[extropy-chat] ENVIRO: Crichton on Nature and Man

[David Lubkin]

At 07:51 AM 12/11/2003 -0600, Greg Burch wrote:

>The rest is just as good.
>
>   http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote05.html
>
>I highly recommend this.

I was similarly impressed when it was referenced on another list.  I wrote --

>Thanks for posting this; I hadn't seen it.  No ideas or facts I wasn't
>familiar with but I didn't realize he felt this way.  Do you know if he's
>always been this sort of rational skeptic?  It's great to see someone as
>well-known and popular as Crichton saying these things.

but then it was pointed out that he wrote a loony autobiographical book, 
Travels --

>I don't know about Crichton's skepticism or rationality with respect
>to the environment--he has traveled pretty widely and seen a lot of
>stuff--but the words "rational skeptic" are quite possibly the last
>words in the entire lexicon I'd ever consider applying to him.
>
>If you'd read his book "Travels" which documents his real-life
>experiences, you'd see how unbelievably gullible and addle-headed he is
>about so-called "psychic" phenomena.  He believes he can bend spoons
>with his mind.  He says that he thinks almost anyone can do it.
>         :
>What an idiot.  There are several more ridiculous chapters in which
>he talks about how he channels spirits, sees auras, being protected by
>some "bat-like" creature, and how he willingly gets taken in by every
>two-bit psychic and cold reader.  I'd quote some of this but it's so
>idiotic as to be painful.  It seems there is no single bit of flummery
>he won't fall for with alacrity.
>
>The whole book makes you feel sorry for him, really.  The entire
>postscript of his bug is a diatribe against scientists, who he thinks
>are just prejudiced because they can't confirm any of this claptrap.

So I generously allowed that since the book was written in 1987, maybe he'd 
grown since then.  Which led to a pointer to a recent interview, 
http://www.montgomerybell.com/atschool/activities/BellRinger/Issue3.pdf , 
which not only affirms his continued belief in nonsense but shows other 
unpleasant sides.  As I wrote,

>I'm a little confused by the seeming disparity between the rational skeptic
>who gave the speech and the spoon-bender.
>
>I had noticed earlier that while his books often have a veneer of science,
>they often either take on a tinge of There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To
>Know <bwa-ha-ha!> or delve into the supernatural.
>
>Was he was devoted to Christopher Lee movies as a child?
>
>I note in the Bell Ringer interview he admits that he began his writing
>career by plagiarizing George Orwell at Harvard.  Perhaps the unusual tenor
>of the speech is because he cribbed it?
>
>He's clearly able to bamboozle high school kids who don't read widely or
>know how to google.
>
>The interviewer described the ideas expressed in Crichton's sf as "ahead of
>their time, so much so that some people have even called him a
>visionary."  (People who haven't read sf?  His press agent?  But wait --
>this might be accurate.  Did he say anything in Travels about seeing
>visions, perhaps chemically induced?)
>
>Crichton said, "We were talking last night and somebody said something
>about one book where I had specified a motion control camera, and he said
>you know we're just developing that tech now."  This will come as a
>surprise to the fellows at Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic, who
>thought they'd developed it a quarter-century ago.
>
>It's asserted that his software company, FilmTrack, was the first to use
>digitized images in a movie.  I have not researched this claim but it seems
>unlikely, from what I know about the history of computer graphics and image
>processing.
>
>He's credited with being a programmer, again an unlikely achievement.  I
>can easily see how a high-schooler could be confused and think someone who
>owns a software company is necessarily a programmer, but Crichton does not
>correct him.
>
>Bottom-line seems to be that he's been so successful in Hollywood because
>he's a shameless BS artist who believes his own press and takes credit for
>other people's work.  (Which lets him fit right in.)


-- David Lubkin.