Comment by chimprich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimprich | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big Culture fan, and I don't know what to make of this article.

Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input.

Examples

> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one

Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.

> We also see that there are a number of Eccentrics, Minds that don’t fully share the values of Culture. They’re not that rare, about 1% of the population.

I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.

> We even see GSV Absconding with Style stockpile resources without general knowledge of the other Minds.

This name is made up, and not by Banks. A Google search for "absconding with style" has only a few hits - mainly this article.

I could go on...

The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints from Surface Detail was described as "very slightly psychotic" - which in the case of advanced Culture warship is quite a thing...

> I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.

If they're including breakaway Cultures (Zetetic Elench etc), maybe you can get there, but otherwise, yeah, 1% seems very, very high.

It might be a bad translation of a translation, i.e., maybe Absconding With Style is a translation from Russian of weird choice of translation of Sleeper Service _into_ Russian? Bit a stretch I'll grant.

I don't know why Russian is mentioned, that Boris the Brave guy is not Russian, but "Sleeper Service" was oddly translated in the Russian publication as "Спальный Состав", which means "Sleeping composition".

I haven't read the books, but I assume that the meaning of "состав" used here may be "train / a set of train cars".

That at least fits one level of the pun.

Hence “might”, “maybe”, “bit of stretch”

I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true. I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it and relied on an LLM too much. That was a mistake.

Some of these were my own supposition - 1% felt about right for how casually they are mentioned in story.

> Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.

I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.

> I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true.

Hah, fair enough. Thanks for getting the Culture back on the front page of HN :)

> I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it

If you were actually referring to the Sleeper Service - I think you still remembered something like the opposite idea of what happened in the story. The twist was - (Spoiler!) - the Sleeper Service was actually not Eccentric at all, and had not built up a small army as a Mind that had gone rogue, but had actually done this as a planned failsafe in conjunction with a number of other Minds. Hence the multi-level pun of its name.

> I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.

I'm afraid I can't remember exactly which books this was explored in, though Inversions, State of the Art and Player of Games are books where the Culture is explicitly compared to other civilisations and so more likely to have mentioned it.

Also Banks' essay /A Few Notes on the Culture/ covers it quite well if you haven't come across that yet. Very short but I think very readable and interesting.

http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

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