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 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".
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.)
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
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.
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.
It's really nothing like TNG at all. The Expanse is basically Breaking Bad in space - a meaningless, ugly, depressing trash show only possible to produce in an empire in terminal decline.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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).
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 such utopia (and risk 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:
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.
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.
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.
All masculinity is positive, even if you don’t like some aspects of it. That’s like saying illogical and hysterical behavior brought on by hormonal changes during women’s periods is toxic femininity. That’s our biological imperative and any deviation from traditional or normal masculinity is just an unstable equilibrium of temporary behavioral modulation.
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.
Yeah the whole thing is some feminist grift that isn’t going to go away unless you repeatedly bring up the hypocrisy/idiocy every time someone dabbles in the idea.
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 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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ..."
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.
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.
Perhaps they should include a chapter on the Prime Directive. Or at least remind congress of George Washington's recommendation in his farewell address.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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’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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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".
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.)
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
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.
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.
It's really nothing like TNG at all. The Expanse is basically Breaking Bad in space - a meaningless, ugly, depressing trash show only possible to produce in an empire in terminal decline.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Stories where characters bring forward their humanness (and not being perfect) can share a lot to learn from.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[dead]
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
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.
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.
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).
I'll say it.
So, basically, Trump?
Big fan of Star Trek and Picard is my captain forever, but this credit seems more due to Gene Roddenberry.
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.
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
> 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...
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.
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 such utopia (and risk 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...
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
All masculinity is positive, even if you don’t like some aspects of it. That’s like saying illogical and hysterical behavior brought on by hormonal changes during women’s periods is toxic femininity. That’s our biological imperative and any deviation from traditional or normal masculinity is just an unstable equilibrium of temporary behavioral modulation.
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.
Yeah the whole thing is some feminist grift that isn’t going to go away unless you repeatedly bring up the hypocrisy/idiocy every time someone dabbles in the idea.
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 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.
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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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...
Data is an embodied finite being. Claude et al seem more like the Borg or Skynet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 ...
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-...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
He ruined his marriage by cheating.
Is he good?
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.
Related:
Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50309647
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.
They see everything. They see it all.
Wasn’t his character’s power teeny tiny compared to those who ruled the Federation?
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
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.
Nothing, because Star Trek is a work of fiction
"Of course it is a work of fiction, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" - Dumbledore, paraphrased
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.
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.
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.
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.
I bet nowadays TNG would have been cancelled after the first season. How many episodes did they need to catch on?
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.
He was a fictional leader. In a fictional utopia.
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?
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 it’s just a way people grieve, but it’s obviously a fallacy to conflate the character with the actor.
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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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)
> 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.
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 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
What leadership credentials do the script writers have?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Or Homer’s?
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?
Well probably better to look to Picard than a literal Nazi…
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.
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.
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.
I agree, but the counterpoint is that many people are influenced by fiction, so we should praise fiction that reinforces positive social values.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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".
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?
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!
Our wealthy and powerful leaders seek to crown themselves nobles without nobility.