Something about this stuff rubs me the wrong way. I'm not sure what. I never thought the mentats of Dune is something anyone would want to be.
It’s like with Nietzsche¹; most fans are not really fans of what the author actually intended.
The flaw of Mentats is that, early on, they are only Mentats, much as the flaw of Ginaz swordmasters was that they were only swordmasters or Reverend Mothers were only Reverend Mothers, etc. As humans grow and improve through the Dune saga, they gain more capabilities. Herbert was all about the Renaissance Man rugged individualist idea, and that was the goal of the Bene Gesserit: "Grow up, humans!...That's their [the BG's] dream. Start acting like adults and not like angry children in a schoolyard."
So he clearly had some interesting ideas to share. But yes it's a comic, so I don't expect it to do anything other than straw-man his views.
I got the impression that Paul saw many possible futures where there was certainty of a bad outcome, and some possible futures with an unknown outcome, and that the path to the unknown outcomes all involved jihad and death. So, at least in the first novel, Paul felt compelled to pursue jihad in order to provide an uncertain future, as avoiding jihad would be worse.
It's been quite some time since I read beyond the first novel though.
My interpretation is that Paul didn’t take the golden path. He felt trapped into taking it, but when twins were born, he was freed of that obligation because it opened up a future he hadn’t foreseen.
Imagine looking into your child's face and knowing the exact time and nature of his/her death. I think this is a big reason childhood diseases have the status of especially evil.
> The term "computer", in use from the early 17th century (the first known written reference dates from 1613),[1] meant "one who computes": a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available.
It think this is an oversimplification. Mentats still had agency--both Piter de Vries and Thufir Hawat have their mentat schemes to kill the Baron Harkonnen.
One of the big points of the Dune series is the indeterminacy of the universe. Computers, being deterministic, couldn't think properly to handle the full universe, so humanity's subjugation to computers (i.e., "machine thinking", both as rule by computer and as habits of thought for humans) was a dead end. Dependency on computers also meant people didn't develop human skills.
After the Butlerian Jihad, the Guild, the Mentats, and the Bene Gesserit all became schools of human development. Mentats aren't just human computers who perform calculations quickly. They cultivate almost zen-like mental states that allow them to sift patterns of data into conclusions, among other techniques. The later books go into much more detail, but part of the point is that they're not deterministic thinkers; they're practitioners of very advanced modes of consciousness.
I think there's a lot of people who wish they could remember more things, or math more effectively without tools or etc. Probably not a whole lot who want to go to the depths of the mentats. In universe, the training would have started before the trainee could consent, which makes it hard to make a choice to become a mentat, you can't choose to begin training, only to continue or abandon if you were in training since early childhood.