NYT Hit Job on the late Michael Crichton
November 9th, 2008Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Today’s New York Times has a disgraceful column by Dave Itzkoff critical of the late Michael Crichton. Itzkoff, who once wrote on the pages of the NYT that Crichton was an “unabashed demagogue,” apparently doesn’t like the fact that some on Crichton’s work — State of Fear on climate change and Next on biotechnology — included elements of fiction. Fiction, my dictionary tells me involves “invention rather than fact.”
Itzkoff didn’t like the themes of these two books and in cowardly fashion invents some unnamed people who were disappointed in Crichton. Itzkoff’s hit job speaks for these people to argue that Crichton’s fiction “seemed to convey certainty about facts that were in dispute” — Shock!! Horror!! A novelist who makes up fictional stories — who knew, least of all a book review editor at the New York Times? Itzkoff doesn’t appear to take issue with Crichton’s work on swarms of flesh eating nanobots, islands with dinosaurs, time travel, alien lifeforms, or many other inventions found in Crichton’s work.
Of course the hit job on Michael Crichton results from his real world skepticism about the science and politics of climate change. The Times explained anger at Crichton’s work in his obituary:
Mr. Crichton was attacked by environmentalists for presenting a tendentious picture of the issue. In his defense, Mr. Crichton said that he accepted the reality of climate change but thought that its dangers could not be known with any certainty and had been exaggerated by environmentalists.
Of course, with the criticism of State of Fear Crichton received what every author desires — he had everyone talking about and debating his writing (Next not so much). And on important issues of science and technology in society, that alone should command our respect. Crichton was skeptical about many things, especially the power of scientists and technologists in modern society. This is a fundamentally political topic and was present throughout his work, climate change being just another locus for exploring this common theme.
Regrettably, the politicization of the climate change issue is so thorough that any expression of skepticism about science or politics leaves one at risk of people dancing on your grave when you are gone. From the NYT we should expect better.
November 9th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
This is precisely what I expect from the NY Times. The NYT is the most thoroughly politicized news organization in America today (MSNBC doesn’t qualify as a news organization). Ideology and propaganda permeate every edition. Why would you expect their treatment of Crichton to be different?
November 9th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Stan-
I think that the NYT is a great newspaper. But that is why this column stands out as not up to the standards one might expect.
November 9th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Received by email from Mike Smith:
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Some of Crichton’s most important words:
“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period. . . .
I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. . . .
To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: “These results are derived with the help of a computer model.” But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world — increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.
This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?”
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November 9th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
This is a variant on the complaints I’ve read or heard from people that a PR counteroffensive was necessary to counteract the ‘bad science’ in whichever new book Crichton was releasing.
The definition Crichton advances appears to consider judgment foreign to science (he certainly considers politics foreign to science). Given what we know and understand of scientific practice, it would seem Crichton had a relatively idealized conception of what science is, or should be. Not having read more than Jurassic Park, I don’t know if he ever speaks about the replacement of old theories with new ones, and what that says about one scientist with reproducible results.
November 10th, 2008 at 1:39 am
Roger, the Itzkoff quasi-obituary seems to be a dumbed-down version of his book review of “Next” that you helpfully link to. Do you also see the book review as a hit piece?
FWIW, while I have not read Next, I disliked “Rising Sun” and “States of Fear” as obviously imbalanced polemics that were designed to inflame and mislead.
November 10th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Tom- The Itzkoff book review is just silly. But I also thought Next and State of Fear were pretty silly also, but not because they included fictional plot elements, which Itzkoff complains about.
Is a “balanced polemic” something like a “jumbo shrimp”?
November 10th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Apparently, Imbalanced Polemics transform a novel of fiction* into something far far more dangerous. Can that happen in movies, too?
Equally well, Imbalanced Polemics when applied to works purported to be non-fiction, especially in Climate Crisis subject areas, are designed to mislead and inflame.
We should abandon Imbalanced Polemics all together.
*literature in the form of prose, esp. short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people.
November 10th, 2008 at 9:18 am
A colleague sent me the link to this Crichton’s Jan 17 2003 speech “Aliens Cause Global Warming” http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
from which I believe Roger’s quote above is taken.
I think the entire speech is worth a read- in no small part to the description of the historical development of science from testable hypotheses to untestable outputs of models. Also his suggestion for independent verification of models. I have also suggested some form of independent evaluation or verification in this blog as a good idea for government funded work. Perhaps in the new administration…
November 10th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
I disagree with a lot of what Michael Crichton wrote and said. For instance, he says:
“As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science.”
I don’t agree at all. Now Paul Ehrlich’s I=PAT…*that* has nothing to do with science. But the Drake equation merely provides a logical framework for assessing the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence. The fact that most of the factors weren’t known at the time Drake developed the equation doesn’t make it unscientific.