Chaos and Jurassic Park
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 10 сен 2024
- My full look at Jurassic Park:
1) A Look at Jurassic Park (The Novel): • A Look at Jurassic Par...
2) Jurassic Park: The Search for Dino DNA: • Jurassic Park: The Sea...
3) Jurassic Park: Chaos: • Chaos and Jurassic Park
4) Discussing Jurassic Park: • Discussing Jurassic Park
Theres a passage in Mostly Harmless where Douglas Adams describes a scifi office block with state of the art automated security and air conditioning, all perfect and guaranteed to never go wrong.
Everyone inside is dead. Because "guaranteed to never go wrong" really means "when it fails, there is no one in the world who knows how to fix it"
That probably isnt chaos theory, but that would be my best argument for "this park is exactly as doomed as you are certain that it could never go wrong"
Where nothing can go worng
@@chrismyofb4909 Where nothing can possi-blye go wrong
... possi-BLEE go wrong. That's the.. first thing that's ever gone wrong.
Actually, yes you´re extremely right, you can´t have a semblance of an idea to gauge something without many or all variables, like trying to make an average out of a single piece of data. The whole concept of the park being infallible is as strong -or weak- as the park failing from the smallest, least conceivable detail....chaos theory only dictates events in the plausibility and probability of their occurrence, but cannot guarantee either without sufficient data to actually calculate with, and the complex system actually generating results by being executed.
Hmmm...a mighty machine built for the purpose of inspiring awe, providing comfort and being completely "unsinkable", therefore not enough contingencies were put in place, like life boats, if, say...chaos tosses an iceberg in your path...and the lookouts don't have binoculars because somebody forgot to unlock the compartment where they were stored before debarking...and a decision was made at the last second to veer hard-left instead of plowing head-on, which ships of the time were designed for...and even then it likely wouldn't have sank if the builders weren't forced to cut corners in mass producing the millions of rivets for the hull, leaving many brittle and easily shattered in cold temperatures, allowing the iceberg to open up the hull like a zipper, far past the limit of the emergency bulkheads to contain and stop in inflow of water...then in a panic the captain saying "women and children first" being misinterpreted as "women and children ONLY", resulting in over a thousand deaths a sea...
Now where have I heard THAT before? It's almost like there are real infamous examples in history of how bad things can go when you assume your creation is "perfect" and "foolproof."
"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen
In the movie, the failure of Jurassic Park was due to Dennis Nedry's sabotage, but in the book, the park had already undergone serious and irreparable failure before Malcolm and the others even arrived upon the island, and this was entirely due to the kinds of systemic failures Malcolm was predicting. Each deviation seemed minor and easily manageable, but rapidly spiraled exponentially out of control. The book does a much better job of portraying the park as inevitably doomed to failure, despite the vastly superior security and countermeasures as compared to what is seen in the movie. In the book, Nedry's betrayal only accelerated what was already unavoidable.
Nedry was just a product of those compoundkng failures.
Hammonds famous quote is "spared no expense" yet nedry was the only person managing all of the computers doing the job of like 30 people.
He's portrayed as a bad guy but the guy was doing what most people would do with that bad of an employer
Nedry is actually part of the system. He is part of the uncertainty related to technology in the island, and misbehaviour of the directive. He is not a brick, he is part of the equation from the start and prove of that is that the problems that lead to the bad outcome of the island start from the beginning of the park, due to corporate greed. The same greed that started everything.
In the strictest sense; it's 35 miles from the sign to the nearest Post Office in that location. It's a throwback to when we were dependent on the mail far more than we are today.
Huh. Good to know. I always assumed it was miles to 'city limits', whatever they happen to be for a given location.
Ok, let's be honest. The water drop example was just an excuse to touch Ellie's hand.
Chuck is an English teacher teaching me Math.
And doing a better job of helping me grasp the idea and keep me engaged to it than any math teacher I ever had.
An doing it better than most math proffesors
No he is Geek teaching you math because he can't stop talking about Speculatuve fiction 🤣
God Bless you Chuck you must have been a great teacher.
I think a big oart of Malcolm's calculation of the failure of the park due to chaos was taking into account the fact that Hammond thought it couldn't fail and therefore was not prepared.
