#dr malcolm

DERNERSERS

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Of course, no kakuhida Jurassic Park au would be complete without Hidan doing That Pose...

The Malcom Fallacy

Dr Malcolm perfectly captured the problem with too much moralizing sci-fi when he whined “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.”Because of course they should! “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs*?” The answer is obviously yes, utterly yes, that’s the positive control case to test absolute YESness. You don’t ask people that question to find the answer, you already know the answer, you ask people that question to find out if they’re worth talking to.

*a scaled pseudospecies distinct from feathered “actual dinosaurs”.

The real problem is the wrong people asking the wrong questions, then blaming science for delivering overwhelming  experimental evidence of their mistakes. Jurassic Park’s key question wasn’t “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs?”, it was “Should we unleash those awesome dinosaurs on a safari with worse security and fewer staff than the average Apple store?” No, you shouldn’t have done that. The science spectacularly succeeded in delivering a dinosaur miracle, and then specifically didn’t knock them out of the Park because that tourism screw-up’s entirely on capitalism. No scientist was collecting data for “Quantifying how much money we can make from tourism” or “Material testing the flimsiest fences imaginable with a goddamn Tyrannosaurus Rex”.

That’s the Malcolm Fallacy: blaming science for everyone else’s mistakes. You’ll see it in almost every techno-horror.

Should we invent AI? Yes! Should we connect it to military mainframes with nuclear launch authority? No!

Should we research viruses? Yes! Should we override the security computer and physically crack open sealed airtight doors when viral labs go into lockdown? No!

Should we research teleportation? Yes! Should we experiment on ourselves, alone, without even the most elementary laboratory (or even pizza parlor) standards of cleanliness? No!

Almost every sci-fi horror plot is driven by money-grubbing corporations but it’s the researchers who can’t even afford a change of clothes from their “I’m a scientist!” lab coats who take the blame. And now we have hordes of idiots destroying cropfields and resurrecting defeated diseases while CEOs gold-plate profit reports on basic medicine. 

Dr. Malcolm’s worries about the dinosaurs being threats to humanity are dumb. Yes, dinosaurs are dangerous, but so are many of the animals of this planet.

First, there isn’t enough dinosaurs to reproduce and have a stable population. The villains only transported 11 species, and Blue doesn’t even have a partner to reproduce with. Also, there was only one big aquatic dinosaur, and as MatPat from The Game Theorists has said, it is a species that swims in shallow waters, so it can be easily contained by some vessels.

Second, the technology to clone dinosaurs has existed since the first Jurassic Park movie, and the technology used in the previous Jurassic World movie has been used for years. With Dr. Wu possibly dead and Masrani almost in bankruptcy, it’s true that some shady companies will try to get the hybridization methods, but they wouldn’t cause as much impact as real life biotechnologies. Hmmm, maybe a human dinosaur hybrid... However, as Dr. Wu said about the Indoraptor, creating a new being is really hard, and you can’t control something that is wild and smart. Weapon manufacturers should just give up on dinosaurs and focus on explosives and bullets. They can’t make money if their clients die when the “product” arrives.

Third, human cloning methods have been proved to work in this fictional universe, so humans can continue to survive in a world of dinosaurs and hybrids.

Don't. Just don't. I know dinosaurs are wicked cool but do we really need to bring them back?

Raptors are smart. Smart enough that it seems Raptors have a distinct trait for opening doors and windows in dramatic fashion.

My god. If you are going to design a weaponized dino, which sounds like a way more dangerous and expensive thing to create, give it some sort of weakness! If you make it "all powerful" what is to stop it from pulling a double cross!

ALWAYS consider the worst case scenario. Which is usually dinosaurs chomping people to death.