Michael Crichton: Offsetting Brilliance and Stupidity, All within the Same Talk

By Nicholas Stix

There’s a famous statement by Crichton, which An Old Friend cites:

Crichton: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's [i.e. Murray Gell-Mann -- AOF] case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine [sic] than the baloney you just read. You turn the page and forget what you know.

N.S.: Crichton gave the talk in 2002, “Why Speculate?,” and it’s a long, witty one.

He presented the notion of what he called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, within what he called the problem of speculation. Crichton called any prediction of social change, “speculation,” and condemned all “speculation” as “useless.” “The reason why it is useless, of course, is that nobody knows what the future holds. “Do we all agree that nobody knows what the future holds? Or do I have to prove it to you? That was a misrepresentation of the concept of speculation. This is a term for which the dictionaries have (to my knowledge) not yet been politically corrupted, though I no longer trust “woke.com” (dictionary.com) to define “and” or “the,” so let’s check out Merriam-Webster.

speculation noun

Definition of speculation : an act or instance of speculating: such as
a : assumption of unusual business risk in hopes of obtaining commensurate gain
b : a transaction involving such speculation

Synonyms & Antonyms for speculation

Synonyms •

adventure, chance, crapshoot, enterprise, flier (also flyer), flutter [chiefly British], gamble, throw, venture

Antonyms • sure thing
•

Examples of speculation in a Sentence •

He dismissed their theories as mere speculation. The book is just a lot of idle speculation about the future.

Crichton complained that journalism is inundated with “speculation,” and called any and all such speculation false.

Although you’d never know it, in this age of the antiversity and fake journalism, there are numerous social science laws, which have vast powers of explaining social phenomena. A couple of years ago, I compiled 11.

If some “expert” should assert that he has determined that a statistical index for a group has broken the social science law that has been observed to govern activity X, then as Hume said of the argument for miracles, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Or in the immortal words of Rickey Ricardo, the expert’s “got some ‘splainin’ to do.” In practice, the “experts” contradicting the social science law (or their fan base) react to challenges with hostility.

One such law, via the statistician La Griffe du Lion, is that there is an average black-White IQ difference in America of one standard deviation (in this case, of 15 points), with Whites at 100, and blacks at 85.

Based on that law, one can predict with confidence that reducing the percentage of White students in a school or school district, while increasing the percentage of black students will cause an accompanying decrease in test scores.

Another such law is that blacks commit an average of 7-10 times as many crimes, percentagewise, than Whites. The reason for the gap being so loose is that the FBI-DOJ Bureau of Crime Statistics has for many years manipulated the White stats, to make it seem as if Whites were much more crime prone than they really are, by counting Hispanics as White. (Hispanic citizens have triple the crime rate of Whites. One hundred percent of all illegal aliens, alias “immigrants,” the majority of whom are Hispanic, are by definition criminals.)

If a school or school district’s proportion of White students decreases, while its proportion of black and/or Hispanic (89 I.Q.) students increases, but its average test scores do not go down, or even rises, proponents tell us that the educators brought about an “educational miracle.”

The real explanation is invariably educational fraud.

Thus, when Rod Paige presided, as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District (HISD), the largest in the state, over incredible improvements in test scores, the results were hailed by Gov. George W. Bush as “the Texas miracle,” and newly elected President Bush rewarded Paige by making him secretary of education.

In 2000, the Democrat Party’s Rand Corporation sought to win the election for Democrat Vice President Al Gore, by funding “research” that would appear as an “October Surprise,” showing that the “Texas Miracle” was fraudulent.

As I exposed at the time, the Randcorp. team was led by an academic named Stephen Klein, included Laura S. Hamilton, Daniel F. McCaffrey and Brian M. Stecher, and was supported by Rand President James Thomson. The “research” team was too lazy to do the necessary investigative research. Instead, they wrote a long op-ed, ranting against the results in familiar, test-bashing clichés, e.g., “teaching to the test.” [Nicholas Stix, “October Surprise? The ‘Texas Miracle’ & Its Critics,” Toogood Reports and A Different Drummer, three parts: “Part I: The Texas Testing Controversy,” October 31; “Part II: ‘Dr. Spin’ Flips the Rand Report,” November 3, and “Part III: Rand Researchers’ Cheatin’ Hearts,” November 6, 2000.]

I showed that Klein had revealed his conclusions to Washington Post reporter John Mintz at the time he was just supposed to be undertaking his research, in April, 2000. Much later, Paige’s fraud would be uncovered. He had done things like keeping weak students out of taking standardized tests. The scandal was exposed in 2003 by whistleblower Robert Kimball, who was then an assistant principal at Houston’s Sharpstown High School, with the help of CBS Houston affiliate, KHOU. As I wrote in 2007,

It seems that through a variety of dodges, the Houston Independent School District (HISD), the largest in Texas, had inflated 10th grade test scores. The tricks included phony bookkeeping that reduced dropout rates that were as high as 70 percent down to 1.5 percent, and holding back passing but borderline students in the ninth grade, and eventually leapfrogging them straight to the eleventh grade, so that they would not take the state tests given to 10th-graders.

In Atlanta during the 2010s, black public school children enjoyed a similar “miracle.” Ultimately, a ring of black “educators” was convicted of organized test fraud.

In New York City under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, there was a “revolution” in fighting crime that began in 1994, and which continued under his successor, Michael Bloomberg from 2002-2014.

As I have shown in a series of exposés, beginning in 1996, the “revolution” was also a case of statistical fraud. The most prominent name supporting said “revolution” has been Heather Mac Donald.

Like I always say, social policy debates proceed in the form of dueling lies.

My point is that, contra Michael Crichton, there are social science laws which have predictive value. There is nothing “speculative” about them. Thus did Crichton offset a brilliant insight with an incredibly stupid one.

There is no problem of “speculation” in the media. The problem is one of institutionalized dishonesty.