It’s always worth remembering that the people who dislike something tend to be the loudest.

There’s no doubt reactions to Discovery have been mixed. Personally, I enjoyed it. It was uneven and flawed and sometimes frustrating. But there were enough good moments to keep me going. I don’t think anyone can tell you if you’ll enjoy it… You just have to try it and see.

Everyone is terrified of all the social problems AI is causing, but maybe it will just encourage everyone to learn Linux and we’ll achieve utopia.

Spock would have to be DM. As a player he’d be the worst rules lawyer ever.

The thing is even if AI could do all that (which is doubtful in my life time), you would still need someone to prompt it with something interesting. And CEO types have never had an interesting idea in their lives

I agree the execution of the end of GoT was bad (i.e. the problems weren’t just the issue of everything needing to come to a head). There were a lot of different complaints about how GoT ended, but I definitely saw a lot about how it was all just battles in the last season and no nuance. I think that was always going to be hard to avoid given how GRRM had set up the main plot. And I think he will find it hard to avoid when writing the last 2 books, which could be part of the reason he doesn’t want to do it.

I always felt that one of the main problems with GoT/ASOIAF was that it was a nuanced, political fantasy with top class world-building, but the overarching plot was pushing everyone towards a massive final confrontation (or 2 really). There was not really a good way to resolve the confrontation without a massive battle (or 2). So the ending was always going to have to move away from what made the series interesting/successful (book and TV), i.e. plot, characters, intrigue, shades of grey.

There were other problems as well, but that was something baked into the whole series by GRRM, and I’m not sure he can really find a way to do it differently. He might come up with a different outcome of the final confrontations, but it still has to be done with epic battles.

Absolutely, and a big part of being a good scientist is acknowledging that subjectivity (and well as the degree of uncertainty in all our knowledge). In social science, subjectivity is baked in… there’s no way to avoid it, no matter how hard you try.

That’s not to say subjectivity means science can’t do anything useful in these areas. Most of the problems with subjectivity come from pretending something is objective when it’s not.

Extremely subjective creatures, many of which believe they’re always right (including many “scientists”).

But yeah, you’re right, the reality is somewhere between the two extremes of the meme. Although we might also want to have a conversation about what “pure objectivity and truth” means.

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We already had that evidence by the 1960s!