Musings on Expertise...

As mentioned in my last blog, I had the pleasure and privilege of being interviewed by Don McCauley for “The Author’s Show” (you can find a link to the interview at https://www.georgemoakley.com/new-events if you scroll down to the bottom of the page).

And, as I’ve mentioned, many of the questions were quite thought provoking.

For example, he asked whether there was a central message to the book.

My response was that I read to be entertained, so I write to entertain.

I find ‘preachy’ novels tedious.

That said, my stories do reflect my values, and there are a number of tropes I avoid. Such tropes include the notion that the peril confronting our heroes is the result of ‘the scientists’ messing with something they shouldn’t and having the peril compounded by the naiveté or outright stupidity of key characters.

Believable, sympathetic characters will, like all of us, have their strengths and weaknesses, but there’s a difference between smart people working their way through a problem, learning along the way, and people taking cringingly stupid actions.

In my novels, the characters each of their respective areas of expertise. When confronted by a novel peril, they have to figure it out. They make mistakes, costly mistakes, but they’re understandable mistakes based on what they do and do not yet know when they make these mistakes.

And part of the fun, at least for me as a reader, is feeling like you’re part of the discussion as these experts struggle, together, to understand and address the threats they face, especially if this includes learning a thing or two along the way.

Dealing with the existential threats the Eden colonists face in ‘Kraken of Eden’ and ’Tides of Eden’ requires understanding the biology of the threats, applying the scientific method, and sound and practical engineering.

In particular, they have to apply, as discussed in another of these blogs, the part of the scientific method that deals with paradigms.

This all came to mind, recently, as I scrolled through a social media ‘debate’ regarding evolution.

There were, of course, participants that dogmatically reject evolution entirely.

But there were also quite a few lay people whose understanding of evolutionary theory was sufficiently superficial that, despite their best efforts, they could not effectively engage in the debate.

And, really, that shouldn’t be an issue. Most people really don’t need to be experts in evolutionary theory, any more than they need to be, say, experts in automotive transmission design or carpentry or quantum theory.

We each have our areas of expertise worthy of others' respect, and we each should respect the expertise of others.

But, these days, as exemplified in far too many debates, we are experiencing not only a denial, but an outright disdain for expertise.

Consider attending an entertainment event. Buying a ticket to see a movie, or a concert, or a sporting event.

The fact that you’re willing to spend money on such a ticket indicates that you recognize and value that other people have not only an innate talent but have also invested considerable time, energy, and resources to nurture that talent.

You certainly wouldn’t spend money on a ticket to watch me play tennis, I assure you.

Why is it that we’re willing to acknowledge, celebrate, and, as measured by ticket prices, value the expertise of entertainment and sports figures, yet far too many of us reject the expertise of scientists or economists or any of the other areas of expertise relevant to so many of the important issues we face?

For example, one of arguments made against evolutionary theory was the entropy argument. Why do we see increasing sophistication of life forms, such as the progression from single cells to humans, if there’s not a divine force driving this progression?

This argument presumes that there’s a progression, which is a popular misconception driven by the depictions we’ve all seen of a sequence of figures, typically left to right, starting with either a crouching ape or a fish crawling up a beach and ending with a dude in a suit or carrying briefcase or something along those lines.

Yes, especially in popular literature, we tend to depict evolution in hindsight. We start with the modern form, then depict, before it, its evolutionary predecessors.

But that’s NOT how evolution works.

Evolution is not a linear progression.

Evolution is a bush.

Life forms diversify randomly through their inherent variability and through mutations.

Sometimes, especially as environmental conditions change, these variabilities affect reproductive success, and some do not. At any given time, the individuals we see are the descendants of the individuals whose variability favored their reproductive success.

If you look at the history of life on our planet, sure, you see, AMONG MANY OTHER THINGS, an increasing sophistication of some life forms.

But such 'advances' are far, far outnumbered by the proliferation and diversification of the rest of the planet’s biology.

