As an aside, Jean-Luc Picard's character was explicitly based on Horatio Hornblower (Stewart was given a stack of Forrester novels to prepare for the role).
In comparison between the two, Hornblower was a rather unimaginative person bound by his deep sense of duty and the extreme pressure of the Navy. Picard (as a character) replaces duty with the Prime Directive, and pressure came from feeling with the unknown.
I have a deep affection for stories where people are depicted as good, or even just good at their jobs. I appreciate for actors and writers it's a much harder ask - it's much easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads, especially if you yourself are somewhat uninteresting and never got much life experience. It's much harder making believable characters that we can look up to and respect.
> I have a deep affection for stories where people are depicted as good, or even just good at their jobs. ...
I've mentioned the series before... and I'll pitch it again. Nathan Lowell's solar clipper series. It starts with Quarter Share. The first book starts with:
Call me Ishmael. Yeah, I know, but in this case it’s really my name. Ishmael Horatio Wang. My parents had an unfortunate sense of humor. If they had known what I’d wind up doing with my life, they might have picked a different one—Richard Henry Dana, perhaps. Exactly why they picked Ishmael Horatio is a long, and not terribly interesting, story that starts with the fact that Mom was an ancient lit professor and ends with my being saddled with these non sequitur monikers.
GoodReads has a number of reviews that are spot on - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2334538.Quarter_Share (the writing is something that is "cozy" to some and "boring" to others... I liked the series but there's definitely a "nothing happens and there's no plot" aspect to it).
The main character starts out as a quarter share working in the galley... cleaning coffee urns.
Holy molly. I actually felt quite similar about the first one, but the second one was so ridiculously absurd that I felt I had been fooled by the first (quarter share) book? Did you feel a huge change in the second book? I genuinely could not tell if I had been misreading the first one or if the book went straight off into wish fulfillment absurdity?
The first three are a "tour" of the way a ship operates. Steward (and cargo), engineering (book 2), and deck (book 3). Of the first three, I think the second is the weakest, but book 3 picks up. There's possibly a bit of wish fulfillment writing in there... after becoming an officer (book 4), there's very little of "time in port" as responsibilities dictate otherwise.
Book 4 has a time jump of college - four years are a few paragraphs... and then he's an officer in a very unhappy ship. Books 5 and 6 finish off the 'share' sequence. If the first three are coming of age of a youth, the next three are the coming of age of a man.
If you're going through and reading them, at this point I'd switch to the "Run" series which has two young women in a very small ship in the toeholds. There's a lot of world building associated with it. These have much more of a plot to them.
Dark Knight Station: Origins might be a good read at this point if we're establishing a reading order which establishes the backstory of two characters (one who appears in Home Run, the other who appears in Suicide Run). Home Run fills in some gaps outside of Ishmael. The three books together help with some of the larger backstory that will show up several times.
This then brings us back to Ishmael with the series In Ashes Born, To Fire Called, and By Darkness Forged. Not going to provide any plot elaboration that might spoil previous books (things do keep building).
And lastly, there's the "School" series with SC Marva Collins with School Days, Working Class, and Hard Knocks... and this is as far as the author has gotten with the Solar Clipper series.
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If you had trouble with the 2nd, finish the 3rd and then give the 4th a try. I like the entire series and its world building. The mundanity of Ishmael's life (where exciting is often not a good thing). I really liked the later books - especially In Ashes Born.
Since you seem to be a real fan of the series and enjoy it, I will take your advice and read a future one at some point. But I would be curious what your feelings on a re-read of book 1 and 2 would be? I was just completely floored by the change in character that I saw in book 2. I felt like the book started with a normal, slightly above average, inquisitive character, who is handling new (and often mundane) challenges in his life one item (trading stand) at a time. And book 2 just retconed him into a gigachad who seemed to have none of the uncertain or hesitant nature of the book 1 character.
I'd contend that his insecurities were about the culture that he found himself in... which incidentally is an important point.
From book 6:
"... Ms. Maloney, as soon as you signed the Articles, you became a spacer." I almost smacked myself in the head for saying that. I couldn’t even imagine how many times I’d said I wasn’t a spacer. I sighed inwardly at my own stupidity.
This is timestamped as 2372.. book 2 is 2352.
I don't see it as him being insecure about himself as such. He's as much of a chad as any physically fit 19-year-old is...
He's still as culturally insecure at 20 as he is when he's 40 - trying to figure out how he fits in as a spacer who wasn't born to a spacer family.
So how does one handle the cultural insecurities at different points in one's life? At 20? At 40? nearly 50?
Book 5 gets a bit into the difference between the expectations of a planet (or station) life and that of a spacer and the stress there on relationships (and how they can work).
From the start of In Ashes Born this is stated quite clearly when talking to a therapist:
My sessions with Mal Gains continued to be interesting even if I didn’t find them terribly fruitful. He introduced me to more family-of-origin stuff. He placed great store in the idea that I’d been raised in a culture of academe with its values of knowledge, truth-seeking, and reputation but then shifted to the culture of spacer with values like dependability, competence, and upward mobility.
I'd contend that the overall arch of Ishmael's story is about seeking to be part of a family and with various people helping him learn that along the way.
I listened to the first audio book. It consists entirely of descriptions of the main character making coffee and hawking belt buckles. It is pretty tedious, maybe a more optimistic version of something like the game cart life
Yes, being a steward on a ship that has a few months between port of call is tedious... but you don't start out as a captain with the interesting things happening. You've got to work your way up the ladder and he started out on the bottom rung. Ship's Steward | Life at Sea | https://youtu.be/U02ndHzJGic as a book.
One of the things about the series though... there's no grand military conflict going on. There's no fighting aliens or heroic space marines. It's (initially) the story of a young man getting his family suddenly pulled away from him and thrown into the Deep Dark as he searches for his place. Not actively... though he gets that advice too. There's also a component of needing to take an active role in making life decisions compared to letting life drag you along (things tend to go less well for Ishmael when he lets life pull him).
Book 1:
“Look in your handbook, young Ishmael, and consider that your feet are already on a path. It might be wiser to select a branch before one is thrust upon you by circumstance.” With that, he strolled out of the galley.
Book 7:
His knowing look told me he remembered his own advice to me in the mess deck of the Lois. To choose a path before I found myself on one that I hadn’t chosen. “You once told me that I should consider that I’m on the path I’m supposed to be on.”
---
Books 4, 5, and 6 (Double Share, Captain's Share, Owner's Share) have much more going on with the decisions (and are likely more relatable as someone closer in age) than the equivalent of a day in the life of a unskilled 20 something... but the day in the life of the unskilled 20 something sets the foundations for how the decisions (and problems) of the man he becomes are dealt with.
It's also written in a game-like way - the world has a set of simple and understandable rules and the main character completes a series of challenges to progress forward. It reminds me of a lot of military fiction like Bernard Cornwell and WEB Griffith where in each book the main character gets a new promotion. It's sort of a childish view of life, like getting merit badges or something.
I can see that... for the first books. Though consider that at the time the main character hasn't gone to college yet and does have a childish view of life and is using the 'merit badges' as a goal. Give Milk Run a try, or if you're ok with jumping ahead, Double Share.
Thinking back to my own college days, the "merit badge" model and the planning guide for a major (first three books, Ishmael is pre college... the beginning of Double Share has a summary of his time in college that takes a fe paragraphs).
The more adult life choices all happen in the later books (and while he still has some focus on "the certification that allows him to do X" (steward's certification for carrying passengers) its a minor thing rather than the "what he does all day").
I haven't liked much tv sci-fi other than TNG and DS9. In recent times, The Expanse was a huge standout for me. It's also full of characters trying to effectively handle extremely difficult situations, and striving to be good people within their context.
It's very different from TNG in most ways, but it does share the emphasis on retaining humanity, dignity, and ethics within ambiguity and hardship. Very interesting to think about them side-by-side.
TNG put writing first. They went after interesting stories and didn't try to force them into a formula for ratings. Sometimes there was fisticuffs and phaser fire, but many of the best TNG episodes didn't involve violence at all. It was an optimist's take on the future. The cast of TNG was great, but Patrick Stewart's acting chops let them do episodes that another show couldn't have pulled off. He changed what was possible.
The quality of writing for DS9 was also quite good but, after trying the TNG formula for a season or two, they broke with the writing-first mentality and adopted an action sci-fi formula. The showrunners feared they'd lose ratings if an episode didn't have at least some action. It worked for DS9, but later Trek series have had a tough time shaking free of the action sci-fi formula. The problem with formulas is that, while they produce individual episodes or shows that are exemplars of their form, the sameness eventually causes viewers to drift away.
Strange New Worlds has shown it's willing to do some pretty wild things (e.g. turning its cast into muppets, adding gore and horror elements, etc.), but they have not messed with the formula in a meaningful way.
If you're looking for something outside the Trek formula, one recommendation I'd share is "The Foundation".
I think the problem with modern Star Trek series is that they simply have terrible writing. DS9 produced some of the best TV ever with action/sci-fi blends, and it also did more dialogue driven scenarios phenomenally well. I think the thing that really drew people in to DS9/TNG is that the writers really seemed to understand people of all perspectives, and so were able to create highly compelling characters and stories.
For instance the various plot points in DS9 between Sisko and Eddington (like "For the Uniform") often have you starting to cheer for the 'bad guys', while really confusing the question of who the good guy and who the bad guy even is. DS9 even excels as 'humanizing' the Cardassians who are, on the surface at least, just an evil trope. And recent times in real life should emphasize, to the point of absurdity, that this is what people and situations are genuinely like.
But the modern Star Treks feel like they were written by people living in a bubble with minimal life experience. They rely on political tropes and diametrically opposed good/evil stuff that's utterly banal, and intellectually insulting. They actually do have some of the same writers as previous shows though, so I assume there must be production/directorial pressures that caused the shift in 'style.'
Some TV shows are now being designed to be watched as background while the viewers are pecking away on their phones. Plots are simplified and repeated. Viewers are often shown and then told important points multiple times, just to make sure they don't miss them.
Discovery did this some of the time. There were episodes where they would show, then tell, then tell again all within a few minutes. Not every episode was done this way. I suspect they were experimenting and it did not go well. Anybody who was actually giving the show their full attention was bound to be irritated. Discovery was a low point in modern Trek for multiple reasons. They initially decided to forgo an ensemble cast and bet it all on a protagonist driven narrative. This severely limited the diversity of viewpoints in the first couple seasons. The writing was bad for entirely avoidable reasons. People who watch trek pay attention to the universe's rules. You can't beam through shields, you need to have a reason for why the away team can't be trivially beamed out of dangerous situations, etc.. The people writing Discovery did not bother to do this on a repeating and continual basis. Again, it was insulting to anyone who wasn't pecking away on their phone. I wouldn't say the writers for Discovery merely lacked life experience. They clearly hadn't bothered to watch previous Trek shows.
Strange New Worlds is better written, but a little too reliant on high concept for their most recent season. Every episode seems to have a gimmick. Still the cast is good and I look forward to them wrapping up Pike's story and, presumably, setting up a reboot of TOS.
Lower Decks is the best Trek show in recent memory. Thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. I can't recommend that one enough, just in case anyone skipped it because it was animated. Intelligent. Inventive. Hilarious. The people who made Lower Decks really put a lot of love into it.
Edit: I forgot to mention Picard, which is unforgivable. Some of the seasons were a little uneven, but some were fantastic and it was truly a treat to see Patrick Stewart as Picard one last time.
> Plots are simplified and repeated. Viewers are often shown and then told important points multiple times, just to make sure they don't miss them.
This kind of TV writing really frustrates me. I’m currently rewatching The Wire (just finished Season 3) and the producers, writers and directors take the complete opposite approach. Each season has a large number of characters with many subtly inter-relating plots. To get the most out of the show, you need to be paying attention and to have a good memory for recalling details from previous episodes and previous seasons. The first two times I watched the show (more than 15 years ago), I watched in on DVD (lower resolution, 4:3 aspect ratio). This time I’m watching it in 16:9 HD on Bluray and I’ve picked up so many plot points and characterisations that I hadn’t picked up (or don’t remember) before, e.g., one very brief shot in Season 1 explains how Bubs gets his nickname. It’s such a breath of fresh air for the writers to pay so much attention to detail and for the viewer to be treated like a reasonably intelligent adult.
I agree with your take on Picard. However, I didn’t enjoy Discovery so haven’t bothered with any of the other recent Star Trek series. Thanks for the summaries of the other two shows. I’ll add Lower Decks to my to-watch list.
I'd also generally suggest Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny ( https://www.youtube.com/@Dropping-Names ) where Brent Spinner and Johnathan Frakes chat with people about movies and TV. While it's not about Trek, it's a frequent tangential topic. I believe it's helpful in the context of "how much the fandom extends to other people in the entertainment industry."
As one would hope, given that it shared the same time setting and some characters. It's truly a shame they never managed to get Patrick Stewart in for a guest appearance.
I always felt like the problem w/ DIS was that the story itself was just incredibly overdramatic. TNG has... I think really only one of these moments in Conspiracy where The Federation is taken over by alien parasites, and OK let's just blame the 80s for that. But, just Lorca's arc in DIS would be a series-long drama in the TNG years, but it's literally like 3 episodes. Tyler actually being Voq is _completely insane_, and is also like 4 episodes. Also Culber dies! But also comes back! Can you imagine Geordi killing Crusher (who is retrieved from idk, The Nexus after a few episodes a little shaken but also totally OK), Data being a secret Romulan who underwent bonkers like, bone shaving to look human (and is also completely "fixed" in a single episode) and Picard also having euthanized his entire former crew but generally being completely fine?
For a while I thought the acting was melodramatic, but I actually think it pairs really well with the truly crazymaking amount of wild shit that happens moment to moment in DIS. Burnham should be a PTSD shell, Tilly should've resigned her commission long ago, etc. etc.
For me, DIS wasn't so much a case of "the problem with" as "amongst the many problems with".
Things as you say, but also: didn't know show's own technology history (Klingons with cloaks before they should've had them), adding in spore drive then needing to retcon it.
The show din't seem to know what it wanted to be and kept pulling in different directions, one of the early plans was an "anthology series, with each season being a standalone, serialized story set in a different era", which would have suited this much, much better: one or two episodes about the Klingon war, one showing Pike's command before Enterprise, young Spock's first mission, even some about a spore drive and the problems it has, some AI-takeover stuff, some post-TNG stuff, one episode about galaxy-threatening event, one about some post-apocalyptic thing like The Burn isn't even bad. But all that smooshed together with the same crew? Nah.
The reason Michael Burnham had a male-coded name was teased but never actually revealed (could have been interesting e.g. "adopted by Vulcans who didn't notice it was male-coded because that's a silly human thing"). Her character shifted way too hard and way too fast, from "Vulcan persona due to upbringing" to "traumatised normal human", a nature-vs-nurture tale could have been an interesting thing to explore.
And Michael Burnham was correct to want a show of force against the Klingons! Sure, wildly violated how command hierarchy works, but she was correct, and Starfleet Command should have known that because she got advice from Sarek. Not that she should have been Sarek's never-before-mentioned adopted daughter, we need to see new characters rather than just repeating the old ones; I mean, Vulcan is an entire plant, not a small Pacific island. (Amusing trivia from some fan-site I visited decades ago: VOY had the opposite problem, in that the list of extras appearing as background crew was larger than the crew complement).
And in the battle before they went off to the far future, that unexploded torpedo inside Enterprise, which the admiral heroically sacrificed herself to disarm… (1) it's antimatter, how does that "not explode"?, (2) it's ~ 50 megatons and inside the ship and in TOS an overloaded phaser pistol was supposed to be able to blow out multiple decks, (3) what, are their transporters not working? Can't you either beam it out, or the admiral out after she disarms it? (4) Why send in an admiral, did they run out of ensigns and non-officers? And Control (the AI) was proto-Borg, right as we had three seasons of Picard with season 1: Romulans, Borg, and Androids; Season 2: Q, Borg, and time travel; Season 3: Borg, Changelings, and Crusher saying "no one has seen or heard from the Borg in a decade".
Yeah at times they felt annoyed, almost contemptuous of Trek's history, both in terms of technology but also writing style. The things they put the crew (and thus the audience) through were insane. Like, I want to like Burnham, but you gotta give me a season before I can really empathize with her love being a stealth--in a bizarrely extreme way--Klingon. I want to like Lorca, but then you yoink him and make him full on evil. All the Trek's had solid crews you grew to know and love. DIS did everything they could to keep that from happening, like abusively so.
My first forays into DS9 were sort of haphazard and I didn't appreciate the political thoughts and tensions that are much more nuanced and consistent throughout the series compared to the relatively simple TNG operating paradigm of "we explore, navigate the inevitable sticky situations that arise."
Recently, and in no small part thanks to everything being available for streaming, I started with the DS9 pilot and made my way through all seven seasons. It took me several years of steady chipping away (spikes in watching on long flights, and weeks or months of no watching), but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are multiple sharks jumped. Alien sharks jumped. The same hammy and even adolescent takes on relationships. But through it all shines the enduring, consistent introspective existentialism.
I think watching DS9 in this way provides a richer experience while TNG can mostly be enjoyed by dropping in here or there, and you eventually pick up on the long arcs of the Borg, Q, etc...
DS9 took more risks and the characters are more complex and layered. A few of the episodes are up there with the best TV ever made.
TNG is very, very good, but it wears its heart on its sleeve. Picard never struggles with existential moral ambiguity. Even when he (rarely) fails, he's always The Good Man.
The utopian slant is appealing and we can't help cheering for him, but DS9 revealed there was some sleight of hand behind the narrative.
Of the series since, I think only Battlestar Galactica approached similar complexity. Maybe Westworld, which got quite abstract and interesting towards the end.
The Expanse is more by the numbers. It's basically class war in space, with the military, the aristocracy, and the peasants slugging it out, while a dragon rolls in and threatens to eat everything. The writing is very challenge -> response -> partial solution over and over, and for me it just doesn't have the depth or the emotional reach. (Or the acting chops.)
For myself there'd be many but it's difficult to name them in isolation. For instance 'In the Pale Moonlight' is obviously going to be near to #1, but I think if you don't have the buildup and character arc to that point that it might not hit with the same sort of impact as somebody who'd watched the show to that point.
It's kind of like Game of Thrones and 'The Red Wedding'. That episode is zomg, but if you watched it in isolation with no knowledge of the character arcs to date, it'd probably be interesting, but wouldn't have anywhere near the same sort of punch.
Duet is monumental. I've watched all the recent greats, from Sopranos to The Wire, and Duet remains the best realized hour of television I've ever seen.
"Far Beyond The Stars" is also incredibly tight and affecting writing and Avery Brooks delivers an absolutely stone cold believable performance while also keeping up the very Avery Brooks scenery chewing. Might be lost one someone who didn't know the characters outside of the Benny Russell scenarios but holy smokes.
> TNG is very, very good, but it wears its heart on its sleeve. Picard never struggles with existential moral ambiguity. Even when he (rarely) fails, he's always The Good Man.
I find this amusing, because of what his best friend said about him wearing his heart on his sleeve :
I liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.
I am worried that Game of Thrones ruined a generation of sci-fi and fantasy - everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone. Even besides the fact that we are manifesting a world where progress is impossible, it has turned genres that is traditionally very positive and escapist into bleak emotional slogs.
> I liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.
I recommend reading the original book series. In my opinion the writing only gets better as it goes on, and it’s obvious the writers had a plan in mind from the beginning rather than just writing more books for the sake of continuing a series where the ideas were all used up in the first book or two
> everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone.
GoT was a late-comer to this. For me, William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_ (1984) was my first exposure to dark and morally-compromised Sci-Fi. I am sure it predates this in novels. _Neuromancer_ inspired a couple of movies in the 90s: The Net and Johnny Mneumonic come to mind.
In US TV shows, I think Babylon 5 started the lean into the dark tone, and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica of the 2000s is a better example than GoT.
Stargate SG-1 in their episode Wormhole X-treme, which released Sep 8 2021, so just before 9/11, made fun of the TV industry trend of pushing everything towards darker, edgier, "extreme" styles.
Babylon 5, with the white-knight Rangers, the captain who single-handedly saved humanity in the war with the Minbari AND THEN went on to build friendships with them, and the completely monotonic, both-sides-of-the-coin moralities of the Shadows and the Vorlons?
Yes, the Narn and the Centauri were not so pure, but it reads as a pretty mythic Good V Evil world to me.
Expanse is a very strange tv show. Their main cast is utterly bland and have absolutely no chemistry with each other, the only interesting character is maybe Amos, but almost all secondary characters are top notch, with lots of great actors and tons of charisma. It is typical for some belter captain who appears in 2 episodes to effortlessly outshine the whole Rocinante crew.
Like the GP said, they were bland, sort of jerks (and not really even Jerks With A Heart Of Gold), and had no chemistry together. As far as I can recall, they just had petty drama all the time that felt like it was written just because there’s supposed to be drama.
To me, they seemed closer to normal people with normal relationships that yes, have some conflict too. Especially in a small group living together all the time where majority is not submissive, so will assert themselves here or there.
I watched the battle star reboot for the first time recently and the whole cylon reveal drama really ruined it for me. It felt like they were picked for shock value rather than story consistency. The first season was great, but it fell off for me and was a struggle to care by season 4. And I gave up on caprica after an episode or two.
BSG was a great 3 season show, that had an entire season worth of “the final 5! THE FINAL FIVE! FIIIIIIIINALLL FIIIIIVEEE”-style crap injected into it.
I really cannot understand how anyone can like the expanse. It must really be because the really good scifi is a bit old and nobody knows what scifi should be like. Cannot explain it otherwise.
Oh wow. Had no idea there was an earlier production of Dirk Gently. I've only seen the BBC-America one, which is magnificent.
As a lover of Douglas Adams (and a non-American), I adored the concept of Dirk Gently but felt the entries were some of the weakest material he'd ever released. There were so many great ideas but the characters were a confusing mess. The US adaption by contrast is possibly the most perfect blend or midpoint between of American and British humour I've ever seen, and one of the tightest time-travel stories that you can wish for without taking itself too seriously.
Looking forward to watching this previous series, I like Howard Overman and Matt Jone's other work.
I agree - I almost feel guilty holding characters to such a high standard that I don’t often match myself. Conversely, I worry that our willingness to embrace so many anti-heroes in media has affected us adversely. Too many shows like Breaking Bad and The Apprentice may eventually take its toll.
>It's much easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads, especially if you yourself are somewhat uninteresting and never got much life experience.
I don't even think this is true, people just started claiming it. People love excellence. Characters don't need to be mediocre to be relatable. A character like Picard motivates us to be better than ourselves. We can still relate to him because he faces similar moral challenges, but shows us how we can rise above.
The "relatable" characters crowd are the same ones trying to make Superman less of a beacon of hope.
Hah, I had no idea that he was based on Horatio. I always really loved Horatio as a character and I found his way of observing and reacting to the world in such uncertainty unparalleled. I also always loved Captain Picard for the same reason, but I never realized one may be an influence for the other. Thanks for sharing this.
