Children of Dune – Frank Herbert

Thoughts: The scope of Children of Dune, as with the two books that preceded it, is stunning. So many complex characters with complex motives. Excellent.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering. I read this as an e-book, so page numbers are as they appeared in the app I used, Libby.)

Herbert, Frank. [1976] 2008. Children of Dune. ACE.

• 310: “Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: ‘There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.’ The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: ‘Now what is this thing doing?’ -The Mentat Handbook”
  • j: cf. Phil Tetlock’s hedgehogs
• 396: “Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance. -The Words of My Father: An Account of Muad’dib Reconstructed by Harq Al-Ada”
  • j: this relates obliquely to ideas about entropy (harder to build a thing than to break it), optimization in fitness landscapes that are changing, the 80/20 rule, …