Chaos and Jurassic Park. Aka the state of affairs & opinions towards the films and its franchise after the first movie.
"Humans are odd. They think that order and chaos are somehow opposites and try to control what won't be."
-Vision _Avengers: Age of Ultron_
Thanks to this video I can better appreciate this line.
So there is an issue with your statement with Chaos and Nedry... Nedry DOES fit into Chaos Theory.. He is not a brick at all. It's just that Ian would never have predicted Nedry... because Nedry is in a model Ian Malcolm wasn't looking at.
Malcolm made a model about the animals and the function of the park. Except he never talks about the people in the park at any time in the book in terms of his model. it is about the systems, the computers, the animals. Not the people. But if he had... he would have predicted Nedry. If you have a rich man that only cares about money and you repeat over and over him treating his employees as purely 'a ways to make money' and 'a way to avoid spending as little money as possible', it is easy to predict that eventually you will have someone snap. You will have people like Wu, like Arnold, who grumble under their breaths about it but don't do anything. Then you will have people like Muldoon, who made a threat to go to the papers to get his way. And finally the most extreme... Nedry decided to screw over Hammond. Chaos would predict this... that you can't treat people the same way and expect each one of them to accept the attacks.
It's like Malcolm's comment in the movie that people sometimes mock, him stating "Who could have predicted Dr. Grant jumping out of a moving vehicle?" That is seen as not actually chaos in terms of the theory but just a random thing by some. Except it isn't... if you factor in people you would realize that some would begin to cause the variations... the ones that would want to leave the car. And thus... it can be predicted, as Muldoon says, that they need locking mechanisms.
My only problem with your argument is that it makes good sense. So why do bosses and HR departments still function as Hammond does to his employees? Add in how few seem to be capable of having a reaction planned for going to the papers or snapping?
@@danamoore1788 In a phrase? The Idiot Paradox.
An idiot does not realize they are an idiot and thus can mock an idiot for doing something they themselves do, but justifying it as "I'm not an idiot so what I am doing is not the same"
A boss can go "Im not evil like that boss!" while doing the same thing the other boss is doing that is evil. Because they justify, they create blindspots, so on. A major part of training a manager is breaking them of this habit.
But if Malcolm's mathematical model didn't factor in one of the most important factors - THE PEOPLE running the park - then the entire model is worthless.
@@TF2CrunchyFrog Exactly. And what is a theme of the novel Jurassic Park?
The false trust placed in "the machine". Just like Arnold and his belief that the system must work so does Ian believe his computer program MUST be correct and have factored in everything.
But with both, something small was forgotten...
I would debate that he WOULD predict Nedry and instead say that he MIGHT predict him because his model wasn't designed for specific problems, only general. Chaos theory can be used to show where problems MIGHT occur, but can not be used as a 100% accurate assessment. And something that surprises many people is that because of Chaos, literally everything could go perfectly. Is it extremely unlikely, yes for sure, but it IS possible within a true Chaos system because there is no true way to know when will happen, only what might happen. What I mean in regards to Nedry is that maybe he just rolled over and did what he was told by Hammond. Or maybe he would have too much integrity to be bought out by Biosyn. Whatever the case, there is still a chance that Nedry would not do what he did and therefor could not be counted as something that WOULD happen, only something that MIGHT happen.
The interesting thing about the movie is that even without Nedry, the Jurassic Park systems will fail. Hard drives fail, data becomes corrupted. A system so dependent on the computers, without any failsafes is a disaster already in progress. You cannot prevent chaos.
You see? Nobody could've predicted that two people would suddenly press the dislike button...!
And now, here I am, sitting by myself in front of a microphone, talking to myself. THAT'S Chaos Theory.
This kind of reminds me of the discussion of psychohistory from Foundation...
When he was talking about the thrown brick, my first thought was The Mule-and how that was something the Seldon Plan did not (and could not have) predicted.
@@CSXIV I know, right!?!
I've been a huge hater of the Malcom character for a while, and when I re-read the audiobook, at first Novel Ian seemed better, but then it quickly became clear he was SO much worse. And I hate the fact that everyone keeps acting like Malcom was right, especially when Jurassic World showed a park that had run for a decade with no incidents
Well he is basically the antagonist or at least the creator of all antagonists in the story. It ends with him being wrong and realizing that. Ignoring the cash grab sequels of course.