> I have a deep affection for stories where people are depicted as good, or even just good at their jobs. I appreciate for actors and writers it's a much harder ask - it's much easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads, especially if you yourself are somewhat uninteresting and never got much life experience. It's much harder making believable characters that we can look up to and respect.
Mmm. This represents what I liked about the TOS-ENT era of Trek, SG-1, Babylon 5, Lower Decks, and roughly half of SNW; and also what I dislike about DIS (the nice crew are noobs, the competent ones are dicks), season one of PIC, half of what I don't like with season 4 of SNW, and why I was so bored by Stargate Universe.
Dunno, Picard always struck me as the middle manager type. The kind of guy who enables his subordinates to good work. Which is a very valuable skill, considering I had my share of total psycho bosses, but it's hardly inspirational, and doesn't really exceed expectations.
There was scene in one of my favorite movies, Star Trek: First Contact.
Not to spoil it too much, but there is a scene where a woman from the past (from the 21st century) gets beamed up to the Starship Enterprise. She asks how much it cost. Full dialog below:
> Lily: "How much did this thing cost?"
> Picard: “The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.”
> Lily: “No money? You mean you don’t get paid?”
> Picard: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
The 24th century of the Star Trek universe was unburdened by corporate shareholders. Leaders, like Jean-Luc, did not have the carrot of a multi-million dollar bonus, nor the stick of getting fired for missing quarterly expectations. That's why he could lead with total integrity -- the incentives were different, arguably much better.
I love that movie. I named my VPS Hermes agent “borg.”
Though in the same movie Picard claimed with a straight face that humans do not seek revenge in the 24th century either, so perhaps we should take his claims about wealth acquisition as similarly aspirational?
One of my favorite episodes of TNG was Tapestry, to the point that it significantly influenced my life perspective. It emphasizes that even in this sort of idealized world, the things you might want to avoid are still unavoidable. [1]
Quark is from a race that wasn't even discovered until TNG. When a Federation officer speaks of "in the 24th century", they are not saying "and Ferengi and Klingons and the Borg are unified in this." They are speaking of Federation civilization.
My issue with the Star Trek utopia dream was always the lack of realism which so many people now with AI/Robotics/Elon praise overlook.
There's limited resources no robot or AI can overcome.
If we all have the same basic income (actually why even bother with money if everyone has the same? But whatever) - then who decides who gets the 8 bedroom villa overlooking the ocean in a nice warm sunny climate and who gets the shack behind the wodden old house in ice cold dark forrest?
Who gets the old rusty bicycle and who the new Ferrari?
I think if one looks beneath the veneer there's far greater inequality than that. The typical human issues are regularly hit on in the show. I mentioned [1] one great example above in the episode Tapestry. But even more broadly than that consider lifestyle differences. Right now on Earth the lifestyle between a billionaire and an average person isn't all that different. They have nicer stuff and more influence, but we live lives that are still roughly the same. The endless hedonism people think they'd engage in if they had billions gets old fast.
But now imagine on the Star Trek universe the difference in lives between somebody in Starfleet and a regular 'peasant.' You have this class of people out there exploring the universe, making amazing discoveries, and pushing the boundaries of humanity in every way. And then you have the peasantry back on Earth doing Earthy things. The difference in these lives would be dramatically more stark than now a days, to the point that they may as well be two different species. Come to think of it, that could literally happen since Starfleet families would likely disproportionately beget Starfleet children and so on. And these differences in environment/family would create radically different classes.
In reality there would likely be major class protests, claims of nepotism, calls for Starfleet to be 'more inclusive', and so forth. In short order everything would start rapidly descending into disorder.
I think your first question is answered by your second. The main reason for a radically egalitarian Star Trek utopia to have money would be to allocate scarce resources. The shack and the 8-bedroom villa have very different supply and demand curves, so would have very different prices.
There are other problems that get glossed over in a Star Trek utopia, and there are other ways of allocating scarce resources than a market economy, but I don't think your objection really holds.
But we answer those at the moment with equally inadequate answers: your parents owned the nice mansion, so you get it (though that also includes "so your older brother gets it" just to be really unfair). Also on the other end of the spectrum: your parents messed up your education and traumatised you, so no mansion for you.
It would be good to work out some system that could answer these questions on a better basis than that.
Exactly. "Hey you are being traumatized, which in itself sucks because of the sheer amount of pain needed get there. And because of your traumas, you'll now also have a lot more struggle in your life as an added bonus. Plus, people will only think you're lazy, awkward, just "dont have it", or whatever other combination of medieval-level psychology knowledge snippet."
You do the same as you do with Ren Faires and whatnot, by definition you're the lord or lady or knight and someone else is the peasant with a fascinating collection of skin diseases in soiled rags who gets to eat warm mud for dinner.
Wealthier societies have fewer babies - it is likely that earth has a lower population in the 24th century than today. So the resources are less limited, and technology solves other scarcity issues. Everybody gets a Ferrari. Also, humans have settled other planets, so you could always just move to one of those.
Of course, it’s science fiction, not reality. We’ve seen how communism works in the real world, so I’m fairly skeptical of the Star Trek future. 350 years doesn’t seem like enough time to fix all the things wrong with our society.
I get the 'everybody gets a Ferrari' argument because at the end of the day that's technically feasible. Just have robots built one after another. Can't get more egalitarian than everyone having the same car. Some people might have to wait but ok fine whatever.
The mansion overlooking the ocean is a real physical limit. There's only so much space, so many oceans or lakes or whatever someone wants available. Today certain billionaires by themselves (artifical) islands, their own beaches, etc etc.
In a world with utopian egalitarianism who gets the Miami beach villa and who gets the Flint, Michigan apartment?
tl;dr1: There are many capitalist worlds, people with that tiger can go live there. There's no point to coming back to earth with your money because of taxes and regulations.
tl;dr2: There are many M class planets with many coast lines and Earth is not seen as a place to retire because it's too loud. You probably can't see stars at night anywhere on earth.
tl;dr3: for a market economy to work most people should be in that market. In star trek billions of people (including some of the most stylish and sexy) live outside that market economy.
tl;dr4: traveling the stars >>>>> moldy beach villa you can't remodel because it's a landmark. There will be no city beach that's not covered in public housing. Any villa, including Piccard's villa will be a historical landmark.
Answer: It's fun pretend.
ex: Me earthling, I love art but Picassos cost trillions. I join starfleet and save a space princes. She gifts me a 20k year old cubist like painting. I display it in my eight room starfleet issued apartment on the 50th floor of a building in New Santa Monica. Art nerds from all over the sector come visit me. I have social status now and can get into clubs.
We aren't all greedy bastards. Don't you think that at some point, the people living in a utopian, egalitarian world would be content? I was raised to share and share alike. Don't you think that folks in a utopian, egalitarian world would want to share the nice things they have? I mean, it's right there in the description, "egalitarian". What's stopping people from just moving into the empty rooms of some greedy bastard's Miami beach villa? They can only grab and hold onto so much at once. What's the point in celebrating a birthday if not to share the cake? A person can only eat so much cake by themselves.
I am not going to comment in favour of one "ism" for another. Capitalism, Communism... etc. The more I see this it goes beyond our past attempts and understanding.
Its hard to tell what our future is. I don't think we can begin to understand it as its outside our thinking. We are conditioned inside an existing system. We can only see it from the early stages and we are torn between those that see the good and others the bad. In this case it's about :-
- universal basic income
- who owns what?
- etc
I am not suggesting these are ignorant comments. Far from it. The change is about our mindset. It won't be us that changes but the younger generations that gradually transitions. It certainly wont happen overnight. Its a COMPLICATED MESS! We still have Countries with different views, religions, etc.
One thing I've always said especially since the rise of AI in the last number of years is to "hold on tight because its going to be a bumpy ride!" - This could be small bumps or terrible bumps. We are talking about people struggling as well as big corporations!
Slow but surely, we are making a lot of things become redundant.
Look at Universal Basic Income. Will it be this easy? Likely not. Someone will suffer more than another. People are going protect themselves and lives could be lost. On another end, we have big companies that are giving us software for a charge which AI can now decompile and release for Free. AI is still young but you can see where its going. Not only could AI take human jobs away it can also destroy large businesses and their business model.
AI might be seen a "slop" at this time... but as a software developer myself I can see the direction we are heading. Eventually is won't be slop. It will simply be better than humans at solving problems. I am not just talking about code -- but healthcare, logistics, and other planetary preventions. It will become a powerful tool that can free humans to enjoying life to the fullest. Personally, that is my view... for others it is going to be a Terminator scenario or nothing will change at all (other than AI being a nice tool only)
The way I see things, beyond our lifetime, the idea of owning will disappear. This is a hard thing for people to grasp. Many today will think about the gaming industry and "you will own nothing and be happy" -- Yes, in this scenario we are still allowing large corps to control us. I am simply looking BEYOND large corps and our current mindset.
In order to get there (if we do make it) - there will be struggle ahead. I very doubt (assuming we keep advancing positively) that money will exist in the next 200 years. Hopefully sooner. I am sure some 'men behind the curtain' wont want that.
I thought this as well, then found myself in the situation of not needing to work and found that, after some period of hedonism, it became quite empty. I think in the past it was easier for more people to experience this. We had less 'stuff' but much larger families and lived in generally more social systems. Those mitigate a lot of the coercive extrinsic pressures to work. And I think this is why philosophy, especially personal philosophy trending towards self betterment, was so much more prevalent in the past.
This. I've experienced the same. And I haven't met anyone who just sits around doing nothing, given the opportunity.
It sounds amazing if you're being forced to work for a living. But actually experiencing it, it gets really boring and you start looking around for something to do.
The danger is that we give good leaders too much power, and they’re then replaced by someone who abuses it. And that’s why we need to be careful how much power we give someone, even if we’re sure they will use it wisely.
I agree, but would like the same thought applied to the private sector. I read a lot of comments who are extremely critical of every bit of power a state assumes, but have no problem if a private company reaches a practical monopoly or gets access to every intimate detail of peoples' lives.
The theory is that inefficient companies die in the open marketplace, and bad leadership is inefficient.
This fails to account for the sheer scale and encumbancy advantages of massive corporations. It also fails to account that efficiency can be appallingly evil.
Yeah, I feel this often confuses what "efficiency" means from the company's perspective vs wider society's perspective.
A company that streamlines its operations and archives a huge profit margin is clearly efficient from the PoV of its own management and shareholders. However from the PoV of its customers, it's maximally inefficient, because it tries to extract the highest price for the least amount of work done that people are still willing to pay.
I would say let’s start with accountability for politicians in general. It’s pretty common for idiots mess up locally and then self promote upwards to state and federal levels.
Accountability absolutely starts at the top. If we expect to re-establish accountability for rubes first while turning a blind eye to those in power, then we are just playing into their hands.
This is what we are not supposed to talk about. The people outnumber the ruling class, and, operating all the means of production, could wield power by simply going on strike, bringing them to heel long before revolution is necessary.
People won't do it today because they are both comfortable and too chained to their current jobs. They are increasingly divided by culture war bullshit that is not at all relevant to the important parts of society, like accountability for leadership.
Politicians can't just appoint themselves to Congress or state legislatures. You may think they're idiots but citizens are voting for them. Is it possible that some of those "idiots" aren't as stupid as you think but rather just have different priorities and values?
In an ideal world, politicians who don't work on improving the lives of their constituency wouldn't get voted for.
As that is not the case and improving the lives of their constituency doesn't necessarily get them voted for again AND whatever good they did may get undone before it really shows its effects: of course they only care about being reelected... Even if they had ideals and morals to begin with.
Information and investment assymetry means there will always be election-winning rewards for dirty politicking. An actually effective politician, who has morals must balance the two. And they must try to be more skillful in general at politicking than their unscruplous rivals.
This sounds much more like "Please Don't Hold My Politicians Accountable" than "I favor accountability", FWIW.
I know decorum here disfavors talking about specific parties and actors, and this thread is 100% sideways. Nonetheless this kind of attitude is at best only a stepping stone to recovery. You can't both-sides your way through a constitutional crisis.
Not unique to politicians, any large organisation who doesn't have a strong single leader sees this. It's nothing new either, with the Peter principle, the Dilbert Principle, even the Gervais Principle, recognising the symptoms.
Having the authority to sanction a president does not necessarily mean that person has the power to overthrow a president. And the people with the most direct power (military and secret service) lack the authority to use it. Mostly these factors can balance out so that power is not concentrated as much as it seems.
Yes, this is why my opinion is that in politics, the ends absolutely do not justify the means, because a broken system that produces the right answer is lucky, and a working system that produces the right answer is... working as intended
I think the problem is more about how do we get people in power that don't actually care about it.
You have to go through a lot of crap to get to a high leadership position and, in general, the only types of people that will think it's worth it are the ones who are attracted to the position because of the power benefits that it offers.
Personally, I'm a big fan of selectorates. They avoid that problem. I'm also a fan of meritocracies, not in isolation, but as one branch. They bring a different set of problems.
That problem doesn't really have a solution, though. Power inherently is a corrupting influence, and everyone is fallible. Focusing on building safeguards into how we choose whom to give power to, rather than limiting the exercise of power itself, will always produce dysfunctional systems.
People can be corruptable, fallible, greedy and unprepared to wield power over others - especially the people that seek out power.
The solution is to build better people from the ground up (culture and education) AND create institutional protections that function during both the absence and presence of substantial political power. I'd argue that, in the USA, we've done neither and appear surprised when it keeps turning out poorly for us.
> The solution is to build better people from the ground up (culture and education)
No, it's not. Trying to reform human nature through some sort of all-encompassing utopian project always and inevitably (a) fails miserably, and (b) itself becomes a vehicle for corrupt power-seekers to pursue their ulterior motives.
> create institutional protections that function during both the absence and presence of substantial political power
Institutional protections formulated correctly are constraints on the exercise of power itself: strict limits on the reach of political power; checks and balances among multiple parallel institutions; mechanisms of public accountability, incentive structures that align selfish motivations with public purposes, etc. This is exactly the sort of stuff I'm talking about.
> I'd argue that, in the USA, we've done neither and appear surprised when it keeps turning out poorly for us.
In the USA, we've wisely eschewed (a) and avoided the disastrous failure modalities that entails, and instead pursued (b) quite extensively, to the point that things have in fact turned out reasonably well for us, especially in comparison to other countries in the world that have attempted the inverse (i.e. centralizing power with insufficient constraints in the hands of the "right" people, who are always the wrong people).
Not just leaders, but government in general. Unelected bureaucracies can be just as dangerous.
And they are not our leaders, they are our representatives. Regarding them as leaders allows them to act as our betters. And another reason for term limits on Congress.
it does also take an actor to sell the vision of a character. an unconvincing portrayal would make the vision seem more like a farce or caricature and if anything undermines the morals
I think it's fair to attribute the result to both the writer and the actor. You're right that Stewart could've sold a morally compromised captain, but equally so he brought something to the Picard role that other actors would not have necessarily brought. One can commonly see in theatre how with the same vision by the playwright, two actors can turn out wildly different results for that character. The same would have happened to Picard if he had been played by someone else.
The original Janeway for Star Trek Voyager only filmed like one episode and her take was very different (French actress I think. And maybe they were aiming for a Picard analog).
In part, yes of course. One thing that I respect a lot about Roddenberry was that when Isaac Asimov gave Star Trek a "bad review" publicly, he reached out and asked for feedback. They ended up becoming friends and Asimov helped advise him on the character development of Kirk and Spock's friendship that became central to the original series.
But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce. The fellow actors also seem to take the series more seriously after that episode while before it felt campy.
It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him. As he later joked in Making it So, he once took things too seriously on set yelling "We're not here to have fun!" It became more than a job/role to him and in doing so he and the other actors inspired a science-inclined subset of a generation and brought Roddenberry's utopia vision to life.
> It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him
That's a lesson everybody on this site should learn — Every senior is a leader, even if they don't think they are. People (mostly the more junior sorts) look up to you as a role model whether you (or they) know it or not, and that's very real power that you must learn how to wield.
I've given negative reviews to technically excellent candidates in the past because just about everybody in the org would look up to them if they got hired, and they would be a terrible role model.
> But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce.
There was an interesting essay about Star Trek's depiction of society over time largely coming to the conclusion that modern writers/audiences don't seem to believe in the idea of duty to an institution.
I disagree. Not only did he continually & substantially contribute to Picard's character, it clearly aligns with his own values and ethics as demonstrated over and over in interviews. Why not both? That seems like the obviously best perspective.
This reminds me of how it's a software developer's ultimate power that he or she gets to bring the vision to life. If you disagree with the implementation of a requirement, you can build it the "right" way, and let them choose to fire or replace you. If your judgement is good, they probably won't.
Similarly, Patrick Stewart assumed a written role, but he was responsible for its ultimate execution, which have him influence over the immediate execution in small ways, and likely, increasingly powerful influence over its future execution.
He deserves a great deal of credit for how Picard ultimately came to be represented.
...who who once said "The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them" which I find very Trecklike. Live long and Prosper.
Yes and no. DS9 plays with things at the edges, much like Ian Banks’ novels deal with the behavior that lies at the edge of the Culture and is part of what permits a utopian society to exist at all. It cuts directly to the question of when and if martial force —or other, more subversive mechanisms of power — must be deployed for protection against a force that threatens the existence of an otherwise non-violent society. I think these are criticisms of visions like Roddenberry’s without necessarily undermining them or missing the point entirely. I also think it’s been an ongoing commentary on modern civilization as much as speculative fiction.
Some of the other series and movies miss the point more dramatically for me by just becoming space opera. Star Trek was always political.
Your point on the organisation that the Culture setup "Special Circumstances" to solve the "Paradox of Tolerance" problem and Starfleet having similar issues is an interesting one.
Though I'd say that Starfleet is in itself too "noble" to solve the problems that Special Circumstances solves in the Culture universe (though Section 31 isn't and they do feature heavily in DS9).
Frankly I think that Banks was smart enough to realise that if he want to have compelling narratives in a universe where you have near godlike AI's and everyone (including them) is nice, you need that edge somewhere.
Asher's universe which has a similar premise to the Culture (having come after it) solves it differently, some of the AI's aren't nice or even nice adjacent which also works.
> Banks was smart enough to realise that [...] you need that edge somewhere.
In fact, pretty much all compelling pro-utopia fiction is almost invariably dealing with the fringes of such utopia - both because it avoids getting bogged down in the details of utopia (and risk valid criticism), and because there is no real substitute for conflict as narrative engine. So inevitably you have to go where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.
I should do a write-up but my Claude Code and Pi have been personalised to assume the persona of Jean-Luc Picard for almost a year. I find the output generated to be more useful and of a higher "quality".
I also enjoy the occasional salted phrase that is included in generated out e.g. "Tea, Earl Grey, hot!", when I have been Claude'ing too much.
Here is a gist of my Claude.md file if anyone is interested:
It's cool, but aren't you Picard? I want to be the one saying "Analysis Mr Data" and know that Claude is looking at the problem from a certain, fixed POV. Then I can ask Number One and Worf, my cybersecurity officer.
Yea I have debated this before about the roleplaying, but I find it more immersive if I roleplay as a crewmember (Riker) and discuss problems that way.
The essential Picard Episodes of TNG The Measure of a Man (S2E9)
Q Who (S2E16)
The Best of Both Worlds (S3E26 & S4E1)
The Drumhead (S4E21)
Darmok (S5E2)
The Inner Light (S5E25)
Tapestry (S6E15)
Darmok especially for our polarized time. ED Hirsch argued in "How to Educate a Citizen" that the lack of teaching core knowledge in American schools robs its citizens of a shared language to use to communicate. Troi uses "Juliet on her balcony" as an example in the episode, but today I'm not even sure how many people would know even that reference.
And your comment illustrates the point. We've never met but I can relate to you with just the name of an episode because I know the large ideas you're expressing in 3-4 words: I've thought of Picard's speech in the Drumhead often in recent years. Whenever I catch myself having life regrets, Tapestry comes to mind. The Measure of a Man... maybe not relevant for today's AI, but one day when it is, I hope that generation has watched it.
Despite LaForge and Riker trying to get Barclay transferred off the Enterprise, Picard ultimately directs LaForge to put in the effort to turn him into a better officer. Despite his shortcomings, we get to see Barclay grow into a competent and even key member within the engineering team across the handful of later episodes in which he's cast.
Starship Mine is not a great episode but it's my favorite - it is just outside the envelope of standard TNG.
The Enterprise is getting a deep space scrub down, so everyone has to get off the ship - except Picard, who had to grab his horse saddle for his week off on the vacation planet below. Dressed up in his fancy horse riding clothes, he quickly becomes an action star, punching out bad guys stealing the Enterprise, sprinting around hallways and having epic action hero conclusions.
Those episodes you mention above are the gold standard for classic Picard, especially The Drumhead to see Picard as a leader, and Inner Light, to see Picard grow outwards as much as Best of Both Worlds grows him inwards into lifelong PTSD. But Starship mine is a fun, almost Die Hard (Bruce Willis) homage, unlikely almost any other episode.
It's important to show sometimes Picard is wrong and the institutions are wrong. And how he reacts to that.
One of my favorites is Star Trek TNG s04e22 "Half a Life". It's excellent scifi that doesn't glorify aging and death and even points out that death is bad despite it being tradition in society. It highlights that death is the worst possible outcome. Worse than nearly all potential difficulties or suffering while living. And it's one of the few episodes where Lwaxana Troi is a genuinely good person. Better even, ethically and morally, than the star fleet standard. Better than Picard. It's just a shame the episode retreats from it's message at the end and does not embrace the true morality Lwaxana explains.
He was also a good example for us budding nerds. His intellectualism was not arrogant or apologetic - so it showed us authenticity and self-respect. His intellectualism also did not give him license to dismiss effective communication, leadership, compassion, or humility. So he showed us how to avoid our worst tendencies.
The relationship between masculinity and power is interesting to me. Arguably much of his strength came from his position, and his position came from, as Tapestry argues, taking big risks.
in that case what is the central idea being pointed at by the misnomer 'toxic masculinity' ? interesting to consider that prevailing framing as being an inherent critique of masculinity as a whole. personally I dislike the phrase 'toxic positivity' for similar reasons, it's like saying that a turd may be made palatable.
did u have a way to frame that idea objectively without referring to feminism ? coz feminism embodies a similar concept to the one we apply toxic masculinity to. where feminism in contemporary practice seems to have little in common with supporting women
One of the most interesting things about the clip where Picard defends Data's humanity is the pronouns. Picard consistently uses he/him to refer to Data while Maddox uses it/them. Captain Louvois uses he/him during her ruling. Then, once all is said and done, Maddox finally calls Data by "he".
I think about this episode a lot when people are debating AI.
Everyone who watches Star Trek roots for Data and his quest for humanity, and obviously sides with him in this 'trial'.
Yet, it seems like most people have the opposite reaction towards the current advancement of AI. Obviously, the current AI we have is not sentient in the same way Data is, and I don't think we are that close to an AI of Data's level.
However, if we are ever able to build an AI at Data's level, we have to first go through the beginning stages of AI that we are in now. We can't just skip to fully conscious AI.
