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 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 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.