@@Horatio787 The movie version irks me most of all, especially the Fallen Kingdom version of 'Hey, I know humans made these animals, and we have the capacity to save them, but let's just, not.'
I mean Cheetahs are going extinct without human interference (their genetics are basically a time bomb of inbreeding) but that hasn't stopped us from trying to fix things, and we didn't even create them
"And I hate the fact that everyone keeps acting like Malcom was right"
The issue is that the Ian Malcolm character is a _huge_ Mary-Sue type character (a.k.a. a Gary Stu, since he is male). He's the author's "edgy-cool" mouthpiece character who sprouts one-liners about "chaos theory" and "nature will find a way", and Crichton literally wrote the story so that Malcolm is always proven right even when he is wrong. Any characters who doubt Malcolm are made into strawmen to be shown up.
@@TF2CrunchyFrog I DID like him more in the second movie, where he was at his least Malcom. But as someone who was getting back into science as an interest when I listened to the audio book again, I wanted to slap Crichton for his portrayal of how science 'worked'. But I hate that everyone is always so happy to see when Malcom is in a movie, and I blame that on Goldblum's popularity
@@TheKyrix82 Oh sorry I was mistaken, I meant the Hammond character is the antagonist who creates all the problems but gets rewritten in the sequels. Although Malcolm does have this Mary Sue vibe of always being right but he's wrong once you realize it's a movie where every action that happens reinforces a moral that isn't necessarily true.
I think the counter point to this is that, regardless of Nedry's espionage or not, the park was going to fail...at least, in the novel. Raptors were escaping to the mainland and people were dying, so by all technical accounts the park had already failed by the beginning of the book. The *catastrophic failure* of the park which resulted in the deaths of most of its staff and visitors is what the book focuses on *for effect.*
Thanks for the recommended reading at the end Chuck
This discussion has (absurd as it my sound) made me more interested in exploring this branch of mathematics than my childhood love of dinosaurs
1:25 you joke, but it worked. First video I see of yours and you break out a spreadsheet to review a film/book, that's a winner for me
You get a thumbs-up for the "Brain Donors" reference at 12:25. That's one of my favorite comedies being referenced in a discussion of one of my other favorite movies.
I think it's important in this case to seperate the human motivations of the characters from the chaos. Hammon's greed and Nedry's desire for revenge are bricks that turn the park into anarchy and create a dangerous situation for the characters that makes for an exciting novel. But the chaos is still there: the dinosaurs figure out how to breed, they figure out how to escape the island and overcome their lysine defficiency. These things are already happening before Nedry's sabotage.
of course basic biology overcomes a lysine deficiency by .. eating food.
but for the sake of the plot we can just squint our ears and pretend it was some other deficiency
Indeed. And what ultimately doomed the park wasn't Nedry's sabotage, it was ultimately a simple overlooked detail regarding main power and auxiliary power. The novel state it best: It was normal. When you shut down the system to reboot it, you'll only boot auxiliary power as the main power required a stronger kick to start. Before this simple realization, Jurassic Park was simply being brought back under control, with only a few deaths caused by the T. rex. Had Arnold not overlooked this detail, the park would have been 99% restored.
Part of the problem is that the setup of the park would have fallen apart if they'd been keeping GOATS. Almost no human observers, logistics automated, the counting system was set to stop at the expected number to save cycles, and 20% of the island isn't even being covered by sensors and cameras. A contiguous 20% at that, the part along the river.
note to self: attempt to keep goats first, see if I'm any good at that before moving up to dinosaurs
in fairness, i mean, JP was meant to have been running for years in secret, right? these aren't all a few-months-old clones, the brachiosaurs would have to be force-accelerated to get to adulthood inside of a decade as it is. So maybe all those years of success got them feeling cocky.
loving this series and enjoying the channel quite a bit. going to dump a block of text here.
the system compromise from nedry is the trigger for the sudden total collapse of the park, but animals were already able to leave enclosures and breading in the wild on the island if i recall correctly. the issue of raptors being on the escaping boat, able to breed and survive without artificial lycene was already going to be an issue with or without nedry assassinating the park's security systems. there was an underlying lack of control. even if the park had continued to exist and operate all the way through to a full public opening to business, the animals not being controllable or understood in the way we can understand modern zoo animals could have led to the park closing and failing that way.
if the park had operated publicly only for a bunch of raptors to show up on the mainland, breeding and killing human beings, that would likely be the end of jurassic park as a commercial endeavor. the park would have failed from that perspective. might have to reread the book to refresh my memory of events.