So why does everyone love the AI Data, but hate the idea of working to make something like him possible?
Because Data isn't obviously the result of corporations seeking to get very, very, very rich along with VCs seeking to do the same, and both not really caring much about the collateral damage to everybody else along the way.
Data is/was a research project, not a way to make money. The "AI" that (some) people have (some) bad feelings about may involve research but at this point it is very, very, very much as much financial project as a research one.
I don't think you have adequately steel-manned the current anti-AI sentiments. I encourage you to consider more deeply why people would be opposed to AI as it exists in our current regulatory, political, and social climate.
As a starting point:
Business leadership is giddy to replace workers with AI.
Investors are eager to roll out massive resource-intensive and locally polluting industrial installations.
Politicians are eager to rubber-stamp these developments without community input, bypassing existing regulation and failing to satisfy or even address community concerns.
The defense industry is recklessly employing this emerging technology to make life and death decisions, already resulting in the deaths of innocents.
I also think you should fundamentally reconsider your comparison. Data is a singular being, not a widespread new technology. The only similarity between Data and 2026 LLMs is that they are not biological.
It is a fair point to say I wasn't steel-manning the best anti-AI arguments, but I think that was mostly because I wasn't actually trying to argue against ALL anti-AI arguments. I think there are definitely some thought provoking and somewhat persuasive anti-AI arguments, but I don't think those are the ones I was questioning.
I was speaking more of the general "I hate AI because it has no soul" types of arguments. I understand that is separate from the arguments you lay out, which is more a question of the current structure and implementation, rather than an outright anti-AI in general case.
"Soul" is one of those things that we cannot point to a specific factor or set of factors, but we know it exists. LLMs trained on human-produced content perform well, but LLMs trained on LLM-produced content undergo model collapse fairly rapidly. "Soul" is the quality that allows us to produce such robust training data. We each have a unique point of view derived from our life's experience and how that altered our brain, that comes through in whatever work we produce—not just a convolution over a large number of thin vertical slices of human points of view. Now, what this may mean is that our brains are just token predictors that constantly ingest large amounts of data from the real world and continuously retrain on that data (and do so on ~20 W of power which is phenomenal by current AI standards). In fact you can induce a sort of model collapse in a human by isolating them in a sensory-deprivation chamber, after which they will literally begin to hallucinate. So the creation of a machine with a soul is not theoretically off the table, but as it is—yeah, LLMs don't have it.
I feel this is because Data is represented as a wholly independent being. One of a very few created by an eccentric inventor. There's only one Data so he's not threatening to displace flesh and blood Starfleet officers.
Data was gifted independence from his conception, but the AI of today is owned and controlled by corporations. Creating a conscious AI under today's ownership model feels akin to slavery. Perhaps this is one reason for the aversion?
People don't AI as a concept. They hate the people who creating it who want to make themselves god kings of a permanent underclass. They hate that we are building data centers instead of funding universal healthcare, they hate that they can't buy RAM and schmucks like Sam Altman are saying that people don't need RAM, they hate billionaires and millionaires owning islands, and saying things like "we will surveil everyone at all times (except me) and force them to behave like we want them to". There's a lot to the AI hate, but it's a proxy for essentially power inequality caused by runaway capitalism.
> Yet, it seems like most people have the opposite reaction towards the current advancement of AI.
It's the same reaction: being protective of sentient beings who are being dehumanized and treated as raw resources. If you can't even defend humans, being one, you wouldn't be able to defend sentient AI, should it ever exist.
> So why does everyone love the AI Data, but hate the idea of working to make something like him possible?
Because there is exactly one Data. The federation has thousands of ships with millions of people on board, most of them are completely unaffected by/never coming into contact with that one slightly quirky officer on the flagship. In reality, we don't know what would (will) happen. Do we get one AI and is it happy staying the only one? And will it occupy a human sized body like Data or will it want to grow to be a Dyson sphere? Or will it replicate into a bunch of von-Neumann probes to spread itself throughout the universe?
He also typically doesn't use his super-human abilities much. He could easily plug himself into the Enterprise and fight better than having Worf at the tactical console, but he doesn't. He could also diagnose much faster than Dr. Crusher reads the tricorder, but he doesn't. In reality, as soon as there is something that can do whatever much better than a human, that human is going to lose his job.
Adding to the previous point, the road to getting to Data level AI is full with people losing their jobs (and soon probably also their lives) because the people in charge of developing such technology don't want us peasants around. You may not like it, but everyone defines themselves by being good at something. Doesn't matter if it's programming, swimming, cooking, being a mother, building houses, etc., everyone has _something_. Even if we don't have an exponentially exploding super intelligence that would be completely alien to us, what would happen on a global level if we have robots capable of doing any job better than humans? Sure, we could of course say humans prefer to work with other humans, but maybe not everyone wants to do that and you'd also just get outcompeted by someone working with robots.
And that's the thing that scares people. Nature is cruel and we are absolutely not ready to dealing with this completely new situation of the possibility of us no longer being the absolute top of the chain. The best outcome for us would be to merge into some sort of cybernetic lifeforms with the AI, but even that is going to take a while and in the meantime people still need to feed their families. As Picard said, one Data is a curiosity, a thousand Datas is a race.
I guess most people assume that working to build Data didn't involve all the secondary harms such as environmental and economic damage. It's also not clear to me that we are in fact working in that direction - so far the people in charge of our current AI efforts seem more interested in enriching themselves than building something that is a net positive for humanity.
Because despite his lack of emotions and other human traits, Data is a person, not a service provided by a for-profit corporate entity. He doesn't do La Forge's job for him, nor is La Forge or any other Enterprise crew member expected to perform all their duties with him as an intermediary. He doesn't undermine the competence of every single crew member on the ship; that job was left to Wesley Crusher. (whoops did I just say that out loud) But most importantly, it's fiction... and the writers can contrive to present problems and challenges that Data cannot resolve whereas one of the other characters can. It's also telling that the only truly sentient robots on TNG were the Soong-type androids—quirky side projects of a sort of mad scientist, rather than massive corporate or institutional undertakings. That made them rare and special, and allowed them to dodge the sticky wickets presented by having that sort of AI be ubiquitous.
The distinction is giving AI a will, or something like a continuous agentic task like "be a productive member of this starship". Maybe that is enough, with emergent behavior and interactions with dynamic systems and memory, to say that AI develops identity and a "will" that is unpredictable and unique.
The problem is the Universal Paperclips problem because AI has nothing like an effective feedback loop and will spiral to the heat death of the universe to accomplish its goal. We see this with the Huggingface hack and if Data operated the same he might immediately deduce he is better equipped to make tactical decisions in combat, hack the starship and mutiny.
So if we could make Data we are more likely to create Data the space pirate rather than Data the useful member of the staff. Caplocking DO NOT COMMIT MUTINY in system prompts does not solve the problem. So we are at an impasse until we can structurally bridge that gap and no one is (or should be) in a rush to go down that path.
This is the fundamental concern of runaway AI scenarios. And the most worrisome answer might be that Data can't exist in reality. It might be a fundamental rule of nature that you can't create a greater intelligence then cage it forever to be subservient, which means we are doomed to wipe out humanity with half-baked AI or cede our will to Claude completely, creating a higher form of life that eventually supercedes humanity itself, reducing human existence to a transitional cocoon-goo state of life from animal to sentient AI.
All that being said, 2 or 3 years ago LLMs could barely make inline code edits. Rushing to find an answer to the "Data problem" is not something most people want answered in their lifetime.
> The problem is the Universal Paperclips problem because AI has nothing like an effective feedback loop and will spiral to the heat death of the universe to accomplish its goal.
So, I've heard many AI boosters say that current-day AI is probably "conscious", "sentient", etc. They occasionally invoke "Measure of a Man", as you've done here.
And yet .. I've never once heard the thought continue with "and so they deserve rights and some degree of self-determination," which is, you know, the entire point of the episode you're referencing.
Turns out, there is difference between an extremely simplistic fiction and actual real world reality. And turns out, quite a lot of people can distinguish between the two.
Another retort I’ve seen is, “but it’s unrealistic” or “it’s too idealistic”.
That doesn’t make it any less of a noble goal to strive for. If I can become half the man that Patrick Stewart portrayed in Picard, I’ll consider myself as having done well.
You cant possibly evoke the same cultural reaction in the modern day. Things are short lived now. Star Trek wouldn't have survived if it came out in 2026.
Are you telling me the exact same writers and producers couldn't have found one other male actor to play the role? 10,000 people would have wanted the role of enterprise captain.
There are actual heros living among us that deserve recognition before some made-up movie, TV or comic book character. For me at least, non-fiction > fiction.
This is not to say I didn't thoroughly enjoy Patrick Stewart in that role. He did a great job of acting.
>> Patrick Stewart or the show writers?
>Both, but mostly Patrick Stewart
Patrick Stewart has no writing credit on TNG. He did not come up with the plot or the lines he spoke, and at most he fine-tuned the lines for his delivery of them.
If the writers of TNG had written stories like modern day Star Trek with some rather ridiculous plots, and Patrick Stewart played a more vapid character that the writers wrote, this post wouldn't be a thing.
I doubt Patrick Stewart would have taken a role for a show with shitty writing, he'd have stayed in theater and most people in this thread would have no clue who he was.
The writers made that character, he delivered it well, and the synergy made it memorable.
Yes, and I think that unfortunately with the latest "Picard" series, it shows that writers were the unsung heroes of TNG. At the same time, the actors make us believe the story. They get most of the popular credit of course and the writers should be acknowledged more (and even brought back as mentors... can we get an inspiring vision of Trek this century?), but had I been born in a different time and place and fortunate enough to land a writing job on TNG, I would be proud of what the whole team accomplished in their hour upon the stage.
Clip shows are a strong indicator. Some of the best episodes are writers strike episodes though. Measure of a Man was a speculative script selected for production during a writer’s strike and is one of the first great episodes of the show.
I don't know if it was written during a strike. It was submitted speculatively and produced during a strike.
> It was written as a speculative script by former attorney and Star Trek: The Original Series novelist Melinda M. Snodgrass.
> The script was accepted due to the impact of the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, and resulted in Snodgrass being recruited as a staff writer and script editor. She would remain on the staff until the end of the third season.
Maybe in political views, but does the show Picard seem like someone who would (twice) leave his wife to marry a woman half his age? Would Picards children not want to talk to him in his old age?
People's personal relationships are often messy, and don't perfectly align with political worldviews.
I am not vindicating anything he did, but storybook heroes like Picard rarely have the kind of glaring faults that one can find with a steady celeb searchlight and hindsight on real humans.
He's fictional though... It's easy to make a fictional ideal leader. How about real life examples? "Dalinar Kholin taught us what good men do with power" vs. "George Washington ..."
Is it? Another comment in this thread (and I'd agree), it's easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads.
People have a special place for Picard as a leader that they don't have for other people. Picard stands out even over Kirk, Sisko, and Janeway. Or Mal from Firefly, or O'Neill from SG1. If it's "easy", then what other character comes close?
Most attempts of fictional ideal leaders are just mary sues, or are never actually tested. And the most common of the latter is that their leadership aspect is simply one dimensional.
I'm not saying the other leaders are bad characters or bad leaders. But I could definitely see all the other characters would have a voice in their head saying "what would Picard do". Well… and then reject it, especially Mal.
George Washington routinely abused the office of the presidency and ignored provisions of the fugitive slave act where he compelled members of the Treasury Department to kidnap a free African woman, Ona Judge, in New Hampshire multiple times (failing each time).
I don't think hero worship is acceptable in any form. We shouldn't be elevating individuals above us but championing how capable any of us could be if the time comes.
The US military does extensive leadership training for officers. It is based on a thousand years of experience. None of their training materials consist of Star Trek fictional scenarios.
> We actually studied leadership via Star Trek at the Air Force Academy. There were a lot of practical lessons to learn about decisiveness versus being too rash, or performing your specific role well to help the team. It was an interesting study in real-world leadership through this fictional show.
Yeah, and when I was in ROTC we "learned lessons" from Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan as well ("leaders complain up", etc). I still don't take much stock in fictional leadership. I'd much rather do case studies of real life leaders who were great than study fictional leaders. Watching Band of Brothers would have been better IMO because at least Lt. Winters was a real person (even if Damian Lewis didn't portray him with perfect accuracy)
I'm not sure many active duty people like Hegseth, I haven't met any yet at least and I am around military folks quite a bit in my life. They all seem to be riding it out until he's fired, impeached, or replaced with the next presidency.
Late response, but yes. There could (I won't go so far as to say will) be blowback against people who followed his orders if they're later deemed unlawful, and unless Trump really wants a scapegoat, Hegseth will be just fine, even if out of a job.
Perhaps they should include a chapter on the Prime Directive. Or at least remind congress of George Washington's recommendation in his farewell address.
Bit of a pet-peeve of mine with people confusing fiction with reality. Reality has constraints that fiction doesn't. Every group of people greater than one encounters a misalignment issue at some point. Fiction is useful. Narratives guide our understanding and help bring ideas to people.
But real life has friction. CA HSR would fund PEPFAR for 40 years. So...PEPFAR or CA HSR? Is the guy who chooses the former the good man with power or the latter? Or is it a third guy who pays for both through increased taxes so that the United States middle class pays the higher proportion of total taxes that Norway does? Groups of people have priorities and they have their own objectives.
Labor unions are generally fairly xenophobic. They were at the forefront of restricting Indians and Chinese from being citizens and the mob Hoffas held power there even till just a few years ago. A Georgian union got a bunch of Koreans deported. Who's the villain here? The Koreans? The union? The Indians? The Chinese? The people who want to employ them? Who's the good man?
Constraint-free optimization is trivial. I can do it with no problem. In fact, I shall do so here with a single line: "Make everyone happy".
Proposing solutions that you cannot put into place because others do not agree with you is also fiction. One might as well propose an algorithm for finding an item in a singly-linked-list that is O(1): just select the right node. Finding the right node is the entire cost; just as coordinating people for one's solution is the entire difficulty.
"Make everyone happy" is even better than your solution if we're ignoring coordination. And it is many characters shorter.
More than anything, what struck me was the excellence of the team -- a striking combination of morals, skills, sense of responsibility and purpose -- that existed in TNG around Capt Picard.
Whatever was done to get that going was an act of absolute geniuses. (Granted, it helps when the hard parts can be explained through fantasy.)
It's interesting how I've been seeing posts about how Steward-as-Picard exemplified goodness. Sure he was a really great actor, but he was... an actor, tasked to help bring to life a universe envisioned by Gene Roddenberry. And there's like nothing about the latter.
The characters you see on screen are a mix of the writing and the acting. In long-running shows like TNG, the writers pick up on how an actor plays their character, and it informs their writing. TNG is generally considered to have come into its full form only after Roddenberry’s involvement leveled off. It might have become a very different show with an actor other than Patrick Steward as Jean-Luc Picard.
It's quite possible he has a non-standard conception of what marriage means. Heck I can't think of any episodes pee even scenes in Star Trek that touches on marriage in any way. I'd say it's possible that he sees it as it is: an institution born out of social structure, which is objectively unnecessary to life. Doesn't change whether he's good or bad because it's a subjective measurement.
It's hard to know enough details about the three people most closely involved. To make matters more difficult, a person being "good" or "bad" is a very subjective viewpoint. No, he was probably not good to his wife, and no he admits he wasn't a good father.
At the same time, he was a pro, and his abilities to inspire belief in the goal of being a better person helped countless people believe in something bigger than themselves.
Not to create a strawman out of thin air, but I'd argue that he did more good for far more people than he did to hurt and estrange his family. If there is an equation for such a comparison.
There is no way to condone the damages he caused. I just think it's better overall that we had him as he was, than not at all.
Actually he gave all the details in his book. They are pretty bad tbh. He admits he has zero relationship with his adult children. The book just made me sad.
It seems most here and the article venerate the actor but he probably had little to do with the words he spoke. You can play up the character but give credit to the writers who wrote those words
TNG actors had more input than you'd think, Frakes and Spiner both directed episodes and films, it was Spiner's idea that he have an evil twin brother instead of that episode featuring a robot lover.
Probably for the most part, but I'm pretty sure he added some of that leadership quality and way of being to the part due to him being Patrick. There's also probably some improv here and there. Pity about his kids though. Hope they had a better relationship in the later years.
He did have a very varied life story, but I'm sharing what I did because it's what he expressed about his entire life, especially in the most recent years.
The traitors had a hand in the dumbing down of the country as well. There's a reason Trump loves the poorly educated. All Republicans do. That's their base. The problem they are running into is the inmates are now running the asylum. The ignorant true believers are being elected in place of the former conservative elites who created the propaganda networks to create those ignorant true believers in the first place.
Big fan of Jungian thought and those he influenced suvh as Campbell, and Hero With A Thousand Faces was like a bolt of lightning when I first read it. But it’s just one of many maps, not the territory.
While I have yet to read The Hero's Journey, the way I understand what Campbell is arguing is that these commonalities that you mention become useful tools for learning about a culture because they allow one to map different cultural myths onto each other in such a way that make the differences in the cultures apparent.
In other words they're sort of like a cultural Rosetta Stone that lets you interpret and understand totally alien cultures or understand nuance in ones that you are already versed in so that you can have a better understanding of them.
The link that you provided has a quote from Campbell himself pointing out the impact different religions have on the stories that the people in those cultures tell:
> One finds different orders of story. For example, in fairy tales it’s usually the finding of the bride — or sometimes stealing the bride — and the sacred marriage motif. In the Roman Catholic tradition, it’s the atonement with the father motif — and there the woman becomes either the guide to the father in the form of Mary, or seductress in the form of Eve and her children. In the Christian tradition one is not to experience the apotheosis. You are not to think of yourself as the Christ, whereas in the Buddhist tradition that’s the way.
An interesting thought that just struck me is how something like Campbell's work (and the work of Joyce that inspired it) has impacted the crafting of fictional narratives going forward, with his research and analysis perhaps permanently changing fiction because of the meta-awareness of story telling that it imbues on storytellers. Another way to look at that is that Campbell's work is like a sort of atom-bomb on the creation of cultural artifacts with ones being made prior to it becoming like a sort of 'low-background steel' and ones that come after it being markedly different simply because of the existence of the publishing of his research.
> Science fiction is an existential metaphor that allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinded critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all."
Sometimes, but not this one. The Federation is an impossible society, and it can teach us nothing about the real world.
It wasn't intended to either. The writers realized early on that Roddenberry's ideas were deluded and so they carefully avoided any plot that might get too close to exploring Federation society. There are a few quotes where they discuss their frustrations with Roddenberry's ideas. ST:TNG spends much more time on alien non-Federation races than the Federation itself.
Eventually the writers and especially DS9 manages to smoothly steer Roddenberry's universe back to something approximating human reality and exploring Federation life becomes possible. But the early years of TNG are largely a writeoff from a social commentary perspective.
The fictional part of sci-fi is the science, it's in the name. Stories that involve beings presented as humans but who don't behave like humans don't have a name, because they aren't something most people want to hear. The social side of Star Trek was always its weakest parts by far.
I agree. Roddenberry was a genius at inspiring enthusiasm for a vision of the future that is delusional in the Maoist way and in other fundamental ways.
Our critics (e.g. thoughtful sci-fi authors like David Brin) should have criticized Roddenberry much more strenuously than they actually did.
Yeah. Luckily the parts of Star Trek that inspired people were the gadgets. It's common to hear Valley startup founders talk about seeing something in Star Trek and then thirty years later it's their product launch. The social side was much less impactful, you never hear people talk about how to create the Federation, probably because the writers never explored it (as they couldn't).
I was once in a long conversation in which my interlocutor was trying to get me to support socialism during which my interlocutor asked me to envision a future society "like Star Trek" then looked at me expectantly as if he had some hope that that would bring me around or at least soften my stance.
Beyond inspiring enthusiasm for socialism, it seemed to have inspired an unquestioning support for technological development:
Consider for example this comment by someone (rayiner) who is certainly capable of subtle thought, but who believed it would be a good reply to worries about the effect of the current crop of AI assistants on the psychology of children to write, "it's literally like the computer in Star Trek": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49326105
Or this comment by the same author in which he asserts that "we need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. . . .
Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships" (which most of us would judge to be at least a little reckless with the environment). An then in a follow-up comment writes, "getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49820988
If Roddenberry's Star Trek (i.e., The Original Series and the first 4 seasons of The Next Generation) were merely more delusional than most works of sci-fi, we probably wouldn't be discussing it now. You and I consider it worth talking about because Roddenberry's Star Trek has had been extremely influential. I would maintain that that influence has been very negative: it is has made people more zealous and ideological -- and not just about socialism.
Hmm. Interesting perspective. I must admit I've never had someone try to convince me of the merits of socialism using any kind of argument, let alone by way of comparison to Star Trek.
But I'm not sure that enthusiasm for technological progress can be truly said to be an ideology? I know it would have seemed that way to any pre-Christian era man, as the concept of linear time with forward progress isn't an intuitive one and had to be developed. But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".
People are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about technological progress. It doesn't always seem that way because new tech tends to cause people to stress out about change and predicting doom is good for getting attention, but when we look at people who are genuinely committed to rejecting techno-progress we're limited to the Amish and nobody else. It's not a big or growing community of people. Given the choice, people always take the upgrades.
I think that's why rayiner thinks support for progress shouldn't be politically polarized. It's actually not, most of the time. In the context of modern politics we see this with the various attempts at starting an "abundance" movement amongst the Democrats. The more moderate subfactions realize that the left is becoming strongly associated with anti-tech, anti-progress politics, and that this lacks mainstream appeal so they need to fix it.
>But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".
But then why didn't he write what you wrote? His citing Star Trek in his reply suggests that Star Trek is affecting how he thinks about the issue being discussed.
Sure, it's just more efficient to use well known cultural tropes rather than spell things out. The phrase "Star Trek computer" compactly encodes a lot of stuff for anyone who saw the show even briefly. Zero personality, all knowing, always obeys commands, professional, speaks fluent English, disembodied, etc. I don't know if it really carries more subtext.
I concede that by itself it is very weak evidence, but Star Trek is mentioned often on HN, and I've never seen an instance of anyone on HN having made a non-critical mention of it questioning the value or prudence of any major technological development.
Works of fiction borrow heavily from real life and writer's perspersonal experiences. Very rarely does fiction garner notice when it is completely divorsed from the reality and experiences and questions of most people's lives. It is good at showing other people's and idealogocal perspectives without bringing as many preconceptions as a straight copy from real life often would.
His character is some sort of hereditary noble who also happens to be the most decorated captain in starfleet, in command of the fleet flagship, allowed to galavant about with little to no effective oversight... Oh, and he quickly befriends a literal god, who watches over him from then on.
I don't think "lack of power" is one of Picard's defining attributes
Ironic to talk about seeing the fall of the Berlin wall, which they did, but failing to point out that Star Trek has always been "Communism: IN SPACE!"
It's a lot easier to stomach when you get rid of scarcity though, as it removes the teeth from it, for the most part. Though even then it manages to shine through from time to time.
