fiasco

Sounds like an early experiment in artificial neural networks.

The blond side guy was Jared Leto. Edward Norton sure morbed all over him.

And while there's a lot of technical nuance to this, deep learning is nothing more or less than random recombination of its input. The difference between GPT-2, GPT-3, and GPT-4 is how the randomness is conditioned, but it doesn't change the core fact: trying to use deep learning for storytelling would be the greatest breakthrough in cultural stagnation that the world has ever seen.

At least you won't be feeling stagnant, for a while. But I'll answer your question more completely.

Various things have been discovered that have allowed a certain amount of automation in storytelling, but one thing that can't be automated is passion. By automation I'm not talking about "artificial intelligence," I'm talking about—what programmers call "tooling." Movies nowadays are almost always visually stunning, and that's because of algorithmic work in light and shading, character animation, hair simulation. Similarly, there's also a "canonical story" you can read about in a book called Invisible Ink.

The canonical story doesn't tell you how to write dialog, and not surprisingly, dialog has become incredibly weak. On one hand you have capeshit, where characters talk in quips, and on the other The Rings of Power, where everyone talks in weird, deep-sounding non sequitors.

This is what I mean by risk aversion. A lot of beautiful graphics conveying nothing. A lot of electricity used to run computers for no reason at all. This is all very expensive, and expenses have to be justified with spreadsheets.

There are still good things out there, there's still passion in the world. It's just getting harder to find.

When you see him, are you fearful? Are you scared? If you're not, you've been fooled. When you see him, what do you feel?

Yes and no. I generally believe that risk-aversion is a very risky strategy. The greatest threat facing the world is bean-counting MBAs, and they're doing their damndest to destroy culture for the sake of risk minimization.

On the other hand, check this out.

The same is true of DCI Barnaby. Just remember, the copaganda is real.

I'll never get over the fact that Babylon 5 did the founding of the Federation way, way better than Star Trek ever could.

I guess packaging it with Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, that famous book about Lisp, would be too on the nose.

It's worth reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as something of a starting point.

Thomas Kuhn was a grad student in physics at the time of the so-called quantum revolution, and got really interested in how physics, the supposedly most venerable branch of science, got suddenly upended. He shifted to philosophy, then later on collaborated on a sociological study of scientists. That book was the result of his research.

He proposes that science is made up of paradigms, which is what you learn in grad school. What you already believe conditions what you see when you look out at the world, so already this is going to influence what experiments scientists think to run, how they'll design their experiments, what methodologies they'll use to make sense of their data, and so on. It also influences what they'll see as credible findings when peer reviewing papers. Tack onto this that paradigms get attached to careers—if I'm a senior scientist whose career was launched by X research, then I'm gonna be defensive of X—and you've got a recipe for stagnation that'll only occasionally maybe get shaken up. Not to mention that, particularly outside science and engineering, an awful lot of research funding comes from the Rehabilitating Some Billionaire's Public Image Charitable Trust (since public university funding has been massively scaled back). If things do fundamentally change, the change is going to be huge and rapid.

Of course, this applies to nonscientists as well. There's nothing sillier than a Christian saying they took a long, hard look at their beliefs, then arrived exactly where they started. This isn't because they're dishonest or intellectually lazy, but because they see the world in ways that predispose them to believing in God.

With the bad news out of the way, there are two things I can say.

First off, look at how things work. Any belief about politics (for example) has to take into account that the world is full of real people who are just as complex as you or me. Thinking "oh those people are just _____" is a nonstarter. At the same time, institutions (like government, C suites, middle management, churches...) also strongly condition how people will act in particular contexts. Most people are very sensitive to institutional rules and norms, and deviation from rules and norms will generally be on the down low.

Second, don't let inconsistencies slide. Inconsistencies are often a sign that something is being hidden from you, and focusing on them can give you much better insight into how a person or group actually works. For example, democrats could have stopped Roe from being overturned, because they're just as able to filibuster supreme court appointments as republicans. So do democratic senators actually care about abortion access? And on the other hand, why are republicans who said things like "if we elect Donald Trump, he will destroy us, and we will deserve it," then going on Fox News crying about how mean Justice is being to him?

Of course, you only have to stand on a slightly elevated surface and you're safe.

To me, there's a very striking difference between say The Next Generation and Discovery, namely, how they handle exposition.

The senior staff of the Enterprise-D gathers in the conference room off the bridge, one character presents new information, then the department heads give their take on what they just learned. Maybe Crusher will point out the humanitarian angle, Worf will provide savage pragmatism, Troi will ask if the space dust is sentient, and Picard will synthesize all that into his decision. But the other purpose of these scenes is to bake exposition into natural character dialog.

On the Discovery, three characters stand in front of a console taking turns giving a single thread raw exposition, then comment on how cool science is.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I think Discovery is unwatchable trash.