God i love this video. I hope some of your classic long-form disscusions gets reformatted & uploaded like your excellent Profit & Lace disscusion or your AI disscusions from the Matrix. Those are such good thoughtful disscusions.
Keep up the great work Chuck.
The best English teacher I ever had was the wrestling coach at my high-school who was conscripted into teaching us hooligans English in the "last chance for screw-ups" program I was in.
The best Math teacher I ever had was an English teacher, right here in this video.
Spreadsheets help drive RUclips metrics though comments.
I always understood chaos theory as described by Crichton as the following: In a big system with many variables it is impossible to predict the behaviour of any given variable at any given time but it is possible to predict the overall, most likely outcome of a continued interaction between these variables. Kinda like in sports. Who wins the cup at the end is often pretty easy to predict, there are certain favourites each year in every sport. But it is way harder to predict the outcome of every single game. The top teams in any given sports league are likely to win more games than they are going to lose but you can't really predict how man they are going to lose and hence you also can't really predict which ones those will be. Did I get that kinda right or am I way off?
Whenever you get to The Lost World I hope you talk more about Gambler's Ruin.
I totally didn't overlook this video yesterday.
Thank you for actually going into the mathematics. I've seen way too many explanations out there that sort of gloss over chaos as just some nature going haywire and not something that would occur in seemingly simple equations like the tent map.
And...that is kind of where I can see the fault in Jurassic Park's argument. It's an allegory that would work if you sort of see chaos theory in a more colloquial level, but quickly falls apart and even start to not make sense when you read anything by Strogatz.
I would argue that the tradeoff between the pursuit of a dream and the inevitability of human incompetence would be a much more interesting thing to focus on in the story.
The real problem is they didn't do the precautions of a modern zoo, keeping shit like chimps is harder than a t-rex would be.
Nedry's sabotage also counts as an example of chaos. Flaws in the initial conditions of the human social system that made up the company led to Nedry's sabotage. Even if Malcom wouldn't have calculated Nedry's act of sabotage, a sociologist or cultural anthropologist probably could've predicted it. Nedry's act of sabotage was not a thrown brick, it was a direct result of flaws in the company's human social system.
I love spreadsheets. They bring me such joy!
*starts talking about spread sheets*
Aaand now I'm here by myself, uh, talking to myself. See THAT'S that's chaos theory.
"Try not to break your mouse on the way to the subscribe button."
*looks at subscribe button*
Why am I not subscribed!?
So, at the end of the film, when the T-Rex eats the velociraptors and saves the humans from certain death; is this meant to symbolize “a seemingly wild mess demonstrating orderly effects”?
T Rex stays hidden because he gets sunburned 😆
Lorenz shows that out of Chaos there is Dynamic Order.
Great stuff as always!
this actually reminds me of my job. the store works ok for the most part but we frequently have had to deal with problems to do with the automated parts of our computers, another was when they completely failed and we couldn't take credit or debit cards at all, and all the time for the last 7 or so months we have had the things glitching out and crashing, but the problem is what to do in the mean time. the problem is we can't do anything if the systems go down, we can't finish the days paper work if there is no power or the computers fail, or if they aren't done in the way that the company dictates, because the software that runs them is designed to restrict what you can do, because the upper management who set it up don't trust employees. so all theses systems give control to the bosses but if they fail nothing gets done. and money isn't made and is wasted. The systems these people put in to save money end up costing far more and not fixing the problems they introduce. im betting cheapness is why the park is built on an island no where near the usa so it doesn't have to conform to their rules.
Presumably Malcom's calculations weren't account for Nedry causing the park to fail WHEN it failed. Knowing his character in the books, he was probably accounting for the park failing after it opened to the public, and had the variables of dozens if not hundreds of guests fucking around in an amusement park zoo filled with extinct birds.
I think Ian was hoping the body count would be even bigger then it ended up being.
