Seriously–READ what I said, not what you think I said. You seem to think I’m criticizing Herbert, when I’m actually criticizing the idiots reading profundity into the entertainment he wrote. Can you grasp that point, or are you going to keep trying to defend Herbert as some sort of font of wisdom and scientific knowledge?

Which is not the argument made, at all. You’re not even missing the point–You’re making up your own and arguing its merits with some straw man you’re making up out of whole cloth.

“…Herbert bought into and was selling about the whole “ecology” thing…”

I disagree. It was entertainment. How many sci-fi stories have hyper drives??? You seen any of those lately??? You don’t like Herbert, fine but don’t damn him for things he didn’t do.

Even if it is just entertainment using some dubious devices to spin the story it still has a good background that mirrors strategic choices that have to be made ion real life.

My point was that Herbert wrote fiction, much of it what I have to term “Crap”, outside the one great work he had in him, which was Dune.

It’s the Marie Konnikova’s of the world I’m talking about, spinning vast dribbling arrays of philosophy up out of entertainment, as though Herbert were some savant thrown up, prophet-like, by some petty godling whose feet she wishes us to worship at.

Herbert got a lot of what he wrote out of a summer spent tracking dunes, working for geologists. His ideas on ecology and the rest of what he shoehorned into Dune are laughable, things gleaned from the words of others without understanding. The biology of the sandworms is insanely wrong, starting with the idea that anything of that mass could exist outside the ocean depths and the support of water. Not to mention, the idea that a lifeform itself could evolve to encapsulate oceans of water the way he describes. Where did the mass go?

And, this Konikkova chicklet wants us to see Herbert as some font of philosophical wisdom? When the man himself describes what he wrote as cheap entertainment?

Sweet babbling baby Jesus, but the amount of disbelief suspension it takes to read Dune without hysterical laughter is borderline impossible. Genetic memory? How the hell does that work, when you could only have the distaff view of things, and that only up to the birth of the successor generation? How’d the Reverend Mothers and Paul get access to the “wisdom of the ages” from the elderly women they describe, if those geneline memories were genetic? After all, how the flat-out f**k would you transmit anything genetically, past the point where the mother gave birth to the kid? All you’d have would be the meanderings of the pre-conception young mothers, not the “wisdom of the ages”.

Dune, I am afraid, is a work that doesn’t bear much in the way of thinking. Anywhere. It’s a lovely confection, but there isn’t a hell of a lot of meat to it.

And, again… I’m not saying Herbert isn’t entertaining with it, what I am saying is that anyone going to that well for wisdom is about as bright as a burnt-out lightbulb. You may as well look to Tolkien for the true history of humanity, thinking that was what he was writing.

Uhh…it’s sci-fi. It’s not real. It’s entertainment.

I’ve read, I think, everything Herbert wrote and found all of it entertaining. So speak for yourself. I read it when much younger. I expect I wouldn’t care as much for it today but I don’t enjoy fiction as much today of any sort.

Didn’t buy into the crap that Herbert was selling then, don’t buy into it now. Same with Conan Doyle. Let us not forget the trite and utter bullshit that Herbert bought into and was selling about the whole “ecology” thing, or the Conan Doyle wishful thinking about his paranormal spiritualist fantasies that he got into with Houdini and others. Both of these writers were entertaining storytellers, but men with deep insights into the human condition and psyche? LOL… Yeah, pull the other one. That’s the one with bells on…

Never ceases to amaze me what bullshit will sell, and how little of it is actually backed up by any form of real research and/or actual, y’know… Work. It’s all scholarship, based on ephemeral crap that was based on other ephemeral crap which was based on ephemera and fantasy spun up out of nothing. You go back and look for basis background on Conan Doyle’s Sherlockian methodology, and what you find is… Nothing. I dare say that if you were to interview the guy he claims he based Sherlock on, Dr. Joseph Bell, he’d be shocked to hear what was spun up out of his career and teachings to Conan Doyle.

There’s zero real substance to any of it, and the amount of mystic credibility granted to both these writers is astonishing. Good God, Herbert is absolute crap once you get past Dune, and I would highly recommend leaving your illusions intact about the quality of his work before going into the derivative works, which seem to have been universally written solely to make money off the one bit of really good writing that Herbert managed in his lifetime.

I don’t blame either Herbert or Conan Doyle for what others have made out of their works, because both are decent entertainers, but… Dear God, the depth of the bullshit these second-rate minds have come up with. If it were real, we’d be swimming through depths of bovine excrement that covered the world meters deep.

It seems like having a canon of so-called Great Books would help to manage the problem, but then you get into endless arguments over what gets on the syllabus. Which leads to endless arguments over who gets to write the syllabus.

Because any good writing that doesn’t get on the list gets shortchanged.

As for handling stressful situations: it’s partly a skill, but the skill is development of an innate ability. And there’s an inverse of learning resilience: there’s burnout from too much chronic stress.

It’s certainly useful to handle acute stress well, but to handle chronic stress well is a mistake. Chronic stress is a sign of a situation that ought not to be tolerated. Work the real problem. End whatever is causing the chronic stress, and then move on.