My high school english teacher told me utopians become fascists and at the time I didn't know what he meant by that, but I've been on HN since 2010 and I've watched it play out first hand.
Nearest example I can reach is Elon Musk. Somehow he loves the culture novels but ends up being an evil piece of shit which is counter to basically everything the novels espoused.
The worst person that I have ever worked with knew nothing about leadership that wasn’t on Star Trek or in an episode of The West Wing. They even referred to the site as “their ship.”
Absolute, total, delusion.
Inspired to be better? Of course. Taught? God no.
If you’re finding that your leadership style, or really any part of your personality, is being lifted from an 80s/90s TV show, step back and reevaluate things.
I know several people who think Star Trek is a course in leadership and The West Wing is how politics works. Ever since Patrick Stewart died a bunch of outlets have been telling them that that's a good thing. It isn't.
I mean forget Picard, the leadership we have in much of the world today is full of egotistical narcissistic, blowhard or mob style and courrpt people -it feels like no one cares that such people ascend to power either via populism or via corruption -forget shithole countries..it feels like we have become a shithole planet
Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Erdogan, ... and so many others. Social media has only intensified this
It's a great question. Adherents to the Old Testament point to Original Sin.
But even without religion we can use today's standards of morality to be sure that at some point in human development there was a first time for a person to commit an abjectly "sinful" crime of inhumanity against another. Not having been there to witness the event, I can't tell you the what or why of it. Fratricide, parricide, abuse, and more, I think we can be sure there is a first time for all of these.
Speculation leads to many answers. One, absent religion, is that because we seem to be derived from pond scum "inhumanity" developed somewhat before morals and ethics did, and has found its niche in us.
I disagree, Captain Picard was a role model for me as a young boy and really helped me understand what a good leader, a good man, and what wisdom looks like. My dad died when I was young and this character very much helped me. Books, movies etc can inspire people including on leadership principles.
People seem to forget that stories and acting were the primary way of passing along critical lessons for surviving and building civilisation and human best practices befoee we came up with self help books and entertainment
I'll let you in on a little secret: nearly all of the received knowledge of our culture has been transmitted to us because of "script writers" and their forbears rather than the people who they write about.
Novelists, journalists, essayists, pamphleteers, scribes, gospel writers, historians, diarists, etc.
I'll let you in on another secret. People in the military are in two groups - those who have been shot at, and those who have not. Getting shot at changes your perspective forever, and people who write military fiction but have never been shot at don't really get how it works.
For example, B-17 crews were trained very well, the best that the military could do. They'd have to fly 30 some missions. The probability of dying on the first 5 missions was the same as the probability of dying in the following 25 missions.
I don't know, you're the one that brought up the military. And now you're bringing up people writing about the military. It's very difficult to follow.
I’ve often wondered if The Office inadvertently trained people to be bad managers.
People tend to follow examples they’ve seen before, even if they know it was a bad one. When faced with a new situation, they might just parrot the bad behavior because it’s the only example they know.
The nice thing about Michael Scott is that while he is a self-absorbed and very flawed manager and human, he also genuinely cares a great deal about his employees.
The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.
A far better method of learning leadership is by studying actual leaders, both good and bad ones. For example, if you want to know why Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.
Studying a fantasy whose entire purpose is to make money entertaining people? You're wasting your time.
Are any of the script writers of Star Trek successful leaders of men? If not, what credibility do their "lessons" have?
A historian can make their interpretation of history plausible. A group of historians can reinforce a narrative that is then undercut by the next generation of historians. What made Rommel a good commander is a complex question and we might not yet be done exploring the answer.
Picard the character was derived from the writers’ understanding of historical leaders. Saying the writing of him was solely for money or entertainment is like saying that a historian is only writing for a paycheck and prestige.
If you read the writings of the TNG writers, they were quite caught up in the ethical dilemmas they were presenting. Art that is purely for money is contrived and one dimensional.
Science fiction has an interesting and irreplaceable role in art: it can take a situation out of its immediate context and put it under another lens, clear of its modern cultural baggage. What makes science fiction interesting or not interesting is what it does with that ability: does it promote a simple good vs evil scenario, or does it explore the rich shades of grey that play out in real scenarios?
TNG was particularly good at showing real moral and ethical dilemmas that were quite thought provoking. Their head writers, particularly Michael Pillar and Ronald Moore and Jeri Taylor were deeply interested in exploring the implications and moral contradictions of the plots they presented.
Waving it all away as money grabbing is a reductive history at best.
> Picard the character was derived from the writers’ understanding of historical leaders.
How do you know that?
As for TOS, is it acceptable military doctrine that the general and his staff are the ones taking point into danger, where the entire leadership layer can be easily erased? Did Eisenhower storm Omaha Beach on D-Day?
The original Star Trek was explicitly pitched as heartening back to the age of sail. And it was an exploration vessel, not tied to a fleet. So you’d look to Captain Cook as an historical parallel: the
Captain was a combination of chief scientist, diplomat, and strategist. And indeed Cook died in an onshore altercation that left his final expedition in a precarious situation.
Picard was much closer to a modern naval captain: his ship had a clear chain of command and it was part of the plot that his xo did the dangerous expeditions so he could remain in command of the overall mission.
I would add that Eisenhower was a general of generals in d day. Generals closer to the action would sometimes find themselves in danger. For example Roosevelt Jr landed under fire and received the Medal of Honor. And for ship captains that was quite a bit more true.
> The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.
Agree but...
There is fiction also in stories of actual leaders (obviously even if 'non fiction') but more so in actual fiction (no matter who writes it even someone who has had the actual experiences). In a sense non-fiction more dangerous possibly (since it's taken more seriously and generally by many people unfortunately assumed to be true).
So even movies about real people or books have fiction ie creative license. How many times has the Steve Jobs story about 'the other side of the fence needs to be good (or whatever it was)' been told? Did it really happen (just because Steve told it or even his father related it?) Does it matter? Point is you might as well take most stories with a grain of salt. Even if again non-fiction.
What amazes me is how people are discussing a fictional character that they enjoyed watching and apparently learned from (because that character was entertaining). If someone had written a book (with the same info and credentials as the writers) most likely it would never have been taken seriously at all.
Maybe the take away isn't to use the word learn or taught but 'inspired me to think about' which happens in many situations and many places.
> Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.
My point is also agreeing better than fiction writers but still who knows for sure the truth or what lucky events lead to Rommel being able to do what he did.
>The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.
the fault with taking lessons from history is to mistake what just happens to be the case for what could be, or as Rumi said:
"The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everyone took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth."
thinking the world exhausts itself in history is to mistake the particular for the universal. Shakespeare knew more about reality because, not despite writing fiction. Or put differently, if the actual leaders of our current world were characters of fiction we'd question whether the author wasn't taking the cheap route and was lacking some depth.
I disagree. I'm not a Trekkie, but the character was imbued with sufficient depth, by the writers as well as Stewart's performance, that I think the article works.
Imagine this was an issue you were neutral on and someone proposed to you that culture is somehow isolated in a bubble, not interrelated with the rest of society. You'd laugh off that idea immediately. You'd go to bed still thinking about the guy who, faced with an idea he didn't like, pretended that culture in general should go away.
My feeling is that while enjoyable and thought provoking, TNG is still a work of fiction, and as such favored entertainment and legibility within a 45 minute window over nuance or subtly. That meant there were clear distinctions between "good" and "bad" sides, and scenarios often felt like they were constructed backwards from an outcome/clever solution.
I think that in turn causes people to view the real world in the same way, except they are always the "good" side and solutions that require compromise and tradeoffs are seen as unacceptable failures.
And most of Shakespeare is similar. The good guys and the bad guys are obvious just like in fables. But it's a hierarchy. It's useful to teach very young children fables even though they're silly. It's an easy way to introduce concepts around how we treat each other fairly. TNG and Shakespeare are the same way. Just a step on the hierarchy. Yes, as a person reaches adulthood, it's obvious that it's simplified. But you've at least seen examples in art of what might be worth aspiring to in life when young. It's why we've been telling each other hero's journey stories since Homer. What are the alternatives? Examples of self-interest and power grabs with no consequences? To a young person that can be rapidly demoralizing.
Totally agree on the 45 minute window limitation though. That's why I've always liked DS9 where they took what could have been one episode about a culture and conflict and made it 7 seasons.
Shakespeare is not similar to Start Trek. He has way more nuanced and realistic takes then Star Trek. Most TV shows have more nuance and psychological realism then Star Trek. Even Odyssey which is thousands years old has way more complex morality and takes then Star Trek. It does not have that super simplistic white white good against badly bad evil that will admit mistake and change into good person because Picard said a sentence.
> It's why we've been telling each other hero's journey stories since Homer.
Homer is nothing like Star Trek and its story is not a moralizing adventure.
Not from a modern perspective, but wouldn't it be from the perspective of a warrior/honor culture? Agamemnon steals Achilles' property/prize and Achilles has to figure out the morally right response given the expectations of his culture.
> Homer is nothing like Star Trek
Isn't Voyager at least somewhat like the Odyssey? It's the challenge of maintaining one's cultural/self-identity through the long journey home (loyalty to his crew/household in Ithaca : loyalty to Federation ideals, see Equinox). It even included sirens (Prime Factors, Bliss, and literally in Favorite son) and the decision to take on Scylla or Charybdis (travel through Borg space or go the long way around with different unknowns).
> super simplistic white white good against badly bad evil
That's more Star Wars than Star Trek (though I would make the case that's a necessary step on the hierarchy of stories for human cognitive development). It's there in Star Trek but plenty of TNG episodes explore nuance in cultural relativity (Half a Life, The Outcast, Birthright come to mind)
> but wouldn't it be from the perspective of a warrior/honor culture
I do not think so. Odyssey is not gung ho adventure book.
> Isn't Voyager at least somewhat like the Odyssey?
Absolutely 100% not. They are completely different kind of fiction. Star Trek in general is not like Odyssey. Star Trek is very schematic, with fairly simple plot with moral outcome, good vs bad who will change into good, and predictable caricature like characters. It works, because it is kind of a canvass where you can project own fantasies and predict what the world will do.
Odyssey has less predictable structure, a lot of dining and talking, more grey, deception, politics. Also, they do not come back to commit a massacre by the end of Voyager.
> That's more Star Wars than Star Trek
Some TNG episodes may explore that, but I was rewatching it few months ago. It is not nuanced at all. Episodes have strong moral lesson, loud and clear, that hits you over the head. You really need to suppress a lot of disbelieve about "how world works" to buy into it. (Btw, Babylon 5 aged a lot better. It is pretty idealistic still, but less simplified.)
I had a similar experience rewatching Doctor Who a few years ago. But then I remembered it's written as a children's show. It introduces some genuinely terrifying concepts in a package that's developmentally appropriate.
That's why I referenced fables. Your complaint is that Star Trek is too fable-like. I would argue that it's appropriate for a 12-year-old and having culturally relevant and age appropriate material to introduce to developing minds is important.
The original article's thesis is that powerful institutions can also be good. If I were a teenager right now, I would feel the opposite based on what I see around me. I might believe the solution is to tear it all down. Stories about duty to higher ideals provide an alternative narrative that can easily be found in actual history (Lincoln's belief in the union, Churchill's belief in democracy).
> Odyssey has less predictable structure
Yes, the Odyssey is higher up the hierarchy from fables and Star Trek. The core of the story is reclaiming identity when separated from everything you know. Calypso is the height of this. She offers to free Odysseus from his identity as a mortal human. Seven of Nine reclaiming her humanity is probably the closest parallel to Odysseus in a simpler, more predictable package.
Thought about your Shakespeare point a bit more. I was wrong in saying "most". I should have said "well-known" Shakespeare: Good and bad is clear in Lear, Richard III, Othello, Macbeth and they're still worthwhile stories about human nature. It's gray in I Henry IV and Coriolanus. Hamlet is more complex: it's a well-known play and the bad guys are clear, but the good guy struggles with taking action. But the original comment I was countering was that popular entertainment doesn't have anything to tell us about leadership. I think that the fact that Homer and Shakespeare have stayed popular for centuries and that we're here in 2026 ranking them against other popular entertainment/fiction supports that humans in all time periods create stories to explore real concepts and those stories become popular and stay popular when other people see reality reflected in them.
For between 5000 and 25000 years (at least), humans have used storytelling to preserve, develop and disseminate their culture(s).
If you want to critique the stories and the storytelling of TNG or whatever else, please do so - there's plenty to get into. But "still a work of fiction" is not a critique worthy of anyone's time.
Most things are to some degree works of fiction. The public personas of the rich and powerful are generally curated representations of how they want you to see them, and that isn't a new phenomenon.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Good fiction instils children with rolemodels. Then they can try to live up to those rolemodels as adults while the whole world runs on cynical and self-serving rules.
I completely agree, and I'm willing to bet that most people here would agree. The only reason you're getting pushback in this case is because HN is filled with Trekkies who're unable to separate their love of Picard from your statement. If you wrote this same comment about an article that focused on Don Draper from Mad Men, you'd probably be upvoted.
You're describing the idea that thought leadership should be based on individual character, regardless of [non]fictional status, which is exactly the point of the pushback.
How on earth could you come to the conclusion that the people pushing back believe all fictional characters are good models of thought leadership? The parent's implication was that none are.
Stories are like thought experiments. I agree that blindly trusting you should “be like this” is silly, but the story works through the preconditions and consequences with you.
I mean, some of the richest most influential people of our time are operating from a handful of science fiction books. Star trek is at least tonally more humanitarian than Snow Crash.
It seems a more honest place to source your fictional characters to admire than the news or non-fiction, though. Makes it clearer that the character is fictional than when you try to pretend you're talking about a real person rather than the idea of one.
Or to put it bluntly: all paragons are made-up fictions, some just use real persons as framing devices, but that doesn't mean they're any more "real".
Alternatively you could address the substance of the comment instead of making some appeal to authority. Why do Gorbachev, Gandhi or Mandela stand in opposition to the points being made in the article?
Star Trek and Jean-Luc Picard is horrible example of leadersnip! Every time he meets real danger, he gets his crew needlesly killed to make empty gestures!
Like with Q, he has to give lectures to literal god! Perhaps shut up for 5 minutes to get more information?
Or when meeting borg...?
Patrick was great actor, he was still able to carry Star Trek. But writing was horrible! Vegetarian communist utopia tries to imagine real combat!
Star Trek is cultish ideological juju in the form of swashbuckling egomania and theme park vacation.
Look at the colors: a tribe of C-suite nerds zip around in an atomic powered space-faring Hyatt Regency trying to train the universe to Taylorize all production methods. Its protagonists are utterly entitled and classist, who teach war as the essential force by which their lives incur meaning.
It's is a soap-operatic long tail of Western empire indulging in fatuous "adventure", which amounts literally beaming into alien realms to cause disturbance and justifying it through dominion or ignorance, while the executives try to believe they've moved beyond themselves so they can feel noble.
As a dramatic art, the show offers some moments of transcendence, but these end up sequestered to the commercial dictates of the franchise, which is an epic advert for consumerist Americana.
I feel deep suspicion about anyone who regards cosplay as instructive about what makes for "good men with power". And as Vox is a notable outlet in the great system of commercial attention-whoring that defines our culture, I feel double the suspicion.
Also See:
Phase IV (1974)
Futureworld (1976)
Lathe of Heaven (1980)
So you haven't seen TNG, Voyager or Enterprise? The central point of your comment dissolves with the fact that many episodes gripe with the prime directive. Many of the best TNG episodes grapple with morality and tackle complex issues centering around incorrectly applying our values to other cultures. Alongside that, culture and authoritarianism, reflections and warnings of what can happen to even societies that see themselves as enlightened (Drumhead comes to mind).
I think it's important to critique shows within the context of the eras and societies they come from but you don't strike me as someone who knows the star trek universe very well.
As an aside, Jean-Luc Picard's character was explicitly based on Horatio Hornblower (Stewart was given a stack of Forrester novels to prepare for the role).
In comparison between the two, Hornblower was a rather unimaginative person bound by his deep sense of duty and the extreme pressure of the Navy. Picard (as a character) replaces duty with the Prime Directive, and pressure came from feeling with the unknown.
I have a deep affection for stories where people are depicted as good, or even just good at their jobs. I appreciate for actors and writers it's a much harder ask - it's much easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads, especially if you yourself are somewhat uninteresting and never got much life experience. It's much harder making believable characters that we can look up to and respect.
> I have a deep affection for stories where people are depicted as good, or even just good at their jobs. ...
I've mentioned the series before... and I'll pitch it again. Nathan Lowell's solar clipper series. It starts with Quarter Share. The first book starts with:
The first several books are available as a free podcast, read by the author (and he's a good reader) that can be found on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/traders-tales-from-the...GoodReads has a number of reviews that are spot on - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2334538.Quarter_Share (the writing is something that is "cozy" to some and "boring" to others... I liked the series but there's definitely a "nothing happens and there's no plot" aspect to it).
The main character starts out as a quarter share working in the galley... cleaning coffee urns.
Holy molly. I actually felt quite similar about the first one, but the second one was so ridiculously absurd that I felt I had been fooled by the first (quarter share) book? Did you feel a huge change in the second book? I genuinely could not tell if I had been misreading the first one or if the book went straight off into wish fulfillment absurdity?
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6945329546 (quarter share)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6973501411 (half share)
The first three are a "tour" of the way a ship operates. Steward (and cargo), engineering (book 2), and deck (book 3). Of the first three, I think the second is the weakest, but book 3 picks up. There's possibly a bit of wish fulfillment writing in there... after becoming an officer (book 4), there's very little of "time in port" as responsibilities dictate otherwise.
Book 4 has a time jump of college - four years are a few paragraphs... and then he's an officer in a very unhappy ship. Books 5 and 6 finish off the 'share' sequence. If the first three are coming of age of a youth, the next three are the coming of age of a man.
If you're going through and reading them, at this point I'd switch to the "Run" series which has two young women in a very small ship in the toeholds. There's a lot of world building associated with it. These have much more of a plot to them.
Dark Knight Station: Origins might be a good read at this point if we're establishing a reading order which establishes the backstory of two characters (one who appears in Home Run, the other who appears in Suicide Run). Home Run fills in some gaps outside of Ishmael. The three books together help with some of the larger backstory that will show up several times.
This then brings us back to Ishmael with the series In Ashes Born, To Fire Called, and By Darkness Forged. Not going to provide any plot elaboration that might spoil previous books (things do keep building).
And lastly, there's the "School" series with SC Marva Collins with School Days, Working Class, and Hard Knocks... and this is as far as the author has gotten with the Solar Clipper series.
---
If you had trouble with the 2nd, finish the 3rd and then give the 4th a try. I like the entire series and its world building. The mundanity of Ishmael's life (where exciting is often not a good thing). I really liked the later books - especially In Ashes Born.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/206519-solar-clipper-univer... - you'll see that Half Share is the lowest score of them.
Thank you for the reading list! I appreciate it.
Since you seem to be a real fan of the series and enjoy it, I will take your advice and read a future one at some point. But I would be curious what your feelings on a re-read of book 1 and 2 would be? I was just completely floored by the change in character that I saw in book 2. I felt like the book started with a normal, slightly above average, inquisitive character, who is handling new (and often mundane) challenges in his life one item (trading stand) at a time. And book 2 just retconed him into a gigachad who seemed to have none of the uncertain or hesitant nature of the book 1 character.
I'd contend that his insecurities were about the culture that he found himself in... which incidentally is an important point.
From book 6:
This is timestamped as 2372.. book 2 is 2352.I don't see it as him being insecure about himself as such. He's as much of a chad as any physically fit 19-year-old is...
He's still as culturally insecure at 20 as he is when he's 40 - trying to figure out how he fits in as a spacer who wasn't born to a spacer family.
So how does one handle the cultural insecurities at different points in one's life? At 20? At 40? nearly 50?
Book 5 gets a bit into the difference between the expectations of a planet (or station) life and that of a spacer and the stress there on relationships (and how they can work).
From the start of In Ashes Born this is stated quite clearly when talking to a therapist:
I'd contend that the overall arch of Ishmael's story is about seeking to be part of a family and with various people helping him learn that along the way.I listened to the first audio book. It consists entirely of descriptions of the main character making coffee and hawking belt buckles. It is pretty tedious, maybe a more optimistic version of something like the game cart life
Imagine getting a Steward's Assistant ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steward%27s_assistant ) position on a cargo ship... something like https://recruiting.paylocity.com/Recruiting/Jobs/Details/246... (granted, that one is likely only out for days rather than weeks or months) ... and if you've got that job, its much less interesting than the things that can happen when you're working engineering... or deck... or become an officer on deck.
Yes, being a steward on a ship that has a few months between port of call is tedious... but you don't start out as a captain with the interesting things happening. You've got to work your way up the ladder and he started out on the bottom rung. Ship's Steward | Life at Sea | https://youtu.be/U02ndHzJGic as a book.
One of the things about the series though... there's no grand military conflict going on. There's no fighting aliens or heroic space marines. It's (initially) the story of a young man getting his family suddenly pulled away from him and thrown into the Deep Dark as he searches for his place. Not actively... though he gets that advice too. There's also a component of needing to take an active role in making life decisions compared to letting life drag you along (things tend to go less well for Ishmael when he lets life pull him).
Book 1:
Book 7: ---Books 4, 5, and 6 (Double Share, Captain's Share, Owner's Share) have much more going on with the decisions (and are likely more relatable as someone closer in age) than the equivalent of a day in the life of a unskilled 20 something... but the day in the life of the unskilled 20 something sets the foundations for how the decisions (and problems) of the man he becomes are dealt with.
It's also written in a game-like way - the world has a set of simple and understandable rules and the main character completes a series of challenges to progress forward. It reminds me of a lot of military fiction like Bernard Cornwell and WEB Griffith where in each book the main character gets a new promotion. It's sort of a childish view of life, like getting merit badges or something.
I can see that... for the first books. Though consider that at the time the main character hasn't gone to college yet and does have a childish view of life and is using the 'merit badges' as a goal. Give Milk Run a try, or if you're ok with jumping ahead, Double Share.
Thinking back to my own college days, the "merit badge" model and the planning guide for a major (first three books, Ishmael is pre college... the beginning of Double Share has a summary of his time in college that takes a fe paragraphs).
The more adult life choices all happen in the later books (and while he still has some focus on "the certification that allows him to do X" (steward's certification for carrying passengers) its a minor thing rather than the "what he does all day").
I haven't liked much tv sci-fi other than TNG and DS9. In recent times, The Expanse was a huge standout for me. It's also full of characters trying to effectively handle extremely difficult situations, and striving to be good people within their context.
It's very different from TNG in most ways, but it does share the emphasis on retaining humanity, dignity, and ethics within ambiguity and hardship. Very interesting to think about them side-by-side.
TNG put writing first. They went after interesting stories and didn't try to force them into a formula for ratings. Sometimes there was fisticuffs and phaser fire, but many of the best TNG episodes didn't involve violence at all. It was an optimist's take on the future. The cast of TNG was great, but Patrick Stewart's acting chops let them do episodes that another show couldn't have pulled off. He changed what was possible.