There are, for every advancement, a LOT of new bacteria, virus, and so forth.

Let’s look at this another way.

If you decided to flip a coin 10 times, the odds that you’ll get 10 heads are pretty poor.

But if you decided to flip a coin 10 times, and you decided to repeat that exercise 1,000 times, I guarantee you that, at least once, you’ll get 10 heads.

When we depict evolution in terms of the ancestral forms of a modern sophisticated species, we aren’t seeing divine intervention in our coin flipping.

We’re just ignoring all the coin flips that didn’t produce the kind of exceptional result that captures our attention.

People that have studied evolution understand this and could explain it, but, when we don’t respect expertise, we don’t listen.

And this IS important!

One of the reasons scientists find this frustrating is that evolutionary theory isn’t just a theory. It is a conceptual framework, a paradigm, within which biology makes sense. Evolutionary theory provides the context within which scientists can make and test useful predictions.

Want to improve crop yields? Want to detect and prevent, or at least respond to, a pandemic? Want to breed a new, really cute breed of dog or cat?

Evolutionary theory provides the foundation for that work.

So, yes, I read to be entertained, so I write to entertain.

But, in my novels, experts and their expertise are not only respected, they are essential to the plot…

"The Author's Show"; Who's the Book For?

Recently, I had the pleasure and privilege of being interviewed by Don McCauley for “The Author’s Show” (you can find the interview at https://www.georgemoakley.com/new-events).

I was particularly impressed by the process. I was sent a set of potential interview questions to help me prepare. At first glance, they seemed simple, straightforward questions.

Then I started jotting down notes.

Here’s what I wasn’t expecting.

I wasn’t expecting these questions to inspire so much introspection about my writing and my novels.

With that in mind, I thought I should not only post the above link to the interview, but also offer distillations of some of the notes I wrote in preparation.

I was asked who I wrote the book for.

That’s actually an interesting question!

I wrote the book I’ve always wanted to read. If you’re like me, and you enjoy science fiction or monster stories, you’ll enjoy my books.

But I also have readers, and this really surprised me, that are NOT science fiction fans and still love the books.

Why?

I love a story that takes me someplace else. Makes me feel like I’m part of a different world.

Doesn’t have to be an alien world. Could be the samurai culture of feudal Japan or life as part of an organized crime family. Just take me to a different world and make it so vivid, so realistic, that I feel like I’ve really been there. Give me characters I grow to love, and miss when the story’s over.

If you want to be immersed in an alternate reality, you’ll like my books.

But don’t break the mood. I’m the kind of guy that watches a movie set it southeast Asia that gets distracted by actors walking by central American trees, or seeing some character tap a few keys and magically hack into a top-secret system.

That’s why I love hard science fiction. Everything about this story is as realistic and plausible as possible.

If you love hard scifi, like “The Martian” or the original “Jurassic Park”, you’ll enjoy my books.

If you like thrill rides, if you like plot twists that surprise you but make perfect sense in hindsight, and characters that prevail through not just strength but smarts, by solving a complex puzzle through science and critical thinking, you’ll enjoy my books.

Now, I must say, my books aren’t for the squeamish. The monsters are truly monstrous.

And when a younger reader expresses interest, I explain to parents that it’d probably be rated PG-13 or R for the intensity of the alien attacks. There’s some strong language, but not that much. When it happens, well, you’d swear, too!  And sexual behavior is referred to but not graphically described.

Short Term Pessimist, Long Term Optimist

It’s been months since my last blog post. I have excuses, of course. I’ve been crazy busy. “Tides of Eden” manuscript is finished and should be released in the fall, and I met lots of new readers through a variety of book events.

But, in addition to my excuses, I also have my regrets. For one, I recently realized I’d neglected to post anything about participating in a ‘Faith and Science’ event this past January at Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale, Arizona. Dr. Michael Hegeman invited me to be his guest for a discussion of ‘Faith and Science Fiction’ after reading “Kraken of Eden” (a recording of the event can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uZ2h-a2DOI).

