[Minor spoiler alert] I’ve been obsessed with Dune lately. I watched the movie and read the book and loved both. Dune contains many subtle elements of rationality and x-risks despite the overall mythological/religious theme. Here are my interpretations: the goal of the Bene Gesserit is to selectively breed a perfect Bayesian who can help humanity find the Golden Path. The Golden Path is the narrow set of futures that don’t result in an extinction event. The Dune world is mysteriously and powerfully seductive.
I think you’re reading that into it. No one before Leto II shows any awareness of Kralizec or the inevitable extinction of humanity at the hands of prescient machines invented by the Ixians (and given the retroactive prescience dynamics, unclear if anyone even could). The BG’s stated goals are always to make humanity grow up into ‘adults’, equipped for the challenges of a radically open infinite universe; this ultimately contributes to Leto’s plans, but that was not the BG’s intention, and they were pawns of prescience starting before Dune when Paul retrocauses himself to be born instead of some Paulina as the BG had planned. (The Golden Path is narrow because it requires 3 different very improbable events: the invention of the Siona gene and No-fields/ships, and the Scattering. The former two ensure that no possible future prescient power, particularly machine ones, can ever, anywhere in any possible future, control probability to create a new self-consistent history by reaching back to prune away all possible futures not leading to human defeat and then guiding the machines to their targets everywhere; the last ensures that humanity is exponentially expanding at a sufficient rate randomized throughout the infinite universe that no non-prescient extinction wave can ever catch up to extinct all human planets.)
Herbert doesn’t think this is confined solely to mere reasoning, Bayesian or otherwise; if he had, Mentats (technology/computation) would be the ne plus ultra of the universe. Instead, they, as well as the Sword Masters (military), Honored Matres (politics=sex, see Walter’s Sexual Cycle), Bene Tleilaxu (genetics & manipulation of biology) / ascended Face Dancers, Bene Gesserit (sociology & control of bodies), access to the knowledge of Ancestral Memories etc, are all part of the toolbox. Later humans are not just smart and more rational and more observant, but physically faster, stronger, and more dexterous.
[Minor spoiler alert] I’ve been obsessed with Dune lately. I watched the movie and read the book and loved both. Dune contains many subtle elements of rationality and x-risks despite the overall mythological/religious theme. Here are my interpretations: the goal of the Bene Gesserit is to selectively breed a perfect Bayesian who can help humanity find the Golden Path. The Golden Path is the narrow set of futures that don’t result in an extinction event. The Dune world is mysteriously and powerfully seductive.
I think you’re reading that into it. No one before Leto II shows any awareness of Kralizec or the inevitable extinction of humanity at the hands of prescient machines invented by the Ixians (and given the retroactive prescience dynamics, unclear if anyone even could). The BG’s stated goals are always to make humanity grow up into ‘adults’, equipped for the challenges of a radically open infinite universe; this ultimately contributes to Leto’s plans, but that was not the BG’s intention, and they were pawns of prescience starting before Dune when Paul retrocauses himself to be born instead of some Paulina as the BG had planned. (The Golden Path is narrow because it requires 3 different very improbable events: the invention of the Siona gene and No-fields/ships, and the Scattering. The former two ensure that no possible future prescient power, particularly machine ones, can ever, anywhere in any possible future, control probability to create a new self-consistent history by reaching back to prune away all possible futures not leading to human defeat and then guiding the machines to their targets everywhere; the last ensures that humanity is exponentially expanding at a sufficient rate randomized throughout the infinite universe that no non-prescient extinction wave can ever catch up to extinct all human planets.)
Herbert doesn’t think this is confined solely to mere reasoning, Bayesian or otherwise; if he had, Mentats (technology/computation) would be the ne plus ultra of the universe. Instead, they, as well as the Sword Masters (military), Honored Matres (politics=sex, see Walter’s Sexual Cycle), Bene Tleilaxu (genetics & manipulation of biology) / ascended Face Dancers, Bene Gesserit (sociology & control of bodies), access to the knowledge of Ancestral Memories etc, are all part of the toolbox. Later humans are not just smart and more rational and more observant, but physically faster, stronger, and more dexterous.
See https://www.gwern.net/Dune-genetics