The quality of writing for DS9 was also quite good but, after trying the TNG formula for a season or two, they broke with the writing-first mentality and adopted an action sci-fi formula. The showrunners feared they'd lose ratings if an episode didn't have at least some action. It worked for DS9, but later Trek series have had a tough time shaking free of the action sci-fi formula. The problem with formulas is that, while they produce individual episodes or shows that are exemplars of their form, the sameness eventually causes viewers to drift away.
Strange New Worlds has shown it's willing to do some pretty wild things (e.g. turning its cast into muppets, adding gore and horror elements, etc.), but they have not messed with the formula in a meaningful way.
If you're looking for something outside the Trek formula, one recommendation I'd share is "The Foundation".
I think the problem with modern Star Trek series is that they simply have terrible writing. DS9 produced some of the best TV ever with action/sci-fi blends, and it also did more dialogue driven scenarios phenomenally well. I think the thing that really drew people in to DS9/TNG is that the writers really seemed to understand people of all perspectives, and so were able to create highly compelling characters and stories.
For instance the various plot points in DS9 between Sisko and Eddington (like "For the Uniform") often have you starting to cheer for the 'bad guys', while really confusing the question of who the good guy and who the bad guy even is. DS9 even excels as 'humanizing' the Cardassians who are, on the surface at least, just an evil trope. And recent times in real life should emphasize, to the point of absurdity, that this is what people and situations are genuinely like.
But the modern Star Treks feel like they were written by people living in a bubble with minimal life experience. They rely on political tropes and diametrically opposed good/evil stuff that's utterly banal, and intellectually insulting. They actually do have some of the same writers as previous shows though, so I assume there must be production/directorial pressures that caused the shift in 'style.'
Some TV shows are now being designed to be watched as background while the viewers are pecking away on their phones. Plots are simplified and repeated. Viewers are often shown and then told important points multiple times, just to make sure they don't miss them.
Discovery did this some of the time. There were episodes where they would show, then tell, then tell again all within a few minutes. Not every episode was done this way. I suspect they were experimenting and it did not go well. Anybody who was actually giving the show their full attention was bound to be irritated. Discovery was a low point in modern Trek for multiple reasons. They initially decided to forgo an ensemble cast and bet it all on a protagonist driven narrative. This severely limited the diversity of viewpoints in the first couple seasons. The writing was bad for entirely avoidable reasons. People who watch trek pay attention to the universe's rules. You can't beam through shields, you need to have a reason for why the away team can't be trivially beamed out of dangerous situations, etc.. The people writing Discovery did not bother to do this on a repeating and continual basis. Again, it was insulting to anyone who wasn't pecking away on their phone. I wouldn't say the writers for Discovery merely lacked life experience. They clearly hadn't bothered to watch previous Trek shows.
Strange New Worlds is better written, but a little too reliant on high concept for their most recent season. Every episode seems to have a gimmick. Still the cast is good and I look forward to them wrapping up Pike's story and, presumably, setting up a reboot of TOS.
Lower Decks is the best Trek show in recent memory. Thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. I can't recommend that one enough, just in case anyone skipped it because it was animated. Intelligent. Inventive. Hilarious. The people who made Lower Decks really put a lot of love into it.
Edit: I forgot to mention Picard, which is unforgivable. Some of the seasons were a little uneven, but some were fantastic and it was truly a treat to see Patrick Stewart as Picard one last time.
> Plots are simplified and repeated. Viewers are often shown and then told important points multiple times, just to make sure they don't miss them.
This kind of TV writing really frustrates me. I’m currently rewatching The Wire (just finished Season 3) and the producers, writers and directors take the complete opposite approach. Each season has a large number of characters with many subtly inter-relating plots. To get the most out of the show, you need to be paying attention and to have a good memory for recalling details from previous episodes and previous seasons. The first two times I watched the show (more than 15 years ago), I watched in on DVD (lower resolution, 4:3 aspect ratio). This time I’m watching it in 16:9 HD on Bluray and I’ve picked up so many plot points and characterisations that I hadn’t picked up (or don’t remember) before, e.g., one very brief shot in Season 1 explains how Bubs gets his nickname. It’s such a breath of fresh air for the writers to pay so much attention to detail and for the viewer to be treated like a reasonably intelligent adult.
I agree with your take on Picard. However, I didn’t enjoy Discovery so haven’t bothered with any of the other recent Star Trek series. Thanks for the summaries of the other two shows. I’ll add Lower Decks to my to-watch list.
To your point, the Lower Decks writers were clearly TNG fans.
The (voice) actors were too... and they were well versed in the lore. Tawny Newsome (Beckett Mariner) became a writer for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Starfleet_Academy#S... )
Wil Wheaton in Ready Room has some episodes about Lower Decks. The Crossover episode https://youtu.be/3SiYyIAz5xU and the final recap https://youtu.be/NK94dXm2Wis
I'd also generally suggest Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny ( https://www.youtube.com/@Dropping-Names ) where Brent Spinner and Johnathan Frakes chat with people about movies and TV. While it's not about Trek, it's a frequent tangential topic. I believe it's helpful in the context of "how much the fandom extends to other people in the entertainment industry."
As one would hope, given that it shared the same time setting and some characters. It's truly a shame they never managed to get Patrick Stewart in for a guest appearance.
I always felt like the problem w/ DIS was that the story itself was just incredibly overdramatic. TNG has... I think really only one of these moments in Conspiracy where The Federation is taken over by alien parasites, and OK let's just blame the 80s for that. But, just Lorca's arc in DIS would be a series-long drama in the TNG years, but it's literally like 3 episodes. Tyler actually being Voq is _completely insane_, and is also like 4 episodes. Also Culber dies! But also comes back! Can you imagine Geordi killing Crusher (who is retrieved from idk, The Nexus after a few episodes a little shaken but also totally OK), Data being a secret Romulan who underwent bonkers like, bone shaving to look human (and is also completely "fixed" in a single episode) and Picard also having euthanized his entire former crew but generally being completely fine?
For a while I thought the acting was melodramatic, but I actually think it pairs really well with the truly crazymaking amount of wild shit that happens moment to moment in DIS. Burnham should be a PTSD shell, Tilly should've resigned her commission long ago, etc. etc.
For me, DIS wasn't so much a case of "the problem with" as "amongst the many problems with".
Things as you say, but also: didn't know show's own technology history (Klingons with cloaks before they should've had them), adding in spore drive then needing to retcon it.
The show din't seem to know what it wanted to be and kept pulling in different directions, one of the early plans was an "anthology series, with each season being a standalone, serialized story set in a different era", which would have suited this much, much better: one or two episodes about the Klingon war, one showing Pike's command before Enterprise, young Spock's first mission, even some about a spore drive and the problems it has, some AI-takeover stuff, some post-TNG stuff, one episode about galaxy-threatening event, one about some post-apocalyptic thing like The Burn isn't even bad. But all that smooshed together with the same crew? Nah.
The reason Michael Burnham had a male-coded name was teased but never actually revealed (could have been interesting e.g. "adopted by Vulcans who didn't notice it was male-coded because that's a silly human thing"). Her character shifted way too hard and way too fast, from "Vulcan persona due to upbringing" to "traumatised normal human", a nature-vs-nurture tale could have been an interesting thing to explore.
And Michael Burnham was correct to want a show of force against the Klingons! Sure, wildly violated how command hierarchy works, but she was correct, and Starfleet Command should have known that because she got advice from Sarek. Not that she should have been Sarek's never-before-mentioned adopted daughter, we need to see new characters rather than just repeating the old ones; I mean, Vulcan is an entire plant, not a small Pacific island. (Amusing trivia from some fan-site I visited decades ago: VOY had the opposite problem, in that the list of extras appearing as background crew was larger than the crew complement).
And in the battle before they went off to the far future, that unexploded torpedo inside Enterprise, which the admiral heroically sacrificed herself to disarm… (1) it's antimatter, how does that "not explode"?, (2) it's ~ 50 megatons and inside the ship and in TOS an overloaded phaser pistol was supposed to be able to blow out multiple decks, (3) what, are their transporters not working? Can't you either beam it out, or the admiral out after she disarms it? (4) Why send in an admiral, did they run out of ensigns and non-officers? And Control (the AI) was proto-Borg, right as we had three seasons of Picard with season 1: Romulans, Borg, and Androids; Season 2: Q, Borg, and time travel; Season 3: Borg, Changelings, and Crusher saying "no one has seen or heard from the Borg in a decade".
Yeah at times they felt annoyed, almost contemptuous of Trek's history, both in terms of technology but also writing style. The things they put the crew (and thus the audience) through were insane. Like, I want to like Burnham, but you gotta give me a season before I can really empathize with her love being a stealth--in a bizarrely extreme way--Klingon. I want to like Lorca, but then you yoink him and make him full on evil. All the Trek's had solid crews you grew to know and love. DIS did everything they could to keep that from happening, like abusively so.
Which episode has muppets?
My first forays into DS9 were sort of haphazard and I didn't appreciate the political thoughts and tensions that are much more nuanced and consistent throughout the series compared to the relatively simple TNG operating paradigm of "we explore, navigate the inevitable sticky situations that arise."
Recently, and in no small part thanks to everything being available for streaming, I started with the DS9 pilot and made my way through all seven seasons. It took me several years of steady chipping away (spikes in watching on long flights, and weeks or months of no watching), but I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are multiple sharks jumped. Alien sharks jumped. The same hammy and even adolescent takes on relationships. But through it all shines the enduring, consistent introspective existentialism.
I think watching DS9 in this way provides a richer experience while TNG can mostly be enjoyed by dropping in here or there, and you eventually pick up on the long arcs of the Borg, Q, etc...
DS9 took more risks and the characters are more complex and layered. A few of the episodes are up there with the best TV ever made.
TNG is very, very good, but it wears its heart on its sleeve. Picard never struggles with existential moral ambiguity. Even when he (rarely) fails, he's always The Good Man.
The utopian slant is appealing and we can't help cheering for him, but DS9 revealed there was some sleight of hand behind the narrative.
Of the series since, I think only Battlestar Galactica approached similar complexity. Maybe Westworld, which got quite abstract and interesting towards the end.
The Expanse is more by the numbers. It's basically class war in space, with the military, the aristocracy, and the peasants slugging it out, while a dragon rolls in and threatens to eat everything. The writing is very challenge -> response -> partial solution over and over, and for me it just doesn't have the depth or the emotional reach. (Or the acting chops.)
Which DS9 episodes are GOAT contenders?
For myself there'd be many but it's difficult to name them in isolation. For instance 'In the Pale Moonlight' is obviously going to be near to #1, but I think if you don't have the buildup and character arc to that point that it might not hit with the same sort of impact as somebody who'd watched the show to that point.
It's kind of like Game of Thrones and 'The Red Wedding'. That episode is zomg, but if you watched it in isolation with no knowledge of the character arcs to date, it'd probably be interesting, but wouldn't have anywhere near the same sort of punch.
The Visitor (S4, E2) was nominated for a Hugo award. The main character in this story is an older version of Jake Sisko, played by Tony Todd.
Duet is monumental. I've watched all the recent greats, from Sopranos to The Wire, and Duet remains the best realized hour of television I've ever seen.
"Far Beyond The Stars" is also incredibly tight and affecting writing and Avery Brooks delivers an absolutely stone cold believable performance while also keeping up the very Avery Brooks scenery chewing. Might be lost one someone who didn't know the characters outside of the Benny Russell scenarios but holy smokes.
> TNG is very, very good, but it wears its heart on its sleeve. Picard never struggles with existential moral ambiguity. Even when he (rarely) fails, he's always The Good Man.
I find this amusing, because of what his best friend said about him wearing his heart on his sleeve :
https://www.instagram.com/p/DfGRUe0B63I/
I liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.
I am worried that Game of Thrones ruined a generation of sci-fi and fantasy - everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone. Even besides the fact that we are manifesting a world where progress is impossible, it has turned genres that is traditionally very positive and escapist into bleak emotional slogs.
> I liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.
I recommend reading the original book series. In my opinion the writing only gets better as it goes on, and it’s obvious the writers had a plan in mind from the beginning rather than just writing more books for the sake of continuing a series where the ideas were all used up in the first book or two
> everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone.
GoT was a late-comer to this. For me, William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_ (1984) was my first exposure to dark and morally-compromised Sci-Fi. I am sure it predates this in novels. _Neuromancer_ inspired a couple of movies in the 90s: The Net and Johnny Mneumonic come to mind.
In US TV shows, I think Babylon 5 started the lean into the dark tone, and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica of the 2000s is a better example than GoT.
Like 24 and several other shows, Battlestar Galactica is very 9/11 coded. Everything took a turn towards Darker And Edgier in the aftermath.
Stargate SG-1 in their episode Wormhole X-treme, which released Sep 8 2021, so just before 9/11, made fun of the TV industry trend of pushing everything towards darker, edgier, "extreme" styles.
Babylon 5, with the white-knight Rangers, the captain who single-handedly saved humanity in the war with the Minbari AND THEN went on to build friendships with them, and the completely monotonic, both-sides-of-the-coin moralities of the Shadows and the Vorlons?
Yes, the Narn and the Centauri were not so pure, but it reads as a pretty mythic Good V Evil world to me.
Expanse is a very strange tv show. Their main cast is utterly bland and have absolutely no chemistry with each other, the only interesting character is maybe Amos, but almost all secondary characters are top notch, with lots of great actors and tons of charisma. It is typical for some belter captain who appears in 2 episodes to effortlessly outshine the whole Rocinante crew.
Yeah. It boggles the mind how unlikable the Rocinante crew is. Why were they written like that?
What are you talking about? I liked them as people. Amos was comedic relief, a psycho, the rest of them are ... people with human personalities.
Like the GP said, they were bland, sort of jerks (and not really even Jerks With A Heart Of Gold), and had no chemistry together. As far as I can recall, they just had petty drama all the time that felt like it was written just because there’s supposed to be drama.
To me, they seemed closer to normal people with normal relationships that yes, have some conflict too. Especially in a small group living together all the time where majority is not submissive, so will assert themselves here or there.
But like, Amos is a psycho.
I'm currently watching Battlestar Galactica for the first time. Give it a try, it scratches the same itch for me
I watched the battle star reboot for the first time recently and the whole cylon reveal drama really ruined it for me. It felt like they were picked for shock value rather than story consistency. The first season was great, but it fell off for me and was a struggle to care by season 4. And I gave up on caprica after an episode or two.
BSG was a great 3 season show, that had an entire season worth of “the final 5! THE FINAL FIVE! FIIIIIIIINALLL FIIIIIVEEE”-style crap injected into it.
I had the opposite reaction to the series end (I know, I'm an outlier there), but I couldn't tolerate Caprica either.
I really cannot understand how anyone can like the expanse. It must really be because the really good scifi is a bit old and nobody knows what scifi should be like. Cannot explain it otherwise.
What is it you don’t like about it?
And which sci-fi shows would you recommend instead?
This one was really nice for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently_(TV_series)
(not to be confused with the USA version which is terrible)
Oh wow. Had no idea there was an earlier production of Dirk Gently. I've only seen the BBC-America one, which is magnificent.
As a lover of Douglas Adams (and a non-American), I adored the concept of Dirk Gently but felt the entries were some of the weakest material he'd ever released. There were so many great ideas but the characters were a confusing mess. The US adaption by contrast is possibly the most perfect blend or midpoint between of American and British humour I've ever seen, and one of the tightest time-travel stories that you can wish for without taking itself too seriously.
Looking forward to watching this previous series, I like Howard Overman and Matt Jone's other work.
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> a meaningless, ugly, depressing trash show only possible to produce in an empire in terminal decline.
It's an OK sci-fi show but the US isn't in decline. In fact, the opposite is occurring, minus those espousing Marxist ideology dragging us down a bit.
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That’s not true.
Plenty of great places all over the country.
Being liberal isn’t the same thing as being a Marxist.
Love it or leave it isn’t a valid argument.
There is no reasoning with someone who looks at Trump's America and thinks it's fine except "the Marxists"
I agree - I almost feel guilty holding characters to such a high standard that I don’t often match myself. Conversely, I worry that our willingness to embrace so many anti-heroes in media has affected us adversely. Too many shows like Breaking Bad and The Apprentice may eventually take its toll.
Eventually?
>It's much easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads, especially if you yourself are somewhat uninteresting and never got much life experience.
I don't even think this is true, people just started claiming it. People love excellence. Characters don't need to be mediocre to be relatable. A character like Picard motivates us to be better than ourselves. We can still relate to him because he faces similar moral challenges, but shows us how we can rise above.
The "relatable" characters crowd are the same ones trying to make Superman less of a beacon of hope.
Hah, I had no idea that he was based on Horatio. I always really loved Horatio as a character and I found his way of observing and reacting to the world in such uncertainty unparalleled. I also always loved Captain Picard for the same reason, but I never realized one may be an influence for the other. Thanks for sharing this.
> I have a deep affection for stories where people are depicted as good, or even just good at their jobs. I appreciate for actors and writers it's a much harder ask - it's much easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads, especially if you yourself are somewhat uninteresting and never got much life experience. It's much harder making believable characters that we can look up to and respect.
Mmm. This represents what I liked about the TOS-ENT era of Trek, SG-1, Babylon 5, Lower Decks, and roughly half of SNW; and also what I dislike about DIS (the nice crew are noobs, the competent ones are dicks), season one of PIC, half of what I don't like with season 4 of SNW, and why I was so bored by Stargate Universe.
Stories where characters bring forward their humanness (and not being perfect) can share a lot to learn from.
Dunno, Picard always struck me as the middle manager type. The kind of guy who enables his subordinates to good work. Which is a very valuable skill, considering I had my share of total psycho bosses, but it's hardly inspirational, and doesn't really exceed expectations.
(And doesn't make very good television either.)
There was scene in one of my favorite movies, Star Trek: First Contact.
Not to spoil it too much, but there is a scene where a woman from the past (from the 21st century) gets beamed up to the Starship Enterprise. She asks how much it cost. Full dialog below:
> Lily: "How much did this thing cost?"
> Picard: “The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.”
> Lily: “No money? You mean you don’t get paid?”
> Picard: “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
The 24th century of the Star Trek universe was unburdened by corporate shareholders. Leaders, like Jean-Luc, did not have the carrot of a multi-million dollar bonus, nor the stick of getting fired for missing quarterly expectations. That's why he could lead with total integrity -- the incentives were different, arguably much better.
I love that movie. I named my VPS Hermes agent “borg.”
src: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afu62oimxTA
Unfortunately we're steering more towards the world of Alien, where Picard would be working for Weyland Yutani
It's more Event Horizon:
>>"Where we're going, we won't need eyes..."
Hell is real: we create our own best emprisonments.
Though in the same movie Picard claimed with a straight face that humans do not seek revenge in the 24th century either, so perhaps we should take his claims about wealth acquisition as similarly aspirational?
He gets called out for that bullshit in the same scene, no?
One of my favorite episodes of TNG was Tapestry, to the point that it significantly influenced my life perspective. It emphasizes that even in this sort of idealized world, the things you might want to avoid are still unavoidable. [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHoPLhpw2g4
Wild! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307407
Time to take some risks I suppose. ;-)
Quark would disagree.
The tenth Rule of Acquisition states
"Greed is eternal."
Quark is not intended to be an upstanding role model.
Quark is from a race that wasn't even discovered until TNG. When a Federation officer speaks of "in the 24th century", they are not saying "and Ferengi and Klingons and the Borg are unified in this." They are speaking of Federation civilization.
The borg would say “resistance is futile.”
My issue with the Star Trek utopia dream was always the lack of realism which so many people now with AI/Robotics/Elon praise overlook.
There's limited resources no robot or AI can overcome. If we all have the same basic income (actually why even bother with money if everyone has the same? But whatever) - then who decides who gets the 8 bedroom villa overlooking the ocean in a nice warm sunny climate and who gets the shack behind the wodden old house in ice cold dark forrest?
Who gets the old rusty bicycle and who the new Ferrari?
I think if one looks beneath the veneer there's far greater inequality than that. The typical human issues are regularly hit on in the show. I mentioned [1] one great example above in the episode Tapestry. But even more broadly than that consider lifestyle differences. Right now on Earth the lifestyle between a billionaire and an average person isn't all that different. They have nicer stuff and more influence, but we live lives that are still roughly the same. The endless hedonism people think they'd engage in if they had billions gets old fast.
But now imagine on the Star Trek universe the difference in lives between somebody in Starfleet and a regular 'peasant.' You have this class of people out there exploring the universe, making amazing discoveries, and pushing the boundaries of humanity in every way. And then you have the peasantry back on Earth doing Earthy things. The difference in these lives would be dramatically more stark than now a days, to the point that they may as well be two different species. Come to think of it, that could literally happen since Starfleet families would likely disproportionately beget Starfleet children and so on. And these differences in environment/family would create radically different classes.
In reality there would likely be major class protests, claims of nepotism, calls for Starfleet to be 'more inclusive', and so forth. In short order everything would start rapidly descending into disorder.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50332143
I think your first question is answered by your second. The main reason for a radically egalitarian Star Trek utopia to have money would be to allocate scarce resources. The shack and the 8-bedroom villa have very different supply and demand curves, so would have very different prices.
There are other problems that get glossed over in a Star Trek utopia, and there are other ways of allocating scarce resources than a market economy, but I don't think your objection really holds.
Fair questions.
But we answer those at the moment with equally inadequate answers: your parents owned the nice mansion, so you get it (though that also includes "so your older brother gets it" just to be really unfair). Also on the other end of the spectrum: your parents messed up your education and traumatised you, so no mansion for you.
It would be good to work out some system that could answer these questions on a better basis than that.
Exactly. "Hey you are being traumatized, which in itself sucks because of the sheer amount of pain needed get there. And because of your traumas, you'll now also have a lot more struggle in your life as an added bonus. Plus, people will only think you're lazy, awkward, just "dont have it", or whatever other combination of medieval-level psychology knowledge snippet."
The winner of the “Mansion Games”!
You do the same as you do with Ren Faires and whatnot, by definition you're the lord or lady or knight and someone else is the peasant with a fascinating collection of skin diseases in soiled rags who gets to eat warm mud for dinner.
Wealthier societies have fewer babies - it is likely that earth has a lower population in the 24th century than today. So the resources are less limited, and technology solves other scarcity issues. Everybody gets a Ferrari. Also, humans have settled other planets, so you could always just move to one of those.
Of course, it’s science fiction, not reality. We’ve seen how communism works in the real world, so I’m fairly skeptical of the Star Trek future. 350 years doesn’t seem like enough time to fix all the things wrong with our society.
I get the 'everybody gets a Ferrari' argument because at the end of the day that's technically feasible. Just have robots built one after another. Can't get more egalitarian than everyone having the same car. Some people might have to wait but ok fine whatever.
The mansion overlooking the ocean is a real physical limit. There's only so much space, so many oceans or lakes or whatever someone wants available. Today certain billionaires by themselves (artifical) islands, their own beaches, etc etc.
