Why Speculate?
A talk
by Michael Crichton
International Leadership Forum
La Jolla
April 26, 2002
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My topic for today is the prevalence of speculation in media. What does it mean? Why has it become so ubiquitous? Should we do something about it? If so, what? And why? Should we care at all? Isn’t speculation valuable? Isn’t it natural? And so on.
I will join this speculative trend and speculate about why there is so much speculation. In keeping with the trend, I will try express my views without any factual support, simply providing you with a series of bald assertions.
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This is not my natural style, and it's going to be a challenge for me, but I will do my best. Some of you may see that I have written out my talk, which is already a contradiction of principle. To keep within the spirit of our time, it should really be off the top of my head.
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Before we begin, I'd like to clarify a definition. By the media I mean movies television internet books newspapers and magazines. Again, in keeping with the general trend of speculation, let's not make too many fine distinctions.
First we might begin by asking, to what degree has the media turned to pure speculation? Someone could do a study of this and present facts, but nobody has. I certainly won't. There's no reason to bother. The requirement that you demonstrate a factual basis for your claim vanished long ago. It went out with the universal praise for Susan Faludi's book Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 1991, and which presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false.
But that's old news. I merely refer to it now to set standards.
Today, of course everybody knows that “Hardball,” “Rivera Live” and similar shows are nothing but a steady stream of guesses about the future. The Sunday morning talk shows are pure speculation. They have to be. Everybody knows there's no news on Sunday.
But television is entertainment. Let's look at the so-called serious media. For example, here is the New York Times for March 6, the day Dick Farson told me I was giving this talk. The column one story for that day concerns Bush's tariffs on imported steel. Now we read...
Mr. Bush’s action “is likely to send the price of steel up sharply, perhaps as much as ten percent..” American consumers “will ultimately bear” higher prices. America’s allies “would almost certainly challenge” the decision. Their legal case “could take years to litigate in Geneva, is likely to hinge” on thus and such.
Also note the vague and hidden speculation. The Allies’ challenge would be “setting the stage for a major trade fight with many of the same countries Mr. Bush is trying to hold together in the fractious coalition against terrorism.” In other words, the story speculates that tariffs may rebound against the fight against terrorism.
By now, under the Faludi Standard I have firmly established that media are hopelessly riddled with speculation, and we can go on to consider its ramifications.
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You may read this tariff story and think, what’s the big
deal? The story’s not bad. Isn’t it reasonable to talk
about effects of current events in this way? I answer,
absolutely not. Such speculation is a complete waste of
time. It’s useless. It's bullshit on the front page of the
Times.
The reason why it is useless, of course, is that nobody
knows what the future holds.
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Do we all agree that nobody knows what the future holds? Or do I have to prove it to you? I ask this because there are some well-studied media effects which suggest that simply appearing in media provides credibility. There was a well-known series of excellent studies by Stanford researchers that have shown, for example, that children take media literally. If you show them a bag of popcorn on a television set and ask them what will happen if you turn the TV upside down, the children say the popcorn will fall out of the bag. This result would be amusing if it were confined to children. But the studies show that no one is exempt. All human beings are subject to this media effect, including those of us who think we are self-aware and hip and knowledgeable.
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Media carries with it a credibility that is totally
undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call
the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by
this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-
Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater
importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would
otherwise have.)
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 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.
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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 than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
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That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it
does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary
life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you,
you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is
the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus,
which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But
when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence
that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of
the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The
only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
So one problem with speculation is that it piggybacks on
the Gell-Mann effect of unwarranted credibility, making
the speculation look more useful than it is.
Another issue concerns the sheer volume of speculation.
Sheer volume comes to imply a value which is specious. I
call this the There-Must-Be-A-Pony effect, from the old
joke in which a kid comes down Christmas morning, finds
the room filled with horseshit, and claps his hands with
delight. His astonished parents ask: why are you so happy?
He says, with this much horseshit, there must be a pony.
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Because we are confronted by speculation at every turn, in print, on video, on the net, in conversation, we may eventually conclude that it must have value. But it doesn't. Because no matter how many people are speculating, no matter how familiar their faces, how good their makeup and how well they are lit, no matter how many weeks they appear before us in person or in columns, it remains true that none of them knows what the future holds.
