Currently rereading the series, so I thought I'd point out something. Thanks for the reading suggestions in the text :).
At the beginning of Dune, we are told that the Great Schools come into existence after the Butlerian Jihad to replace the functions served by machines. While these are claimed to be 'human' functions they bear remarkable similarity to the functions of machines, and we can roughly categorize these as follows:
Navigators: Mathematics, pure abstraction.
Mentats: Computation, simulation and rejection of inconsistent alternatives. Logic. Bayesian reasoning.
Suks: Moral apathy.
Bene Gesserit: Command architecture.
My main problem is the suggestion that the Dune Universe is internally aware of and attempts to rectify Goodhart's Law, and that the process... (read 1248 more words →)
Currently rereading the series, so I thought I'd point out something. Thanks for the reading suggestions in the text :).
At the beginning of Dune, we are told that the Great Schools come into existence after the Butlerian Jihad to replace the functions served by machines. While these are claimed to be 'human' functions they bear remarkable similarity to the functions of machines, and we can roughly categorize these as follows:
Navigators: Mathematics, pure abstraction.
Mentats: Computation, simulation and rejection of inconsistent alternatives. Logic. Bayesian reasoning.
Suks: Moral apathy.
Bene Gesserit: Command architecture.
My main problem is the suggestion that the Dune Universe is internally aware of and attempts to rectify Goodhart's Law, and that the process... (read 1248 more words →)