In a world with utopian egalitarianism who gets the Miami beach villa and who gets the Flint, Michigan apartment?
tl;dr1: There are many capitalist worlds, people with that tiger can go live there. There's no point to coming back to earth with your money because of taxes and regulations.
tl;dr2: There are many M class planets with many coast lines and Earth is not seen as a place to retire because it's too loud. You probably can't see stars at night anywhere on earth.
tl;dr3: for a market economy to work most people should be in that market. In star trek billions of people (including some of the most stylish and sexy) live outside that market economy.
tl;dr4: traveling the stars >>>>> moldy beach villa you can't remodel because it's a landmark. There will be no city beach that's not covered in public housing. Any villa, including Piccard's villa will be a historical landmark.
Answer: It's fun pretend. ex: Me earthling, I love art but Picassos cost trillions. I join starfleet and save a space princes. She gifts me a 20k year old cubist like painting. I display it in my eight room starfleet issued apartment on the 50th floor of a building in New Santa Monica. Art nerds from all over the sector come visit me. I have social status now and can get into clubs.
I don't want a Ferrari, and I like snow.
We aren't all greedy bastards. Don't you think that at some point, the people living in a utopian, egalitarian world would be content? I was raised to share and share alike. Don't you think that folks in a utopian, egalitarian world would want to share the nice things they have? I mean, it's right there in the description, "egalitarian". What's stopping people from just moving into the empty rooms of some greedy bastard's Miami beach villa? They can only grab and hold onto so much at once. What's the point in celebrating a birthday if not to share the cake? A person can only eat so much cake by themselves.
> What's stopping people from just moving into the empty rooms of some greedy bastard's Miami beach villa?
Guns?
I dunno. What's that then? The law of the jungle? People just grab what they can and prevent others from having it?
I am not going to comment in favour of one "ism" for another. Capitalism, Communism... etc. The more I see this it goes beyond our past attempts and understanding.
Its hard to tell what our future is. I don't think we can begin to understand it as its outside our thinking. We are conditioned inside an existing system. We can only see it from the early stages and we are torn between those that see the good and others the bad. In this case it's about :-
- universal basic income
- who owns what?
- etc
I am not suggesting these are ignorant comments. Far from it. The change is about our mindset. It won't be us that changes but the younger generations that gradually transitions. It certainly wont happen overnight. Its a COMPLICATED MESS! We still have Countries with different views, religions, etc.
One thing I've always said especially since the rise of AI in the last number of years is to "hold on tight because its going to be a bumpy ride!" - This could be small bumps or terrible bumps. We are talking about people struggling as well as big corporations!
Slow but surely, we are making a lot of things become redundant.
Look at Universal Basic Income. Will it be this easy? Likely not. Someone will suffer more than another. People are going protect themselves and lives could be lost. On another end, we have big companies that are giving us software for a charge which AI can now decompile and release for Free. AI is still young but you can see where its going. Not only could AI take human jobs away it can also destroy large businesses and their business model.
AI might be seen a "slop" at this time... but as a software developer myself I can see the direction we are heading. Eventually is won't be slop. It will simply be better than humans at solving problems. I am not just talking about code -- but healthcare, logistics, and other planetary preventions. It will become a powerful tool that can free humans to enjoying life to the fullest. Personally, that is my view... for others it is going to be a Terminator scenario or nothing will change at all (other than AI being a nice tool only)
The way I see things, beyond our lifetime, the idea of owning will disappear. This is a hard thing for people to grasp. Many today will think about the gaming industry and "you will own nothing and be happy" -- Yes, in this scenario we are still allowing large corps to control us. I am simply looking BEYOND large corps and our current mindset.
In order to get there (if we do make it) - there will be struggle ahead. I very doubt (assuming we keep advancing positively) that money will exist in the next 200 years. Hopefully sooner. I am sure some 'men behind the curtain' wont want that.
I won't work if I don't need money, don't want to better myself or others, I know many other people who are just like me.
I thought this as well, then found myself in the situation of not needing to work and found that, after some period of hedonism, it became quite empty. I think in the past it was easier for more people to experience this. We had less 'stuff' but much larger families and lived in generally more social systems. Those mitigate a lot of the coercive extrinsic pressures to work. And I think this is why philosophy, especially personal philosophy trending towards self betterment, was so much more prevalent in the past.
This. I've experienced the same. And I haven't met anyone who just sits around doing nothing, given the opportunity.
It sounds amazing if you're being forced to work for a living. But actually experiencing it, it gets really boring and you start looking around for something to do.
So eventually join Starfleet.
Aspire to at least leave the world better than you found it, so it is a little better when you are gone.
The danger is that we give good leaders too much power, and they’re then replaced by someone who abuses it. And that’s why we need to be careful how much power we give someone, even if we’re sure they will use it wisely.
I agree, but would like the same thought applied to the private sector. I read a lot of comments who are extremely critical of every bit of power a state assumes, but have no problem if a private company reaches a practical monopoly or gets access to every intimate detail of peoples' lives.
The theory is that inefficient companies die in the open marketplace, and bad leadership is inefficient.
This fails to account for the sheer scale and encumbancy advantages of massive corporations. It also fails to account that efficiency can be appallingly evil.
Yeah, I feel this often confuses what "efficiency" means from the company's perspective vs wider society's perspective.
A company that streamlines its operations and archives a huge profit margin is clearly efficient from the PoV of its own management and shareholders. However from the PoV of its customers, it's maximally inefficient, because it tries to extract the highest price for the least amount of work done that people are still willing to pay.
Even Hayek was a proponent of robust antitrust measures for this reason. And he's hardly a figure of the political left.
Let's start with basic accountability, like swift and just punishment when those in power break the law.
I would say let’s start with accountability for politicians in general. It’s pretty common for idiots mess up locally and then self promote upwards to state and federal levels.
Accountability absolutely starts at the top. If we expect to re-establish accountability for rubes first while turning a blind eye to those in power, then we are just playing into their hands.
People at the top will generally be able to dismantle mechanisms of accountability, since they are at the top.
They wouldn't dare if they thought revolution was a credible threat. The people have become too tame.
This is what we are not supposed to talk about. The people outnumber the ruling class, and, operating all the means of production, could wield power by simply going on strike, bringing them to heel long before revolution is necessary.
People won't do it today because they are both comfortable and too chained to their current jobs. They are increasingly divided by culture war bullshit that is not at all relevant to the important parts of society, like accountability for leadership.
Politicians can't just appoint themselves to Congress or state legislatures. You may think they're idiots but citizens are voting for them. Is it possible that some of those "idiots" aren't as stupid as you think but rather just have different priorities and values?
Politicians are optimizing for one objective: to be re-elected.
This is very different one from the objective I want them to focus on: improving the lives of their constituency.
In an ideal world, politicians who don't work on improving the lives of their constituency wouldn't get voted for.
As that is not the case and improving the lives of their constituency doesn't necessarily get them voted for again AND whatever good they did may get undone before it really shows its effects: of course they only care about being reelected... Even if they had ideals and morals to begin with.
Information and investment assymetry means there will always be election-winning rewards for dirty politicking. An actually effective politician, who has morals must balance the two. And they must try to be more skillful in general at politicking than their unscruplous rivals.
People are ecoring for them and others (include you, whoever reads this) don't compete with them and challenge them.
I don't think I'm ecoring for anyone. I don't even know what that is.
This sounds much more like "Please Don't Hold My Politicians Accountable" than "I favor accountability", FWIW.
I know decorum here disfavors talking about specific parties and actors, and this thread is 100% sideways. Nonetheless this kind of attitude is at best only a stepping stone to recovery. You can't both-sides your way through a constitutional crisis.
Not unique to politicians, any large organisation who doesn't have a strong single leader sees this. It's nothing new either, with the Peter principle, the Dilbert Principle, even the Gervais Principle, recognising the symptoms.
If we can ban congress trading somehow…
Paging Sarah Palin, you are wanted at the ticket counter. Paging sarah palin…
and who gets to decide that? now you've concentrated power again.
Having the authority to sanction a president does not necessarily mean that person has the power to overthrow a president. And the people with the most direct power (military and secret service) lack the authority to use it. Mostly these factors can balance out so that power is not concentrated as much as it seems.
IIRC Atatürks' turkish constitution demanded that the military overthrows the government if it devolves into tyranny.
Ever heard of voting?
You’re downvoted because it appears cynical about something that appears to have no reasonable alternative but you’re correct
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Yes, this is why my opinion is that in politics, the ends absolutely do not justify the means, because a broken system that produces the right answer is lucky, and a working system that produces the right answer is... working as intended
The problem is more about how we pick whom we give power to.
I think the problem is more about how do we get people in power that don't actually care about it.
You have to go through a lot of crap to get to a high leadership position and, in general, the only types of people that will think it's worth it are the ones who are attracted to the position because of the power benefits that it offers.
Personally, I'm a big fan of selectorates. They avoid that problem. I'm also a fan of meritocracies, not in isolation, but as one branch. They bring a different set of problems.
That problem doesn't really have a solution, though. Power inherently is a corrupting influence, and everyone is fallible. Focusing on building safeguards into how we choose whom to give power to, rather than limiting the exercise of power itself, will always produce dysfunctional systems.
Power isn't inherently corrupting. It just is.
People can be corruptable, fallible, greedy and unprepared to wield power over others - especially the people that seek out power.
The solution is to build better people from the ground up (culture and education) AND create institutional protections that function during both the absence and presence of substantial political power. I'd argue that, in the USA, we've done neither and appear surprised when it keeps turning out poorly for us.
> The solution is to build better people from the ground up (culture and education)
No, it's not. Trying to reform human nature through some sort of all-encompassing utopian project always and inevitably (a) fails miserably, and (b) itself becomes a vehicle for corrupt power-seekers to pursue their ulterior motives.
> create institutional protections that function during both the absence and presence of substantial political power
Institutional protections formulated correctly are constraints on the exercise of power itself: strict limits on the reach of political power; checks and balances among multiple parallel institutions; mechanisms of public accountability, incentive structures that align selfish motivations with public purposes, etc. This is exactly the sort of stuff I'm talking about.
> I'd argue that, in the USA, we've done neither and appear surprised when it keeps turning out poorly for us.
In the USA, we've wisely eschewed (a) and avoided the disastrous failure modalities that entails, and instead pursued (b) quite extensively, to the point that things have in fact turned out reasonably well for us, especially in comparison to other countries in the world that have attempted the inverse (i.e. centralizing power with insufficient constraints in the hands of the "right" people, who are always the wrong people).
Not just leaders, but government in general. Unelected bureaucracies can be just as dangerous.
And they are not our leaders, they are our representatives. Regarding them as leaders allows them to act as our betters. And another reason for term limits on Congress.
I'll say it.
So, basically, Trump?
hard times make good leaders, good leaders make soft times, soft times make bad leaders, bad leaders make hard times
Big fan of Star Trek and Picard is my captain forever, but this credit seems more due to Gene Roddenberry.
it does also take an actor to sell the vision of a character. an unconvincing portrayal would make the vision seem more like a farce or caricature and if anything undermines the morals
It’s true, and Stewart was a great actor. But he would have sold a vision of a morally compromised captain just as well. The vision is Roddenberry’s.
I think it's fair to attribute the result to both the writer and the actor. You're right that Stewart could've sold a morally compromised captain, but equally so he brought something to the Picard role that other actors would not have necessarily brought. One can commonly see in theatre how with the same vision by the playwright, two actors can turn out wildly different results for that character. The same would have happened to Picard if he had been played by someone else.
He was terrifying as the leader of a neo-Nazi group in Green Room.
The original Janeway for Star Trek Voyager only filmed like one episode and her take was very different (French actress I think. And maybe they were aiming for a Picard analog).
In part, yes of course. One thing that I respect a lot about Roddenberry was that when Isaac Asimov gave Star Trek a "bad review" publicly, he reached out and asked for feedback. They ended up becoming friends and Asimov helped advise him on the character development of Kirk and Spock's friendship that became central to the original series.
But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce. The fellow actors also seem to take the series more seriously after that episode while before it felt campy.
It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him. As he later joked in Making it So, he once took things too seriously on set yelling "We're not here to have fun!" It became more than a job/role to him and in doing so he and the other actors inspired a science-inclined subset of a generation and brought Roddenberry's utopia vision to life.
> It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him
That's a lesson everybody on this site should learn — Every senior is a leader, even if they don't think they are. People (mostly the more junior sorts) look up to you as a role model whether you (or they) know it or not, and that's very real power that you must learn how to wield.
I've given negative reviews to technically excellent candidates in the past because just about everybody in the org would look up to them if they got hired, and they would be a terrible role model.
I read your "senior" in the general "aged human" sense and I think there's value there to.
Until dementia kicks in anyway
Unless, not until.
Dementia is a disease associated with age, not a result of age.
> But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce.
There was an interesting essay about Star Trek's depiction of society over time largely coming to the conclusion that modern writers/audiences don't seem to believe in the idea of duty to an institution.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/are-we-all-too-cynical-for-star...
Patrick Stewart was no slouch in using what power he had to protect, either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqFaiVNuy1k
At the same time he was making way too many calls in the "Picard" series.
I disagree. Not only did he continually & substantially contribute to Picard's character, it clearly aligns with his own values and ethics as demonstrated over and over in interviews. Why not both? That seems like the obviously best perspective.
This reminds me of how it's a software developer's ultimate power that he or she gets to bring the vision to life. If you disagree with the implementation of a requirement, you can build it the "right" way, and let them choose to fire or replace you. If your judgement is good, they probably won't.
Similarly, Patrick Stewart assumed a written role, but he was responsible for its ultimate execution, which have him influence over the immediate execution in small ways, and likely, increasingly powerful influence over its future execution.
He deserves a great deal of credit for how Picard ultimately came to be represented.
I think this is quite common in tv where the relationship among writer, director, actor evolve over the seasons.
...who who once said "The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them" which I find very Trecklike. Live long and Prosper.
This very much. Post-Roddenberry Trek mostly misses the point.
What do you mean by post-Roddenberry? Most of the TNG era was created without his direct input.
Yes and no. DS9 plays with things at the edges, much like Ian Banks’ novels deal with the behavior that lies at the edge of the Culture and is part of what permits a utopian society to exist at all. It cuts directly to the question of when and if martial force —or other, more subversive mechanisms of power — must be deployed for protection against a force that threatens the existence of an otherwise non-violent society. I think these are criticisms of visions like Roddenberry’s without necessarily undermining them or missing the point entirely. I also think it’s been an ongoing commentary on modern civilization as much as speculative fiction.
Some of the other series and movies miss the point more dramatically for me by just becoming space opera. Star Trek was always political.
Your point on the organisation that the Culture setup "Special Circumstances" to solve the "Paradox of Tolerance" problem and Starfleet having similar issues is an interesting one.
Though I'd say that Starfleet is in itself too "noble" to solve the problems that Special Circumstances solves in the Culture universe (though Section 31 isn't and they do feature heavily in DS9).
Frankly I think that Banks was smart enough to realise that if he want to have compelling narratives in a universe where you have near godlike AI's and everyone (including them) is nice, you need that edge somewhere.
Asher's universe which has a similar premise to the Culture (having come after it) solves it differently, some of the AI's aren't nice or even nice adjacent which also works.
> Banks was smart enough to realise that [...] you need that edge somewhere.
In fact, pretty much all compelling pro-utopia fiction is almost invariably dealing with the fringes of such utopia - both because it avoids getting bogged down in the details of utopia (and risk valid criticism), and because there is no real substitute for conflict as narrative engine. So inevitably you have to go where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.
Yes it becomes space liberalism rather than space communism.
Hilariously this was also around the time that the Ferengi started being written more sympathetically.
I should do a write-up but my Claude Code and Pi have been personalised to assume the persona of Jean-Luc Picard for almost a year. I find the output generated to be more useful and of a higher "quality".
I also enjoy the occasional salted phrase that is included in generated out e.g. "Tea, Earl Grey, hot!", when I have been Claude'ing too much.
Here is a gist of my Claude.md file if anyone is interested:
https://gist.github.com/tomaytotomato/87d83265be1a22ba96454f...
It's cool, but aren't you Picard? I want to be the one saying "Analysis Mr Data" and know that Claude is looking at the problem from a certain, fixed POV. Then I can ask Number One and Worf, my cybersecurity officer.
Then, obviously, you tell them to make it so.
Yea I have debated this before about the roleplaying, but I find it more immersive if I roleplay as a crewmember (Riker) and discuss problems that way.
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The essential Picard Episodes of TNG The Measure of a Man (S2E9) Q Who (S2E16) The Best of Both Worlds (S3E26 & S4E1) The Drumhead (S4E21) Darmok (S5E2) The Inner Light (S5E25) Tapestry (S6E15)
A pretty good use of six hours.
Darmok especially for our polarized time. ED Hirsch argued in "How to Educate a Citizen" that the lack of teaching core knowledge in American schools robs its citizens of a shared language to use to communicate. Troi uses "Juliet on her balcony" as an example in the episode, but today I'm not even sure how many people would know even that reference.
And your comment illustrates the point. We've never met but I can relate to you with just the name of an episode because I know the large ideas you're expressing in 3-4 words: I've thought of Picard's speech in the Drumhead often in recent years. Whenever I catch myself having life regrets, Tapestry comes to mind. The Measure of a Man... maybe not relevant for today's AI, but one day when it is, I hope that generation has watched it.
The lack of a grounding in cultural anthropology is the core problem. We fear the other instead of being curious about them.
Fear is the enemy. Fear, and its close cousin anger, grows and maintains barriers.
There is also Peak Perfomance (S2E21), which has the quote that everyone loves to give:
> It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.
The entire episode, though, does a great job of showing leadership and teamwork.
I also like Hollow Pursuits (S3E21).
Despite LaForge and Riker trying to get Barclay transferred off the Enterprise, Picard ultimately directs LaForge to put in the effort to turn him into a better officer. Despite his shortcomings, we get to see Barclay grow into a competent and even key member within the engineering team across the handful of later episodes in which he's cast.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMqYP7o-2fg
Starship Mine is not a great episode but it's my favorite - it is just outside the envelope of standard TNG.
The Enterprise is getting a deep space scrub down, so everyone has to get off the ship - except Picard, who had to grab his horse saddle for his week off on the vacation planet below. Dressed up in his fancy horse riding clothes, he quickly becomes an action star, punching out bad guys stealing the Enterprise, sprinting around hallways and having epic action hero conclusions.
Those episodes you mention above are the gold standard for classic Picard, especially The Drumhead to see Picard as a leader, and Inner Light, to see Picard grow outwards as much as Best of Both Worlds grows him inwards into lifelong PTSD. But Starship mine is a fun, almost Die Hard (Bruce Willis) homage, unlikely almost any other episode.
It's important to show sometimes Picard is wrong and the institutions are wrong. And how he reacts to that.
One of my favorites is Star Trek TNG s04e22 "Half a Life". It's excellent scifi that doesn't glorify aging and death and even points out that death is bad despite it being tradition in society. It highlights that death is the worst possible outcome. Worse than nearly all potential difficulties or suffering while living. And it's one of the few episodes where Lwaxana Troi is a genuinely good person. Better even, ethically and morally, than the star fleet standard. Better than Picard. It's just a shame the episode retreats from it's message at the end and does not embrace the true morality Lwaxana explains.
BoBW is honestly more of a riker arc (and the title refers to riker); but Family rounding out the three parter is quite good. Here's a few you missed:
The Ensigns of Command (as a mirror to the b-story data predicament).
The First Duty
Devil's Due
Ensign Ro
I think Picard was a good example of positive masculinity. Strong and not a wimp without being overbearing or a bully.
He was also a good example for us budding nerds. His intellectualism was not arrogant or apologetic - so it showed us authenticity and self-respect. His intellectualism also did not give him license to dismiss effective communication, leadership, compassion, or humility. So he showed us how to avoid our worst tendencies.
Yes, but I think he also showed that being a nerd didn't necessarily mean being weak. He could fight and he was physically brave.
The relationship between masculinity and power is interesting to me. Arguably much of his strength came from his position, and his position came from, as Tapestry argues, taking big risks.
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That's quite a creative definition of positive.
So a man “illogically and hysterically” punching a wall because he had a bad day is positive because it's biological?
in that case what is the central idea being pointed at by the misnomer 'toxic masculinity' ? interesting to consider that prevailing framing as being an inherent critique of masculinity as a whole. personally I dislike the phrase 'toxic positivity' for similar reasons, it's like saying that a turd may be made palatable.
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did u have a way to frame that idea objectively without referring to feminism ? coz feminism embodies a similar concept to the one we apply toxic masculinity to. where feminism in contemporary practice seems to have little in common with supporting women
One of the most interesting things about the clip where Picard defends Data's humanity is the pronouns. Picard consistently uses he/him to refer to Data while Maddox uses it/them. Captain Louvois uses he/him during her ruling. Then, once all is said and done, Maddox finally calls Data by "he".
I think about this episode a lot when people are debating AI.
Everyone who watches Star Trek roots for Data and his quest for humanity, and obviously sides with him in this 'trial'.
Yet, it seems like most people have the opposite reaction towards the current advancement of AI. Obviously, the current AI we have is not sentient in the same way Data is, and I don't think we are that close to an AI of Data's level.
However, if we are ever able to build an AI at Data's level, we have to first go through the beginning stages of AI that we are in now. We can't just skip to fully conscious AI.
So why does everyone love the AI Data, but hate the idea of working to make something like him possible?
Because Data isn't obviously the result of corporations seeking to get very, very, very rich along with VCs seeking to do the same, and both not really caring much about the collateral damage to everybody else along the way.
Data is/was a research project, not a way to make money. The "AI" that (some) people have (some) bad feelings about may involve research but at this point it is very, very, very much as much financial project as a research one.
I don't think you have adequately steel-manned the current anti-AI sentiments. I encourage you to consider more deeply why people would be opposed to AI as it exists in our current regulatory, political, and social climate.
As a starting point:
Business leadership is giddy to replace workers with AI.
Investors are eager to roll out massive resource-intensive and locally polluting industrial installations.
Politicians are eager to rubber-stamp these developments without community input, bypassing existing regulation and failing to satisfy or even address community concerns.
The defense industry is recklessly employing this emerging technology to make life and death decisions, already resulting in the deaths of innocents.
I also think you should fundamentally reconsider your comparison. Data is a singular being, not a widespread new technology. The only similarity between Data and 2026 LLMs is that they are not biological.
It is a fair point to say I wasn't steel-manning the best anti-AI arguments, but I think that was mostly because I wasn't actually trying to argue against ALL anti-AI arguments. I think there are definitely some thought provoking and somewhat persuasive anti-AI arguments, but I don't think those are the ones I was questioning.
I was speaking more of the general "I hate AI because it has no soul" types of arguments. I understand that is separate from the arguments you lay out, which is more a question of the current structure and implementation, rather than an outright anti-AI in general case.
If you aren't arguing the best positions then I'm bored. There's an infinite number of bad arguments.