Some people secretly believe that the future can be known. They imagine two groups of people that can know the future, and therefore should be listened to. The first is pundits. Since they expound on the future all the time, they must know what they are talking about. Do they? “Brill's Content” used to track the pundit's guesses, and while one or another had an occasional winning streak, over the long haul they did no better than chance. This is what you would expect. Because nobody knows the future.
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I want to mention in passing that punditry has undergone a
subtle change over the years. In the old days,
commentators such as Eric Sevareid spent most of their
time putting events in a context, giving a point of view
about what had already happened. Telling what they thought
was important or irrelevant in the events that had already
taken place. This is of course a legitimate function of
expertise in every area of human knowledge.
But over the years the punditic thrust has shifted away
from discussing what has happened, to discussing what may
happen. And here the pundits have no benefit of expertise
at all. Worse, they may, like the Sunday politicians,
attempt to advance one or another agenda by predicting its
imminent arrival or demise. This is politicking, not
predicting.
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The second group that some people imagine may know the future are specialists of various kinds. They don’t, either. As a limiting case, I remind you there is a new kind of specialist occupation — I refuse to call it a discipline, or a field of study — called futurism. The notion here is that there is a way to study trends and know what the future holds. That would indeed be valuable, if it were possible. But it isn't possible. Futurists don't know any more about the future than you or I. Read their magazines from a couple of years ago and you'll see an endless parade of error.
Expertise is no shield against failure to see ahead. That's why it was Thomas Watson, head of IBM, who predicted the world only needed 4 or 5 computers. That is about as wrong a prediction as it is possible to make, by a man who had every reason to be informed about what he was talking about. Not only did he fail to anticipate a trend, or a technology, he failed to understand the myriad uses to which a general purpose machine might be put. Similarly, Paul Erlich, a brilliant academic who has devoted his entire life to ecological issues, has been wrong in nearly all his major predictions. He was wrong about diminishing resources, he was wrong about the population explosion, and he was wrong that we would lose 50% of all species by the year 2000. He devoted his life to intensely felt issues, yet he has been spectacularly wrong.
All right, you may say, you’ll accept that the future can't be known, in the way I am talking. But what about more immediate matters, such as the effects of pending legislation? Surely it is important to talk about what will happen if certain legislation passes. Well, no, it isn't. Nobody knows what is going to happen when the legislation passes. I give you two examples, one from the left and one from the right.
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The first is the Clinton welfare reform, harshly
criticized by his own left wing for caving in to the
Republican agenda. The left's predictions were for vast
human suffering, shivering cold, child abuse, terrible
outcomes. What happened? None of these things. Child abuse
declined. In fact, as government reforms go, its been a
success; but Mother Jones still predicts dire effects just
ahead.
This failure to predict the effects of a program was
mirrored by the hysterical cries from the Republican right
over raising the minimum wage. Chaos and dark days would
surely follow as businesses closed their doors and the
country was plunged into needless recession. But what was
the actual effect? Basically, nothing. Who discusses it
now? Nobody. What will happen if there is an attempt to
raise the minimum wage again? The same dire predictions
all over again. Have we learned anything? No.
But my point is, for pending legislation as with
everything else, nobody knows the future.
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The same thing is true concerning the effect of elections and appointments. What will be the effect of electing a certain president, or a supreme court justice? Nobody knows. Some of you are old enough to remember Art Buchwald's famous column from the days of the Johnson Administration. Buchwald wrote a "Thank God we don't have Barry Goldwater" essay, recalling how everyone feared Goldwater would get us into a major war. So we elected Johnson, who promptly committed 200,000 troops to Vietnam. That's what happens when you choose the dove-ish candidate. You get a war. Or, you elect the intellectually brilliant Jimmy Carter, and watch as he ends up personally deciding who gets to use the White House tennis courts. Or you elect Richard Nixon because he can pull the plug on Vietnam, and he continues to fight for years. And then opens China.
Similarly, the history of the Supreme Court appointments is a litany of error in predicting how justices will vote once on the court. They don't all surprise us, but a lot of them do.
So, in terms of imminent events, can we predict anything at all? No. You need only look at what was said days before the Berlin Wall came down, to see nobody can predict even a few hours ahead. People said all sorts of silly things about the Communist empire just hours before its collapse. I can't quote them, because that would mean I had looked them up and had facts at hand, and I have promised you not to do that. But take my word for it, you can find silly statements 24 hours in advance.
Cont'd......... |