At one point, Mike (Dr. Hegeman) brought up how the novel reflects back on the 21st and 22nd centuries, and I explained that I’m a near term pessimist and a long term optimist.

Let me explain.

I wanted to”Kraken of Eden” to be as plausible as possible in every way. My love of monster stories is always throttled by the implausibility of an alien with the digestive plasticity to munch our heroes, so I strove to describe a plausible alien ecosystem in which it makes sense for such a thing to evolve. I wanted to explore a culture that includes interstellar travel at relativistic speeds rather than faster than light travel. I modeled colonial population growth models.

You get the idea.

As much as I love science fiction, one of the many things these stories gloss over is why we’re out there in the first place. So, I applied what I’ve learned about strategic planning from my professional career.

Organizations of any kind, familial, professional, governmental, resist change. The bigger the organization, the greater the inertia. When you’re trying to convince an organization to make a profound change, you can talk all day long about the benefits. You can show them graphs and charts about return on investment.

And it’s possible, though unlikely, that you’ll see the organization change.

But if you REALLY want to motivate an organization to make a profound change, show them pain.

We see this all the time. For example, some years ago, a number of large companies had significant accounting scandals, resulting in the passing of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. Some years before that, a bank experienced a fire that destroyed key records, followed by a surge in companies investing in disaster recovery planning and infrastructure.

Technological upheavals are fascinating in this respect. Such upheavals bring competitive differentiation opportunities that cannot be ignored. Companies initially resist investment, then fear falling behind their competitors. Internal voices expressing concern about novel security attack planes are ignored until spectacular events inevitably happen, then get the funding they’ve been pleading for.

When you’re trying to predict when an organization will make a strategic change, you have to ask when it will hurt enough.

Which brings me back to being a near term pessimist and a long term optimist.

As I envisioned a future that would include “Kraken of Eden”, I wanted it to make sense that humanity has spread throughout our solar system and begun colonizing nearby star systems. Certainly, one can envision the excitement of discovery. The return on investment that could be realized harvesting natural resources beyond Earth.

So, why haven’t we built commercial facilities on the moon? Why haven’t we done more with Mars?

Of course there are technological hurdles to overcome and we can argue about whether the potential return on investment would be sufficient.

But as I pragmatically looked at what it will take for humanity to expand beyond Earth, I found myself thinking about pain.

The human population is growing unsustainably. As our numbers continue to grow, as we, collectively, move more and more people from poverty to a middle class lifestyle that has a significantly greater ecological footprint, we continue to replace non-human biomass with the biomass of humans and our familiars (e.g., pets, agriculture, and vermin) and continue to change the climate.

I realized that, if you’d asked me, say 30 years ago, what kinds of events would be so profound that they would, finally, motivate us to act, I would have listed things like recording, year after year, the hottest years on record. Measurable sea level rise. Desertification. Increasing frequency and intensity of storms leading to the proposal of Category 6 hurricanes. Significant and ongoing declines in worldwide insect populations. Coral bleaching and the level of oceanic warming we’re seeing around Florida. The inevitability of zoonotic transfer pandemics.

In other words, I would have listed things that have already happened.

So, when I say I’m a near term pessimist, I mean that I fear the next hundred years or so may be quite challenging. “Kraken of Eden” characters reflect back on mass extinctions, pandemics far worse than Covid-19, famine, drought, …

I fear we’re going to learn just how painful things will need to get in order to motivate real change.

But I’m also a long term optimist.

Because I believe that we will get through the next hundred years. I believe we will, finally, expand beyond our Earth, and that great wonders await us out there.

It saddens me to accept that, given current life expectancies, I won’t be here to experience it all.

The best I can do is write novels that are as plausible as I can make them, and experience the wondrous future that awaits us vicariously through my characters.

While they avoid getting munched, of course…