Why is the video only in 480p? It's been a while since I've seen almost every video editing app being available in HD. Other than that, great video! :)
Storms can cause chaos.
The problem is that the character of Nedry isn't a thrown brick. You're missing several initial conditions that directly lead to the creation of the Nedry event.
Let's go over them here real quick. First off you have the parent company of INGN. This was a biotech firm and one of several. It is a very obvious initial condition that one or more of INGN's competitors wood upon finding out about Jurassic Park discovery, would attempt 2 Co-op that Discovery for themselves. Second you have Nedry himself. This was a man that was hired to do one of the most sensitive and important jobs in the park programming the system that would run the entire park. However he has severe compromising issues including a reason to force that left them with high alimony and a complete lack of ability to handle his money. On multiple occasions he asked John Hammond for a raise and is refused. This is a perfect storm when combined with point one to create a destabilizing factor in the system, an industrial saboteur. The 3rd initial Factor you actually already touched on and that is John's Hammonds notorious stinginess. In addition to refusing to give Nedry more money just making his problems worse and making him more likely to go off the rails, John Hammond hired metre in the first place knowing he was not the best programmer in the world and that he had all these personal problems.
Now I'm not sure how much these additional Factors change your proposition but I believe they are worth considering
This ignores the issues in the book that aren't alluded to in the film?
420th Like, now and forever.
Awesome video! Subscribed
@TheBobBrom Absolutely!
ah shit i thought this was a Sonic Adventure x Jurassic park crossover video
Thank you, Thank you, THANK YOU for pointing out that many things are not calculable. No model no matter how good it many be can predict every situation, the essence of Chaos. And as I've said before, Chaos can certainly be used to show where problems MIGHT occur, but there is no guarantee that is will. A living system is constantly moving and changing and can never be fully predicted. And yet Malcolm constantly claims to have predicted not only that the park will fail, but when some specific things happen he claims his model predicted them too. More reasons why I say he comes off as a Pseudo-intellectual and not an actual intellectual.
What's weird is that the whole character and concept would have made much more sense if instead he'd been a safety inspector, an expert in the concept of Murphy's Law
which it took a clever disney cartoon to really help me understand _is a safety concept_ the idea being that the only way to prevent malfunction is to make it impossible. as long as it's possible, it's inevitable, given enough time. Not just 'random chance hates you and entropy always wins' but that an ounce of care really can make a gallon of difference. and Jurassic Park was utterly devoid of care.
The parks failed because of bad design. In the first movie they only had electrified fencing to contain the dinosaurs. And the fencing had no redundancies in case of power failure. Had they had solid walls for the enclosures they would have been okay.
In Jurassic World they had massive doors on the carnivore enclosures. Why have them if the dinosaurs will never leave their enclosures? The Indominous Rex, T-Rex, and Mosasaurus escaped because of these doors.
I pressed like at the Excel graph
Try not breaking out mouse heading to the subscribe button? You want us to unsubscribe? why?
7:20 Well you can't expect to wield supreme race-losing power just because some spreadsheet-using jerk hurled a brick at you!
when one considers the scientific faults of crichton's novels and the cinematic frenchise, one ends up understanding that in the fictional world of jurassic park, what they have isn't dinosaurs but hybrid mutations and so on UNLESS you consider a fan theory that's only hinted at: the fictional world of jurassic park is also that of king kong and conan doyle's lost world: 1: the ship "venture" appeares in "the lost world" "kong is mentioned in 1993". a character called roxton, who may be related to the hunter from conan doyle's novel (still very enjoyable today) appeares in crichton's novel. thus, actual dinosaurs were brought from these locations and adapted in jurassic park. it's a very tenouus theory, but so far it's the only one that can account for actual dinosaurs there. by the way' it would be interesting to discuss the loose ends that were left after the first novel, since the second one was influenced by the script treatment more than the first novel.
Chaos theory gets weird, really fast. If you have any interest in math or science, I would recommend reading up on it.
Back to the post office analogy - not only does the precise measurement of position and speed matter, but also the system of units. For example, back in the 60's Britain wanted to know exactly how long the coast of England was. The answer is: it depends on how you measure it. If your physical measurement device was 1m it would yield a different result than one that was 2m.
forget the dinos - people are involved so the odds are it will turn to crap
It's just a question of how many will suffer or die
First.