as saying BOOOGABOOOGA WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!! Not sure everybody gets that.
Of course, when cheap science is used to motivate subsidy hunting–see ethanol–that’s a whole other level of ignorance and mendacity.
IOW, saying “radiation” isn’t the same as saying BOOOGABOOOGA WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!! Not sure everybody gets that.
Heh. I wonder how many peoople who installed granite countertops understand that granite is a source of radiation that one has purposely placed in their homes? and don’t get me started on smoke detectors…
The best line comes at about 8 minutes in when he says that after Chernobyl the most damaging contributor to health issues according to the UN was “bad information.” Can you guess who provided that in bushel baskets?
Crichton was not always a great writer, but I think he was an honest one who did his homework.
Richard Aubrey,
Asking a novelist to get all of the technical aspects 100% correct is fictional thinking. Crichton never pretended to get it all technically correct. He was a novelist. For me, Congo was a fun read because of all the license he took with science: great ape behavior, etc. Same goes for Jurassic Park. That said, I am a fan so perhaps I sport a bias.
I think the following points say it all:
1) Crichton’s main body of work was neo-Luddite cautionary tales. In almost all cases, he looked at how things could go wrong and wrote an entertaining tale of exactly that happening… His topics in film include: Genetic Research (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park), Robotics and AI (Westworld), Tinkering with the brain (Terminal Man)…
2) He set out to write such a tale about eco-disaster (he says this himself in State of Fear)
3) When he looked at the facts about what was known and unknown about ecology, about what environmentalists did, rather than what they said, he found a very different proposition to base a story on — and that became State of Fear, which is very much NOT a neo-Luddite cautionary tale.
In other words, looking at the science behind AGW, he found it so onerously bad that the scientist in him couldn’t write the story.
Says one hell of a lot, both about Crichton and about the basis for AGW.
Along with the late Julian Simon, he was one of the few voices for sense and reason in the realm where science and politics meet.
The official term you’re looking for, sir, is Rent Seeking
😉
An actual understanding of it lies at the heart of every true libertarian.
You can find a lot more of his speeches, for now at least, Here
Strangely, the following two very damning speeches have disappeared from his site, which had the essays out for people to read for themselves. I suggest you copy them while you can using “Save as web page”, since it seems to me that there is a concerted effort to eradicate his speeches from the Web. God only knows how long before the tinfoil hat types (yeah, sounds like a conspiracy theory, so call ’em that) manage to notice these and delete all access to them. Ha-ha-only-serious on that. They really aren’t easy to find any more, and if you didn’t know they existed, you’d probably find little reference. There is something on them in the wiki entry, which are conveniently “unsourced and hence targeted for removal”. I’d add the above links but I’m afraid they’d disappear like the other MC web pages that have the info.
Aliens Cause Global Warming
And
Complexity Theory and Environmental Management
These two speeches should be required reading in high schools. College courses should be designed around them.
Heh: An old quote from many many years ago: