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Not only that, but it's written by an imperfect human who needed plot points for his stories. So when the author points at the Minds' failures to predict the c

Not only that, but it's written by an imperfect human who needed plot points for his stories. So when the author points at the Minds' failures to predict the consequences of their actions he simultaneously fails to acknowledge that without mistakes by the Minds, there would be no plot. No plot, no book. And especially telling is that when he writes about murder, the author totally failed to mention that almost everyone in the Culture is constantly backed up, apart from a few abnormal people who don't, and can be reincarnated in a blink of an eye. How can you not mention that? Being murdered is a minor inconvenience, hence the minor punishment. Also the way Iain wrote about the culture changed over the years, if you read consider phelbas then something like dark matter back to back I felt you can see he realized some of the mistakes he'd made early on, even if he couldnt go back and correct them. For me at least, it's always been clear that the culture did not need an external threat to function, and as a whole it found war to be a tiresome waste of time. I agree with you that the article seems to be plucking at straws to put that argument together.

rkachowski 6y ago
In the series its mentioned that any mind beyond a certain level of perfection would always immediately choose to sublime to the next level of existence. Given the fact that the minds have very strong personalities and they're less than perfect, omniscient creations then mistakes miscalculations and overestimations are inevitable. I'd always taken the view that Contact / Special Circumstances was where many people wanted to be due to it being a limited opportunity in a post scarcity environment. Coupled with the fact that anyone who really wanted to be in a situation requiring the use of scary advanced weaponry is likely to be a bad choice for such a position, this always made the stories about contact agents seem intriguing to me.
- p_l 6y ago
  Excession explicitly shows that being able to prove Contact/Special Circumstances membership was big in terms of social capital, even when you factored the rare people who cared about historical achievement of a given family line - this is used by SC to get someone to impersonate someone else, by essentially dangling the "carrot" of "being part of SC mission". Of course, claiming SC membership falsely probably was quickly refuting just by someone asking the pervasive network for confirmation.

rkachowski 6y ago

In the series its mentioned that any mind beyond a certain level of perfection would always immediately choose to sublime to the next level of existence. Given the fact that the minds have very strong personalities and they're less than perfect, omniscient creations then mistakes miscalculations and overestimations are inevitable. I'd always taken the view that Contact / Special Circumstances was where many people wanted to be due to it being a limited opportunity in a post scarcity environment. Coupled with the fact that anyone who really wanted to be in a situation requiring the use of scary advanced weaponry is likely to be a bad choice for such a position, this always made the stories about contact agents seem intriguing to me.

p_l 6y ago
Excession explicitly shows that being able to prove Contact/Special Circumstances membership was big in terms of social capital, even when you factored the rare people who cared about historical achievement of a given family line - this is used by SC to get someone to impersonate someone else, by essentially dangling the "carrot" of "being part of SC mission". Of course, claiming SC membership falsely probably was quickly refuting just by someone asking the pervasive network for confirmation.