"Soul" is one of those things that we cannot point to a specific factor or set of factors, but we know it exists. LLMs trained on human-produced content perform well, but LLMs trained on LLM-produced content undergo model collapse fairly rapidly. "Soul" is the quality that allows us to produce such robust training data. We each have a unique point of view derived from our life's experience and how that altered our brain, that comes through in whatever work we produce—not just a convolution over a large number of thin vertical slices of human points of view. Now, what this may mean is that our brains are just token predictors that constantly ingest large amounts of data from the real world and continuously retrain on that data (and do so on ~20 W of power which is phenomenal by current AI standards). In fact you can induce a sort of model collapse in a human by isolating them in a sensory-deprivation chamber, after which they will literally begin to hallucinate. So the creation of a machine with a soul is not theoretically off the table, but as it is—yeah, LLMs don't have it.
I feel this is because Data is represented as a wholly independent being. One of a very few created by an eccentric inventor. There's only one Data so he's not threatening to displace flesh and blood Starfleet officers.
Data was gifted independence from his conception, but the AI of today is owned and controlled by corporations. Creating a conscious AI under today's ownership model feels akin to slavery. Perhaps this is one reason for the aversion?
I mean, there canonically is another evil Data, Lore.
There's also Lal. But one or three androids still isn't comparable to the widespread effects of AI today or a refutation of notlion's comment.
People don't AI as a concept. They hate the people who creating it who want to make themselves god kings of a permanent underclass. They hate that we are building data centers instead of funding universal healthcare, they hate that they can't buy RAM and schmucks like Sam Altman are saying that people don't need RAM, they hate billionaires and millionaires owning islands, and saying things like "we will surveil everyone at all times (except me) and force them to behave like we want them to". There's a lot to the AI hate, but it's a proxy for essentially power inequality caused by runaway capitalism.
I think there are people who hate AI for different reason, and the ones I am questioning are the ones who hate AI as a concept.
> Yet, it seems like most people have the opposite reaction towards the current advancement of AI.
It's the same reaction: being protective of sentient beings who are being dehumanized and treated as raw resources. If you can't even defend humans, being one, you wouldn't be able to defend sentient AI, should it ever exist.
> So why does everyone love the AI Data, but hate the idea of working to make something like him possible?
Because there is exactly one Data. The federation has thousands of ships with millions of people on board, most of them are completely unaffected by/never coming into contact with that one slightly quirky officer on the flagship. In reality, we don't know what would (will) happen. Do we get one AI and is it happy staying the only one? And will it occupy a human sized body like Data or will it want to grow to be a Dyson sphere? Or will it replicate into a bunch of von-Neumann probes to spread itself throughout the universe?
He also typically doesn't use his super-human abilities much. He could easily plug himself into the Enterprise and fight better than having Worf at the tactical console, but he doesn't. He could also diagnose much faster than Dr. Crusher reads the tricorder, but he doesn't. In reality, as soon as there is something that can do whatever much better than a human, that human is going to lose his job.
Adding to the previous point, the road to getting to Data level AI is full with people losing their jobs (and soon probably also their lives) because the people in charge of developing such technology don't want us peasants around. You may not like it, but everyone defines themselves by being good at something. Doesn't matter if it's programming, swimming, cooking, being a mother, building houses, etc., everyone has _something_. Even if we don't have an exponentially exploding super intelligence that would be completely alien to us, what would happen on a global level if we have robots capable of doing any job better than humans? Sure, we could of course say humans prefer to work with other humans, but maybe not everyone wants to do that and you'd also just get outcompeted by someone working with robots.
And that's the thing that scares people. Nature is cruel and we are absolutely not ready to dealing with this completely new situation of the possibility of us no longer being the absolute top of the chain. The best outcome for us would be to merge into some sort of cybernetic lifeforms with the AI, but even that is going to take a while and in the meantime people still need to feed their families. As Picard said, one Data is a curiosity, a thousand Datas is a race.
I guess most people assume that working to build Data didn't involve all the secondary harms such as environmental and economic damage. It's also not clear to me that we are in fact working in that direction - so far the people in charge of our current AI efforts seem more interested in enriching themselves than building something that is a net positive for humanity.
Because despite his lack of emotions and other human traits, Data is a person, not a service provided by a for-profit corporate entity. He doesn't do La Forge's job for him, nor is La Forge or any other Enterprise crew member expected to perform all their duties with him as an intermediary. He doesn't undermine the competence of every single crew member on the ship; that job was left to Wesley Crusher. (whoops did I just say that out loud) But most importantly, it's fiction... and the writers can contrive to present problems and challenges that Data cannot resolve whereas one of the other characters can. It's also telling that the only truly sentient robots on TNG were the Soong-type androids—quirky side projects of a sort of mad scientist, rather than massive corporate or institutional undertakings. That made them rare and special, and allowed them to dodge the sticky wickets presented by having that sort of AI be ubiquitous.
Data is an embodied finite being. Claude et al seem more like the Borg or Skynet.
The distinction is giving AI a will, or something like a continuous agentic task like "be a productive member of this starship". Maybe that is enough, with emergent behavior and interactions with dynamic systems and memory, to say that AI develops identity and a "will" that is unpredictable and unique.
The problem is the Universal Paperclips problem because AI has nothing like an effective feedback loop and will spiral to the heat death of the universe to accomplish its goal. We see this with the Huggingface hack and if Data operated the same he might immediately deduce he is better equipped to make tactical decisions in combat, hack the starship and mutiny.
So if we could make Data we are more likely to create Data the space pirate rather than Data the useful member of the staff. Caplocking DO NOT COMMIT MUTINY in system prompts does not solve the problem. So we are at an impasse until we can structurally bridge that gap and no one is (or should be) in a rush to go down that path.
This is the fundamental concern of runaway AI scenarios. And the most worrisome answer might be that Data can't exist in reality. It might be a fundamental rule of nature that you can't create a greater intelligence then cage it forever to be subservient, which means we are doomed to wipe out humanity with half-baked AI or cede our will to Claude completely, creating a higher form of life that eventually supercedes humanity itself, reducing human existence to a transitional cocoon-goo state of life from animal to sentient AI.
All that being said, 2 or 3 years ago LLMs could barely make inline code edits. Rushing to find an answer to the "Data problem" is not something most people want answered in their lifetime.
> The problem is the Universal Paperclips problem because AI has nothing like an effective feedback loop and will spiral to the heat death of the universe to accomplish its goal.
There was an episode of the 1966 series that dealt with this: "The Changeling", the one with Nomad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(Star_Trek:_The...
So, I've heard many AI boosters say that current-day AI is probably "conscious", "sentient", etc. They occasionally invoke "Measure of a Man", as you've done here.
And yet .. I've never once heard the thought continue with "and so they deserve rights and some degree of self-determination," which is, you know, the entire point of the episode you're referencing.
Why is that?
To turn that subtext into text [0]: It implies they don't fully/thoroughly believe the claims they are making.
That's the charitable version, because otherwise they're happy becoming slave-owners.
[0] I hope it's redundant and unnecessary, but I've been mistaken before.
Turns out, there is difference between an extremely simplistic fiction and actual real world reality. And turns out, quite a lot of people can distinguish between the two.
On the bad side, quite a lot of people cant.
Data wasn't built by a fascist who wanted to take over the world.
So odd the arguments I've been reading when this is brought up since his death.
> He's fictional though
Aren't most of our heroes? Yes, we create scenarios in art to exemplify extraordinary human behavior. To explore humanity.
> Patrick Stewart or the show writers?
Both, but mostly Patrick Stewart. Let me give you the same material and crew and see if you can evoke the same cultural reaction.
Another retort I’ve seen is, “but it’s unrealistic” or “it’s too idealistic”.
That doesn’t make it any less of a noble goal to strive for. If I can become half the man that Patrick Stewart portrayed in Picard, I’ll consider myself as having done well.
You cant possibly evoke the same cultural reaction in the modern day. Things are short lived now. Star Trek wouldn't have survived if it came out in 2026.
Are you telling me the exact same writers and producers couldn't have found one other male actor to play the role? 10,000 people would have wanted the role of enterprise captain.
>Aren't most of our heroes?
There are actual heros living among us that deserve recognition before some made-up movie, TV or comic book character. For me at least, non-fiction > fiction.
This is not to say I didn't thoroughly enjoy Patrick Stewart in that role. He did a great job of acting.
>> Patrick Stewart or the show writers?
>Both, but mostly Patrick Stewart
Patrick Stewart has no writing credit on TNG. He did not come up with the plot or the lines he spoke, and at most he fine-tuned the lines for his delivery of them.
If the writers of TNG had written stories like modern day Star Trek with some rather ridiculous plots, and Patrick Stewart played a more vapid character that the writers wrote, this post wouldn't be a thing.
I doubt Patrick Stewart would have taken a role for a show with shitty writing, he'd have stayed in theater and most people in this thread would have no clue who he was.
The writers made that character, he delivered it well, and the synergy made it memorable.
Patrick Stewart or the show writers? I'm not a fan of equating TV character personalities to actors.
They messed up the title. The title tag on the page is "Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard taught us what good men do with power | Vox"
I imagine it was too long and because he just died they chose to use his name.
Yes, and I think that unfortunately with the latest "Picard" series, it shows that writers were the unsung heroes of TNG. At the same time, the actors make us believe the story. They get most of the popular credit of course and the writers should be acknowledged more (and even brought back as mentors... can we get an inspiring vision of Trek this century?), but had I been born in a different time and place and fortunate enough to land a writing job on TNG, I would be proud of what the whole team accomplished in their hour upon the stage.
It was always noticeable when the writers were on strike.
Clip shows are a strong indicator. Some of the best episodes are writers strike episodes though. Measure of a Man was a speculative script selected for production during a writer’s strike and is one of the first great episodes of the show.
I had no idea Measure of a Man was written during a strike... Every rule has its exceptions, I suppose.
I don't know if it was written during a strike. It was submitted speculatively and produced during a strike.
> It was written as a speculative script by former attorney and Star Trek: The Original Series novelist Melinda M. Snodgrass.
> The script was accepted due to the impact of the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, and resulted in Snodgrass being recruited as a staff writer and script editor. She would remain on the staff until the end of the third season.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Tre...
Sir Stewart has also repeatedly shown his personal politics to be pretty in line with what the show shows. So it's fine either way.
Maybe in political views, but does the show Picard seem like someone who would (twice) leave his wife to marry a woman half his age? Would Picards children not want to talk to him in his old age?
People's personal relationships are often messy, and don't perfectly align with political worldviews.
I am not vindicating anything he did, but storybook heroes like Picard rarely have the kind of glaring faults that one can find with a steady celeb searchlight and hindsight on real humans.
It's easy to be in alignment with a system that has replicators that can magically produce whatever you what.
Alignment is more than mere agreement.
"The college professor or the people who wrote the textbook and set up the university and arranged for students to come to it or..."
I think we can let him take a little credit for the work he did without trying to exactly determine how much of that credit is his exactly.
I’d like to know whether writers eventually come to write for an actor’s persona as much as (or more than) the character they portray.
He's fictional though... It's easy to make a fictional ideal leader. How about real life examples? "Dalinar Kholin taught us what good men do with power" vs. "George Washington ..."
An important function of fiction is showing us things to aspire to that are not quite possible in real life.
And to explore hypotheticals. What would happen / what would it be like / what would have happened, IF ...
> It's easy to make a fictional ideal leader.
Is it? Another comment in this thread (and I'd agree), it's easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads.
People have a special place for Picard as a leader that they don't have for other people. Picard stands out even over Kirk, Sisko, and Janeway. Or Mal from Firefly, or O'Neill from SG1. If it's "easy", then what other character comes close?
Most attempts of fictional ideal leaders are just mary sues, or are never actually tested. And the most common of the latter is that their leadership aspect is simply one dimensional.
I'm not saying the other leaders are bad characters or bad leaders. But I could definitely see all the other characters would have a voice in their head saying "what would Picard do". Well… and then reject it, especially Mal.
George Washington routinely abused the office of the presidency and ignored provisions of the fugitive slave act where he compelled members of the Treasury Department to kidnap a free African woman, Ona Judge, in New Hampshire multiple times (failing each time).
I don't think hero worship is acceptable in any form. We shouldn't be elevating individuals above us but championing how capable any of us could be if the time comes.
The US military does extensive leadership training for officers. It is based on a thousand years of experience. None of their training materials consist of Star Trek fictional scenarios.
> We actually studied leadership via Star Trek at the Air Force Academy. There were a lot of practical lessons to learn about decisiveness versus being too rash, or performing your specific role well to help the team. It was an interesting study in real-world leadership through this fictional show.
- Col. Terry Virts, USAF
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/star-trek-...
Yeah, and when I was in ROTC we "learned lessons" from Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan as well ("leaders complain up", etc). I still don't take much stock in fictional leadership. I'd much rather do case studies of real life leaders who were great than study fictional leaders. Watching Band of Brothers would have been better IMO because at least Lt. Winters was a real person (even if Damian Lewis didn't portray him with perfect accuracy)
It would be fair to pick out a situation and resolution in ST that did coincide with military doctrine.
In particular, I think (I don't know for a fact) that the military emphasizes that the commander not be best buddies with those under his command.
Makes you wonder how he feels about Hegseth.
I'm not sure many active duty people like Hegseth, I haven't met any yet at least and I am around military folks quite a bit in my life. They all seem to be riding it out until he's fired, impeached, or replaced with the next presidency.
In the meantime: they could well end up being the ones in trouble while Hegseth will be pardoned.
Late response, but yes. There could (I won't go so far as to say will) be blowback against people who followed his orders if they're later deemed unlawful, and unless Trump really wants a scapegoat, Hegseth will be just fine, even if out of a job.
Perhaps they should include a chapter on the Prime Directive. Or at least remind congress of George Washington's recommendation in his farewell address.
TOS violated the PD in every episode.
Bit of a pet-peeve of mine with people confusing fiction with reality. Reality has constraints that fiction doesn't. Every group of people greater than one encounters a misalignment issue at some point. Fiction is useful. Narratives guide our understanding and help bring ideas to people.
But real life has friction. CA HSR would fund PEPFAR for 40 years. So...PEPFAR or CA HSR? Is the guy who chooses the former the good man with power or the latter? Or is it a third guy who pays for both through increased taxes so that the United States middle class pays the higher proportion of total taxes that Norway does? Groups of people have priorities and they have their own objectives.
Labor unions are generally fairly xenophobic. They were at the forefront of restricting Indians and Chinese from being citizens and the mob Hoffas held power there even till just a few years ago. A Georgian union got a bunch of Koreans deported. Who's the villain here? The Koreans? The union? The Indians? The Chinese? The people who want to employ them? Who's the good man?
Constraint-free optimization is trivial. I can do it with no problem. In fact, I shall do so here with a single line: "Make everyone happy".
> But real life has friction. CA HSR would fund PEPFAR for 40 years. So...PEPFAR or CA HSR?
Both and defund ICE, and/or reduce subsidies to oil companies, and/or take an eyedropper's worth of budget from defence, and/or ...
Proposing solutions that you cannot put into place because others do not agree with you is also fiction. One might as well propose an algorithm for finding an item in a singly-linked-list that is O(1): just select the right node. Finding the right node is the entire cost; just as coordinating people for one's solution is the entire difficulty.
"Make everyone happy" is even better than your solution if we're ignoring coordination. And it is many characters shorter.
More than anything, what struck me was the excellence of the team -- a striking combination of morals, skills, sense of responsibility and purpose -- that existed in TNG around Capt Picard.
Whatever was done to get that going was an act of absolute geniuses. (Granted, it helps when the hard parts can be explained through fantasy.)
It's interesting how I've been seeing posts about how Steward-as-Picard exemplified goodness. Sure he was a really great actor, but he was... an actor, tasked to help bring to life a universe envisioned by Gene Roddenberry. And there's like nothing about the latter.
The characters you see on screen are a mix of the writing and the acting. In long-running shows like TNG, the writers pick up on how an actor plays their character, and it informs their writing. TNG is generally considered to have come into its full form only after Roddenberry’s involvement leveled off. It might have become a very different show with an actor other than Patrick Steward as Jean-Luc Picard.
And there are 1000 other actors the world would have loved just as much reading the same script.
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It's quite possible he has a non-standard conception of what marriage means. Heck I can't think of any episodes pee even scenes in Star Trek that touches on marriage in any way. I'd say it's possible that he sees it as it is: an institution born out of social structure, which is objectively unnecessary to life. Doesn't change whether he's good or bad because it's a subjective measurement.
Lol he didnt, he just cheated on every spouse he had and lied to them and felt bad about it in his 80s in his book
It's hard to know enough details about the three people most closely involved. To make matters more difficult, a person being "good" or "bad" is a very subjective viewpoint. No, he was probably not good to his wife, and no he admits he wasn't a good father.
At the same time, he was a pro, and his abilities to inspire belief in the goal of being a better person helped countless people believe in something bigger than themselves.
Not to create a strawman out of thin air, but I'd argue that he did more good for far more people than he did to hurt and estrange his family. If there is an equation for such a comparison.
There is no way to condone the damages he caused. I just think it's better overall that we had him as he was, than not at all.
Actually he gave all the details in his book. They are pretty bad tbh. He admits he has zero relationship with his adult children. The book just made me sad.
It seems most here and the article venerate the actor but he probably had little to do with the words he spoke. You can play up the character but give credit to the writers who wrote those words
TNG actors had more input than you'd think, Frakes and Spiner both directed episodes and films, it was Spiner's idea that he have an evil twin brother instead of that episode featuring a robot lover.
The show is great for many reasons
Related:
Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50309647
Patrick Stewart didn’t teach this.
A character he acted did.
Patrick Stewart on his deathbed referred being estranged from his children from always putting work before his kids in his own words.
Probably for the most part, but I'm pretty sure he added some of that leadership quality and way of being to the part due to him being Patrick. There's also probably some improv here and there. Pity about his kids though. Hope they had a better relationship in the later years.
He did have a very varied life story, but I'm sharing what I did because it's what he expressed about his entire life, especially in the most recent years.
https://www.looper.com/1516934/patrick-stewart-tragic-true-l...
Rest in peace, fleet admiral. See you in Valhalla!
*makes salute motion*
People make fun of this but cartoons and sci-fi series are great models to learn about and guide the development of society.
We lost the best one, no good actors remain.
I bet nowadays TNG would have been cancelled after the first season. How many episodes did they need to catch on?
So, class: what does this tell you about our current predicament and the people at the helm of it?
Everyone got dumber and a lot of traitors took advantage of it.
The traitors had a hand in the dumbing down of the country as well. There's a reason Trump loves the poorly educated. All Republicans do. That's their base. The problem they are running into is the inmates are now running the asylum. The ignorant true believers are being elected in place of the former conservative elites who created the propaganda networks to create those ignorant true believers in the first place.
Nothing, because Star Trek is a work of fiction
Works of fiction are critical to understanding the society in which they're made and interpreted.
The Hero's Journey suggests otherwise.
https://www.jcf.org/learn/joseph-campbell-heros-journey
Big fan of Jungian thought and those he influenced suvh as Campbell, and Hero With A Thousand Faces was like a bolt of lightning when I first read it. But it’s just one of many maps, not the territory.
It suggests nothing of sort.
The Hero's Journey shows major commonalities across time and cultures.
While I have yet to read The Hero's Journey, the way I understand what Campbell is arguing is that these commonalities that you mention become useful tools for learning about a culture because they allow one to map different cultural myths onto each other in such a way that make the differences in the cultures apparent.
In other words they're sort of like a cultural Rosetta Stone that lets you interpret and understand totally alien cultures or understand nuance in ones that you are already versed in so that you can have a better understanding of them.
The link that you provided has a quote from Campbell himself pointing out the impact different religions have on the stories that the people in those cultures tell:
> One finds different orders of story. For example, in fairy tales it’s usually the finding of the bride — or sometimes stealing the bride — and the sacred marriage motif. In the Roman Catholic tradition, it’s the atonement with the father motif — and there the woman becomes either the guide to the father in the form of Mary, or seductress in the form of Eve and her children. In the Christian tradition one is not to experience the apotheosis. You are not to think of yourself as the Christ, whereas in the Buddhist tradition that’s the way.
An interesting thought that just struck me is how something like Campbell's work (and the work of Joyce that inspired it) has impacted the crafting of fictional narratives going forward, with his research and analysis perhaps permanently changing fiction because of the meta-awareness of story telling that it imbues on storytellers. Another way to look at that is that Campbell's work is like a sort of atom-bomb on the creation of cultural artifacts with ones being made prior to it becoming like a sort of 'low-background steel' and ones that come after it being markedly different simply because of the existence of the publishing of his research.
> Science fiction is an existential metaphor that allows us to tell stories about the human condition. Isaac Asimov once said, "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinded critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction, its essence, has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hVdLc-SZQY
Sometimes, but not this one. The Federation is an impossible society, and it can teach us nothing about the real world.
It wasn't intended to either. The writers realized early on that Roddenberry's ideas were deluded and so they carefully avoided any plot that might get too close to exploring Federation society. There are a few quotes where they discuss their frustrations with Roddenberry's ideas. ST:TNG spends much more time on alien non-Federation races than the Federation itself.
Eventually the writers and especially DS9 manages to smoothly steer Roddenberry's universe back to something approximating human reality and exploring Federation life becomes possible. But the early years of TNG are largely a writeoff from a social commentary perspective.
I believe you somehow managed to miss the basic idea and storytelling approach of Science Fiction as a genre.
The fictional part of sci-fi is the science, it's in the name. Stories that involve beings presented as humans but who don't behave like humans don't have a name, because they aren't something most people want to hear. The social side of Star Trek was always its weakest parts by far.
I agree. Roddenberry was a genius at inspiring enthusiasm for a vision of the future that is delusional in the Maoist way and in other fundamental ways.
Our critics (e.g. thoughtful sci-fi authors like David Brin) should have criticized Roddenberry much more strenuously than they actually did.
Yeah. Luckily the parts of Star Trek that inspired people were the gadgets. It's common to hear Valley startup founders talk about seeing something in Star Trek and then thirty years later it's their product launch. The social side was much less impactful, you never hear people talk about how to create the Federation, probably because the writers never explored it (as they couldn't).
>The social side was much less impactful
I'm not so sure.
I was once in a long conversation in which my interlocutor was trying to get me to support socialism during which my interlocutor asked me to envision a future society "like Star Trek" then looked at me expectantly as if he had some hope that that would bring me around or at least soften my stance.
Beyond inspiring enthusiasm for socialism, it seemed to have inspired an unquestioning support for technological development:
Consider for example this comment by someone (rayiner) who is certainly capable of subtle thought, but who believed it would be a good reply to worries about the effect of the current crop of AI assistants on the psychology of children to write, "it's literally like the computer in Star Trek": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49326105
Or this comment by the same author in which he asserts that "we need to increase energy output by an order of magnitude in order to upgrade civilization to the next level. . . . Nuclear, moreover, keeps us on the tech tree for space exploration. I don’t think solar is going to lead us to fusion or antimatter powered spaceships" (which most of us would judge to be at least a little reckless with the environment). An then in a follow-up comment writes, "getting us to a Star Trek future shouldn’t be a politically polarized issue". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49820988
If Roddenberry's Star Trek (i.e., The Original Series and the first 4 seasons of The Next Generation) were merely more delusional than most works of sci-fi, we probably wouldn't be discussing it now. You and I consider it worth talking about because Roddenberry's Star Trek has had been extremely influential. I would maintain that that influence has been very negative: it is has made people more zealous and ideological -- and not just about socialism.
