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.
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.
Yes, this is why my opinion is that in politics, the ends absolutely do not justify the means, because a broken system that produces the right answer is lucky, and a working system that produces the right answer is... working as intended
I 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?
This sounds much more like "Please Don't Hold My Politicians Accountable" than "I favor accountability", FWIW.
I know decorum here disfavors talking about specific parties and actors, and this thread is 100% sideways. Nonetheless this kind of attitude is at best only a stepping stone to recovery. You can't both-sides your way through a constitutional crisis.
Not unique to politicians, any large organisation who doesn't have a strong single leader sees this. It's nothing new either, with the Peter principle, the Dilbert Principle, even the Gervais Principle, recognising the symptoms.
Having the authority to sanction a president does not necessarily mean that person has the power to overthrow a president. And the people with the most direct power (military and secret service) lack the authority to use it. Mostly these factors can balance out so that power is not concentrated as much as it seems.
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.
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
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 wanted 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.
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:
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.
No such thing as positive masculinity. All masculinity is positive, even if you don’t like some aspects of it. That’s our biological imperative and any deviation from traditional or normal masculinity is just an unstable equilibrium of behavioral modulation.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 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.
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.
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.
The shills pushing for LLMs and datacenters to take over the world really respect nothing. Going to find old Star Trek episodes and then push the narrative that "machines have feelings too" (when, in case you missed it, a human actor is pretending to be a machine) is low... So low.
At a moment where a sizeable part of the world is rising against the externalities of datacenters and the dangers of having two companies trying to do regulatory capture on AI in the US (and probably in the vassal EU too), using an episode of Star Trek to push the narrative that "Good men consider LLMs should have the same rights as humans" just makes me sick.
You guys are seriously unwell and totally falling for a narrative that's pushed on you.
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
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’ve often wondered if The Office inadvertently trained people to be bad managers.
People tend to follow examples they’ve seen before, even if they know it was a bad one. When faced with a new situation, they might just parrot the bad behavior because it’s the only example they know.
The nice thing about Michael Scott is that while he is a self-absorbed and very flawed manager and human, he also genuinely cares a great deal about his employees.
The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.
A far better method of learning leadership is by studying actual leaders, both good and bad ones. For example, if you want to know why Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.
Studying a fantasy whose entire purpose is to make money entertaining people? You're wasting your time.
Are any of the script writers of Star Trek successful leaders of men? If not, what credibility do their "lessons" have?
A historian can make their interpretation of history plausible. A group of historians can reinforce a narrative that is then undercut by the next generation of historians. What made Rommel a good commander is a complex question and we might not yet be done exploring the answer.
Picard the character was derived from the writers’ understanding of historical leaders. Saying the writing of him was solely for money or entertainment is like saying that a historian is only writing for a paycheck and prestige.
If you read the writings of the TNG writers, they were quite caught up in the ethical dilemmas they were presenting. Art that is purely for money is contrived and one dimensional.
Science fiction has an interesting and irreplaceable role in art: it can take a situation out of its immediate context and put it under another lens, clear of its modern cultural baggage. What makes science fiction interesting or not interesting is what it does with that ability: does it promote a simple good vs evil scenario, or does it explore the rich shades of grey that play out in real scenarios?
TNG was particularly good at showing real moral and ethical dilemmas that were quite thought provoking. Their head writers, particularly Michael Pillar and Ronald Moore and Jeri Taylor were deeply interested in exploring the implications and moral contradictions of the plots they presented.
Waving it all away as money grabbing is a reductive history at best.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until dementia kicks in anyway
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...
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.
Some of the other series and movies miss the point more dramatically for me by just becoming space opera. Star Trek was always political.
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 wanted 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.
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...
A pretty good use of six hours.
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
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I imagine it was too long and because he just died they chose to use his name.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- Col. Terry Virts, USAF
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/star-trek-...
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.
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.
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".
Both and defund ICE, and/or reduce subsidies to oil companies, and/or take an eyedropper's worth of budget from defence, and/or ...
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.)
Is he good?
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.
I don't think "lack of power" is one of Picard's defining attributes
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.
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.
https://www.looper.com/1516934/patrick-stewart-tragic-true-l...
*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.
Care to unpack that for the rest of us?
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.
At a moment where a sizeable part of the world is rising against the externalities of datacenters and the dangers of having two companies trying to do regulatory capture on AI in the US (and probably in the vassal EU too), using an episode of Star Trek to push the narrative that "Good men consider LLMs should have the same rights as humans" just makes me sick.
You guys are seriously unwell and totally falling for a narrative that's pushed on you.
Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Erdogan, ... and so many others. Social media has only intensified this
What is wrong with Humanity?
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)
No Shakespeare for you then!
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.
Novelists, journalists, essayists, pamphleteers, scribes, gospel writers, historians, diarists, etc.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fiction in the case of TNG is an excuse to spam aphorisms. The whole scifi setup is not the point of the stories.
Twice
The other performer was, of course, Trump. He had a TV show.
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.
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?
Patrick Stewart as Macbeth ("Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84
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".
Gandhi?
Mandela?
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!