I Dub Michael Crichton A Smart Dude
…because he makes presentations like this one, which are very good. He links many things I’ve been thinking about–complexity, information and its effect on behavior, how bad things are suddenly good things again, how Ehrlich is a dangerous demagogue, counterintuition.
The link goes to an annotated lecture with slides that most emphatically does not suck.
…the assumptions I am talking about today represent another kind of map—a map that tells us the way the world works. Since this is a lecture on complexity, you will not be surprised to hear that one important assumption most people make is the assumption of linearity, in a world that is largely non-linear. I hope by the end of this lecture that the meaning of that statement will be clear. But we won’t be getting there in a linear fashion.
Some of you know I have written a book that many people find controversial. It is called State of Fear, and I want to tell you how I came to write it. Because up until five years ago, I had very conventional ideas about the environment and the success of the environmental movement.
The book really began in 1998, when I set out to write a novel about a global disaster. In the course of my preparation, I rather casually reviewed what had happened in Chernobyl, since that was the worst manmade disaster in recent times that I knew about.
What I discovered stunned me. Chernobyl was a tragic event, but nothing remotely close to the global catastrophe I imagined. About 50 people had died in Chernobyl, roughly the number of Americans that die every day in traffic accidents. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but it was a setback for me. You can’t write a novel about a global disaster in which only 50 people die.
Undaunted, I began to research other kinds of disasters that might fulfill my novelistic requirements. That’s when I began to realize how big our planet really is, and how resilient its systems seem to be. Even though I wanted to create a fictional catastrophe of global proportions, I found it hard to come up with a credible example. In the end, I set the book aside, and wrote Prey instead.
But the shock that I had experienced reverberated within me for a while. Because what I had been led to believe about Chernobyl was not merely wrong—it was astonishingly wrong. Let’s review the data.
I do recommend Crichton’s work here. Maybe you won’t click on volcano documentaries, but click on this one, all right?
3 Responses to “I Dub Michael Crichton A Smart Dude”
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December 28th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
So… by rendering the Volcano inefective and ingesting the lava they lowered the earth’s temperature by one one millionth of a degree, effectively ensuring the demise of the porcupine dolphin, heretofor unknown in the easter or western hemispheres and causing the eventual extinction of the Ballantine Microbe, which relied upon the dung of the Eastern Snail Darter who in turn needed the sloughed off epidermis of the Porcupine Dolphin to survive. What was not really known or understood until that point was that the Ballantine Microbe was absolutely necesarry fot the proper cask aging of Scotch Whiskey, and thus we find ourselves in the year 2006 in the untenable position of having only previously casked scotch for sustenance into our later years. Obviously the price of Scotch has now gone through the roof and the existing distilleries in the Isles have banded together to purchase Microsoft and Sun, and having no knowledge of informatin technology, business, brinery or anti-trust regulations managed to bolox up the entire works… and now I am out of work.
Damned Tiki Bar people.
December 28th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Chap, great link; thank you for sharing. Prime example of the great advantage available to the unscrupulous, if only because at least 50% of the public cannot read critically and many of the rest are too busy making a living and dealing with their children to take the opportunity for independent thinking. TV news tries to fill an impossible void, sympathizes with political elites who describe the public as helplessly ignorant, and winds up spreading their propaganda.
There must be some great opportunities connected with filling such unmet needs.
December 29th, 2005 at 9:35 am
Interestingly enough (to myself at any rate) I happened to purchase and read Crichton’s afore mentioned book “State of Fear”
this past Christmas weekend…
I was expecting to read a typical Crichton fiction book. While the book was fiction in and of itself, Michael took the time
to use real facts/studies, etc. to back up the ‘stances’ of a few key characters. Arguing ‘both sides’ as if there were a real debate
going on regarding the issues at hand in the novel. My experience reading his book was that the main fictional story line became
secondary now and then as I came across the arguements presented. More accurately, it became secondary when I came across
the supporting ‘documentation’ for the fictional arguements. I’ll be checking the sources he has quoted in the footnotes that can
be found throughout the book in the near future.
While I found the book to be a slow read personally (I was looking for ‘mental bubblegum’ to read durring my flights after all) I
did find some nuggets of knowledge to be gleaned from the work and highly recommend the book as an introduction to Michael’s
point of view. He makes alot of sense in his statements and opinions…
Thank you for bringing this up Chap!