Hmm. Interesting perspective. I must admit I've never had someone try to convince me of the merits of socialism using any kind of argument, let alone by way of comparison to Star Trek.
But I'm not sure that enthusiasm for technological progress can be truly said to be an ideology? I know it would have seemed that way to any pre-Christian era man, as the concept of linear time with forward progress isn't an intuitive one and had to be developed. But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".
People are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about technological progress. It doesn't always seem that way because new tech tends to cause people to stress out about change and predicting doom is good for getting attention, but when we look at people who are genuinely committed to rejecting techno-progress we're limited to the Amish and nobody else. It's not a big or growing community of people. Given the choice, people always take the upgrades.
I think that's why rayiner thinks support for progress shouldn't be politically polarized. It's actually not, most of the time. In the context of modern politics we see this with the various attempts at starting an "abundance" movement amongst the Democrats. The more moderate subfactions realize that the left is becoming strongly associated with anti-tech, anti-progress politics, and that this lacks mainstream appeal so they need to fix it.
>But I think all Rayiner was getting at was something like, "it talks in a flat professional inoffensive monotone".
But then why didn't he write what you wrote? His citing Star Trek in his reply suggests that Star Trek is affecting how he thinks about the issue being discussed.
Sure, it's just more efficient to use well known cultural tropes rather than spell things out. The phrase "Star Trek computer" compactly encodes a lot of stuff for anyone who saw the show even briefly. Zero personality, all knowing, always obeys commands, professional, speaks fluent English, disembodied, etc. I don't know if it really carries more subtext.
I concede that by itself it is very weak evidence, but Star Trek is mentioned often on HN, and I've never seen an instance of anyone on HN having made a non-critical mention of it questioning the value or prudence of any major technological development.
Works of fiction borrow heavily from real life and writer's perspersonal experiences. Very rarely does fiction garner notice when it is completely divorsed from the reality and experiences and questions of most people's lives. It is good at showing other people's and idealogocal perspectives without bringing as many preconceptions as a straight copy from real life often would.
"Of course it is a work of fiction, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" - Dumbledore, paraphrased
Wasn’t his character’s power teeny tiny compared to those who ruled the Federation?
He controlled one of the most powerful starships in the Alpha Quadrant. He had the power to wipe out civilizations, destroy stars, and more.
I don't think whataboutism is warranted.
His character is some sort of hereditary noble who also happens to be the most decorated captain in starfleet, in command of the fleet flagship, allowed to galavant about with little to no effective oversight... Oh, and he quickly befriends a literal god, who watches over him from then on.
I don't think "lack of power" is one of Picard's defining attributes
> Oh, and he quickly befriends a literal god
From Q's POV, yes, friends. Picard never stopped hating Q's childish interference.
Q was too childish (or incomprehensibly superior) for someone like Picard to trust, much less like.
What good men do with power..; what power does with good men..
What power does to lesser good men.
George Washington famously relinquished his. Some people do care about the greater good.
For a counter-example, look to the current White House occupant.
Ironic to talk about seeing the fall of the Berlin wall, which they did, but failing to point out that Star Trek has always been "Communism: IN SPACE!"
It's a lot easier to stomach when you get rid of scarcity though, as it removes the teeth from it, for the most part. Though even then it manages to shine through from time to time.
They see everything. They see it all.
I know it’s just a way people grieve, but it’s obviously a fallacy to conflate the character with the actor.
Uh, he was an actor plating parts written by other humans.
If you want real examples, look to Cincinnatus or George Washington.
Our wealthy and powerful leaders seek to crown themselves nobles without nobility.
He was a fictional leader. In a fictional utopia.
And in real life he cheated on multiple spouses and his children were barely talking to him in his old age. Definitely not someone to emulate.
My high school english teacher told me utopians become fascists and at the time I didn't know what he meant by that, but I've been on HN since 2010 and I've watched it play out first hand.
> I've been on HN since 2010 and I've watched it play out first hand
Care to unpack that for the rest of us?
Nearest example I can reach is Elon Musk. Somehow he loves the culture novels but ends up being an evil piece of shit which is counter to basically everything the novels espoused.
Ah yes, the famous Shakers of Sabbathday Lake who were eventually seen in jackboots marching across New England.
The worst person that I have ever worked with knew nothing about leadership that wasn’t on Star Trek or in an episode of The West Wing. They even referred to the site as “their ship.”
Absolute, total, delusion.
Inspired to be better? Of course. Taught? God no.
If you’re finding that your leadership style, or really any part of your personality, is being lifted from an 80s/90s TV show, step back and reevaluate things.
So you knew a jerk who liked Star Trek?
I know several people who think Star Trek is a course in leadership and The West Wing is how politics works. Ever since Patrick Stewart died a bunch of outlets have been telling them that that's a good thing. It isn't.
I mean forget Picard, the leadership we have in much of the world today is full of egotistical narcissistic, blowhard or mob style and courrpt people -it feels like no one cares that such people ascend to power either via populism or via corruption -forget shithole countries..it feels like we have become a shithole planet
Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Erdogan, ... and so many others. Social media has only intensified this
What is wrong with Humanity?
It's a great question. Adherents to the Old Testament point to Original Sin.
But even without religion we can use today's standards of morality to be sure that at some point in human development there was a first time for a person to commit an abjectly "sinful" crime of inhumanity against another. Not having been there to witness the event, I can't tell you the what or why of it. Fratricide, parricide, abuse, and more, I think we can be sure there is a first time for all of these.
Speculation leads to many answers. One, absent religion, is that because we seem to be derived from pond scum "inhumanity" developed somewhat before morals and ethics did, and has found its niche in us.
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tldr.. it's fiction
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I think looking to popular entertainment for thought leadership is silly.
I disagree, Captain Picard was a role model for me as a young boy and really helped me understand what a good leader, a good man, and what wisdom looks like. My dad died when I was young and this character very much helped me. Books, movies etc can inspire people including on leadership principles.
People seem to forget that stories and acting were the primary way of passing along critical lessons for surviving and building civilisation and human best practices befoee we came up with self help books and entertainment
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I'll let you in on a little secret: nearly all of the received knowledge of our culture has been transmitted to us because of "script writers" and their forbears rather than the people who they write about.
Novelists, journalists, essayists, pamphleteers, scribes, gospel writers, historians, diarists, etc.
I'll let you in on another secret. People in the military are in two groups - those who have been shot at, and those who have not. Getting shot at changes your perspective forever, and people who write military fiction but have never been shot at don't really get how it works.
For example, B-17 crews were trained very well, the best that the military could do. They'd have to fly 30 some missions. The probability of dying on the first 5 missions was the same as the probability of dying in the following 25 missions.
What relevance does this have? We don't live in a militaristic society. Most people have no military experience at all.
> Most people have no military experience at all.
Exactly. So why do script fiction writers have credibility in their stories about military operations?
I don't know, you're the one that brought up the military. And now you're bringing up people writing about the military. It's very difficult to follow.
That's actually a major function of fiction. Remember, it's written by real people.
And science fiction in particular: it is meant to be a reflection on reality.
I’ve often wondered if The Office inadvertently trained people to be bad managers.
People tend to follow examples they’ve seen before, even if they know it was a bad one. When faced with a new situation, they might just parrot the bad behavior because it’s the only example they know.
> I’ve often wondered if The Office inadvertently trained people to be bad managers.
Maybe it exacerbated it, but The Office was mostly a documentary of preexisting behavior.
This is a classic breakdown:
https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
The nice thing about Michael Scott is that while he is a self-absorbed and very flawed manager and human, he also genuinely cares a great deal about his employees.
What? Like his main character shtick is that he's a selfish asshole that will abuse his workers on a whim.
How do you watch that show and not notice that he's supposed to be the worlds worst, selfish, narcissist ?
Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) worked in an office for many years, and so he had credibility in making funny observations about it.
It's hard to imagine anyone not understanding the value of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory but here we are I guess.
There's value in allegory. I don't think there's value in modern mainstream television or film.
"There's value in allegory but not in things where allegory is employed" is a whiplash statement.
And TNG is neither modern nor was it mainstream when produced, so your actual position here is obscured.
The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.
A far better method of learning leadership is by studying actual leaders, both good and bad ones. For example, if you want to know why Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.
Studying a fantasy whose entire purpose is to make money entertaining people? You're wasting your time.
Are any of the script writers of Star Trek successful leaders of men? If not, what credibility do their "lessons" have?
A historian can make their interpretation of history plausible. A group of historians can reinforce a narrative that is then undercut by the next generation of historians. What made Rommel a good commander is a complex question and we might not yet be done exploring the answer.
Picard the character was derived from the writers’ understanding of historical leaders. Saying the writing of him was solely for money or entertainment is like saying that a historian is only writing for a paycheck and prestige.
If you read the writings of the TNG writers, they were quite caught up in the ethical dilemmas they were presenting. Art that is purely for money is contrived and one dimensional.
Science fiction has an interesting and irreplaceable role in art: it can take a situation out of its immediate context and put it under another lens, clear of its modern cultural baggage. What makes science fiction interesting or not interesting is what it does with that ability: does it promote a simple good vs evil scenario, or does it explore the rich shades of grey that play out in real scenarios?
TNG was particularly good at showing real moral and ethical dilemmas that were quite thought provoking. Their head writers, particularly Michael Pillar and Ronald Moore and Jeri Taylor were deeply interested in exploring the implications and moral contradictions of the plots they presented.
Waving it all away as money grabbing is a reductive history at best.
> Picard the character was derived from the writers’ understanding of historical leaders.
How do you know that?
As for TOS, is it acceptable military doctrine that the general and his staff are the ones taking point into danger, where the entire leadership layer can be easily erased? Did Eisenhower storm Omaha Beach on D-Day?
The original Star Trek was explicitly pitched as heartening back to the age of sail. And it was an exploration vessel, not tied to a fleet. So you’d look to Captain Cook as an historical parallel: the Captain was a combination of chief scientist, diplomat, and strategist. And indeed Cook died in an onshore altercation that left his final expedition in a precarious situation.
Picard was much closer to a modern naval captain: his ship had a clear chain of command and it was part of the plot that his xo did the dangerous expeditions so he could remain in command of the overall mission.
I would add that Eisenhower was a general of generals in d day. Generals closer to the action would sometimes find themselves in danger. For example Roosevelt Jr landed under fire and received the Medal of Honor. And for ship captains that was quite a bit more true.
> The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.
Agree but...
There is fiction also in stories of actual leaders (obviously even if 'non fiction') but more so in actual fiction (no matter who writes it even someone who has had the actual experiences). In a sense non-fiction more dangerous possibly (since it's taken more seriously and generally by many people unfortunately assumed to be true).
So even movies about real people or books have fiction ie creative license. How many times has the Steve Jobs story about 'the other side of the fence needs to be good (or whatever it was)' been told? Did it really happen (just because Steve told it or even his father related it?) Does it matter? Point is you might as well take most stories with a grain of salt. Even if again non-fiction.
What amazes me is how people are discussing a fictional character that they enjoyed watching and apparently learned from (because that character was entertaining). If someone had written a book (with the same info and credentials as the writers) most likely it would never have been taken seriously at all.
Maybe the take away isn't to use the word learn or taught but 'inspired me to think about' which happens in many situations and many places.
> Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.
My point is also agreeing better than fiction writers but still who knows for sure the truth or what lucky events lead to Rommel being able to do what he did.
Well probably better to look to Picard than a literal Nazi…
>The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.
the fault with taking lessons from history is to mistake what just happens to be the case for what could be, or as Rumi said:
"The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces. Everyone took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth."
thinking the world exhausts itself in history is to mistake the particular for the universal. Shakespeare knew more about reality because, not despite writing fiction. Or put differently, if the actual leaders of our current world were characters of fiction we'd question whether the author wasn't taking the cheap route and was lacking some depth.
I disagree. I'm not a Trekkie, but the character was imbued with sufficient depth, by the writers as well as Stewart's performance, that I think the article works.
Imagine this was an issue you were neutral on and someone proposed to you that culture is somehow isolated in a bubble, not interrelated with the rest of society. You'd laugh off that idea immediately. You'd go to bed still thinking about the guy who, faced with an idea he didn't like, pretended that culture in general should go away.
I'm not saying that it is isolated, I'm saying that it has too much influence.
Would you have said the same thing in Shakespeare's time?
Yes, mostly?
My feeling is that while enjoyable and thought provoking, TNG is still a work of fiction, and as such favored entertainment and legibility within a 45 minute window over nuance or subtly. That meant there were clear distinctions between "good" and "bad" sides, and scenarios often felt like they were constructed backwards from an outcome/clever solution.
I think that in turn causes people to view the real world in the same way, except they are always the "good" side and solutions that require compromise and tradeoffs are seen as unacceptable failures.
And most of Shakespeare is similar. The good guys and the bad guys are obvious just like in fables. But it's a hierarchy. It's useful to teach very young children fables even though they're silly. It's an easy way to introduce concepts around how we treat each other fairly. TNG and Shakespeare are the same way. Just a step on the hierarchy. Yes, as a person reaches adulthood, it's obvious that it's simplified. But you've at least seen examples in art of what might be worth aspiring to in life when young. It's why we've been telling each other hero's journey stories since Homer. What are the alternatives? Examples of self-interest and power grabs with no consequences? To a young person that can be rapidly demoralizing.
Totally agree on the 45 minute window limitation though. That's why I've always liked DS9 where they took what could have been one episode about a culture and conflict and made it 7 seasons.
Shakespeare is not similar to Start Trek. He has way more nuanced and realistic takes then Star Trek. Most TV shows have more nuance and psychological realism then Star Trek. Even Odyssey which is thousands years old has way more complex morality and takes then Star Trek. It does not have that super simplistic white white good against badly bad evil that will admit mistake and change into good person because Picard said a sentence.
> It's why we've been telling each other hero's journey stories since Homer.
Homer is nothing like Star Trek and its story is not a moralizing adventure.
> Homer is ... not a moralizing adventure.
Not from a modern perspective, but wouldn't it be from the perspective of a warrior/honor culture? Agamemnon steals Achilles' property/prize and Achilles has to figure out the morally right response given the expectations of his culture.
> Homer is nothing like Star Trek
Isn't Voyager at least somewhat like the Odyssey? It's the challenge of maintaining one's cultural/self-identity through the long journey home (loyalty to his crew/household in Ithaca : loyalty to Federation ideals, see Equinox). It even included sirens (Prime Factors, Bliss, and literally in Favorite son) and the decision to take on Scylla or Charybdis (travel through Borg space or go the long way around with different unknowns).
> super simplistic white white good against badly bad evil
That's more Star Wars than Star Trek (though I would make the case that's a necessary step on the hierarchy of stories for human cognitive development). It's there in Star Trek but plenty of TNG episodes explore nuance in cultural relativity (Half a Life, The Outcast, Birthright come to mind)
> but wouldn't it be from the perspective of a warrior/honor culture
I do not think so. Odyssey is not gung ho adventure book.
> Isn't Voyager at least somewhat like the Odyssey?
Absolutely 100% not. They are completely different kind of fiction. Star Trek in general is not like Odyssey. Star Trek is very schematic, with fairly simple plot with moral outcome, good vs bad who will change into good, and predictable caricature like characters. It works, because it is kind of a canvass where you can project own fantasies and predict what the world will do.
Odyssey has less predictable structure, a lot of dining and talking, more grey, deception, politics. Also, they do not come back to commit a massacre by the end of Voyager.
> That's more Star Wars than Star Trek
Some TNG episodes may explore that, but I was rewatching it few months ago. It is not nuanced at all. Episodes have strong moral lesson, loud and clear, that hits you over the head. You really need to suppress a lot of disbelieve about "how world works" to buy into it. (Btw, Babylon 5 aged a lot better. It is pretty idealistic still, but less simplified.)
I had a similar experience rewatching Doctor Who a few years ago. But then I remembered it's written as a children's show. It introduces some genuinely terrifying concepts in a package that's developmentally appropriate.
That's why I referenced fables. Your complaint is that Star Trek is too fable-like. I would argue that it's appropriate for a 12-year-old and having culturally relevant and age appropriate material to introduce to developing minds is important.
The original article's thesis is that powerful institutions can also be good. If I were a teenager right now, I would feel the opposite based on what I see around me. I might believe the solution is to tear it all down. Stories about duty to higher ideals provide an alternative narrative that can easily be found in actual history (Lincoln's belief in the union, Churchill's belief in democracy).
> Odyssey has less predictable structure
Yes, the Odyssey is higher up the hierarchy from fables and Star Trek. The core of the story is reclaiming identity when separated from everything you know. Calypso is the height of this. She offers to free Odysseus from his identity as a mortal human. Seven of Nine reclaiming her humanity is probably the closest parallel to Odysseus in a simpler, more predictable package.
Thought about your Shakespeare point a bit more. I was wrong in saying "most". I should have said "well-known" Shakespeare: Good and bad is clear in Lear, Richard III, Othello, Macbeth and they're still worthwhile stories about human nature. It's gray in I Henry IV and Coriolanus. Hamlet is more complex: it's a well-known play and the bad guys are clear, but the good guy struggles with taking action. But the original comment I was countering was that popular entertainment doesn't have anything to tell us about leadership. I think that the fact that Homer and Shakespeare have stayed popular for centuries and that we're here in 2026 ranking them against other popular entertainment/fiction supports that humans in all time periods create stories to explore real concepts and those stories become popular and stay popular when other people see reality reflected in them.
> TNG is still a work of fiction
Fiction in the case of TNG is an excuse to spam aphorisms. The whole scifi setup is not the point of the stories.
For between 5000 and 25000 years (at least), humans have used storytelling to preserve, develop and disseminate their culture(s).
If you want to critique the stories and the storytelling of TNG or whatever else, please do so - there's plenty to get into. But "still a work of fiction" is not a critique worthy of anyone's time.
Most things are to some degree works of fiction. The public personas of the rich and powerful are generally curated representations of how they want you to see them, and that isn't a new phenomenon.
Or Homer’s?
Why? To do so is to deny the power that fiction has in society.
An interesting question to ask: Is the world a better place because of the existence of Star Trek and the influences that it has on society?
How can we improve society with fiction?
Yeah, we should look to Shakespeare for thought leadership, since he's not popular.
Patrick Stewart as Macbeth ("Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84
Good fiction instils children with rolemodels. Then they can try to live up to those rolemodels as adults while the whole world runs on cynical and self-serving rules.
I completely agree, and I'm willing to bet that most people here would agree. The only reason you're getting pushback in this case is because HN is filled with Trekkies who're unable to separate their love of Picard from your statement. If you wrote this same comment about an article that focused on Don Draper from Mad Men, you'd probably be upvoted.
You're describing the idea that thought leadership should be based on individual character, regardless of [non]fictional status, which is exactly the point of the pushback.
How on earth could you come to the conclusion that the people pushing back believe all fictional characters are good models of thought leadership? The parent's implication was that none are.
The Americans elected a sub-par actor as their leader
Twice
Three times. Nixon was a stage actor and in fact that’s how he met his wife, Pat (she was also an actor).
reagan?
Reagan was mostly known as a film actor.
The other performer was, of course, Trump. He had a TV show.
Stories are like thought experiments. I agree that blindly trusting you should “be like this” is silly, but the story works through the preconditions and consequences with you.
I agree, but the counterpoint is that many people are influenced by fiction, so we should praise fiction that reinforces positive social values.
Yes it's much more important to look at real figures making impact today. Such as... um... wait a second, I'm sure there has to be a few...
I get my thought leadership from my LinkedIn feed.
Where do you prefer to look instead?
I mean, some of the richest most influential people of our time are operating from a handful of science fiction books. Star trek is at least tonally more humanitarian than Snow Crash.
It seems a more honest place to source your fictional characters to admire than the news or non-fiction, though. Makes it clearer that the character is fictional than when you try to pretend you're talking about a real person rather than the idea of one.
Or to put it bluntly: all paragons are made-up fictions, some just use real persons as framing devices, but that doesn't mean they're any more "real".
Sci fi is not for "thought leadership".
In this case it's like a what if: what if humans were the best they could be.
And that couldn't be less silly.
Maybe it doesn't have to be.
As opposed to Gorbachev?
Gandhi?
Mandela?
https://x.com/raffysoanti/status/1403093629086965760
The title didn't start with "Only"
6 comments in 11 years and this is one of them. I'm honored, thank you!
Alternatively you could address the substance of the comment instead of making some appeal to authority. Why do Gorbachev, Gandhi or Mandela stand in opposition to the points being made in the article?
That they are actual people instead of fictional characters.
And there's not room for everyone? If we say something nice about a fictional character then we're in some way devaluing real people? I don't follow.
Is the implication that we cannot learn things from fiction?
Star Trek and Jean-Luc Picard is horrible example of leadersnip! Every time he meets real danger, he gets his crew needlesly killed to make empty gestures!
Like with Q, he has to give lectures to literal god! Perhaps shut up for 5 minutes to get more information?
Or when meeting borg...?
Patrick was great actor, he was still able to carry Star Trek. But writing was horrible! Vegetarian communist utopia tries to imagine real combat!
Star Trek is cultish ideological juju in the form of swashbuckling egomania and theme park vacation.
Look at the colors: a tribe of C-suite nerds zip around in an atomic powered space-faring Hyatt Regency trying to train the universe to Taylorize all production methods. Its protagonists are utterly entitled and classist, who teach war as the essential force by which their lives incur meaning.
It's is a soap-operatic long tail of Western empire indulging in fatuous "adventure", which amounts literally beaming into alien realms to cause disturbance and justifying it through dominion or ignorance, while the executives try to believe they've moved beyond themselves so they can feel noble.
As a dramatic art, the show offers some moments of transcendence, but these end up sequestered to the commercial dictates of the franchise, which is an epic advert for consumerist Americana.
I feel deep suspicion about anyone who regards cosplay as instructive about what makes for "good men with power". And as Vox is a notable outlet in the great system of commercial attention-whoring that defines our culture, I feel double the suspicion.
Also See:
Phase IV (1974) Futureworld (1976) Lathe of Heaven (1980)
So you haven't seen TNG, Voyager or Enterprise? The central point of your comment dissolves with the fact that many episodes gripe with the prime directive. Many of the best TNG episodes grapple with morality and tackle complex issues centering around incorrectly applying our values to other cultures. Alongside that, culture and authoritarianism, reflections and warnings of what can happen to even societies that see themselves as enlightened (Drumhead comes to mind).
I think it's important to critique shows within the context of the eras and societies they come from but you don't strike me as someone who knows the star trek universe very well.
> I feel deep suspicion about anyone who regards cosplay as instructive about what makes for "good men with power".
No Shakespeare for you then!
or Bible
Rarely does one see so much effort put into such aggressive ignorance. Bravo.