scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/2m65pm.md

## Writing 'Level 2 Intelligent' Characters

* Author: u/PeridexisErrant  *put aside fear for courage, and death for life**
* URL: http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing/level2intelligent
* Score: 28

* Created: 2014-11-13T10:41:03

### Post:

[Link to content](http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing/level2intelligent)

### Comments:

> **u/Escapement** [+20]  *Ankh-Morpork City Watch* (3 hours later)
> 
> I am not sure I personally would have used Ender's Game as a source of Level 2 Intelligent writing without also mentioning some of the failures of level 2 intelligent writing OSC was guilty of in that book. Perhaps it's merely because I tried to reread the book not long ago due to the recent film,  and I remember the failures as vividly or more than the successes (though before the reread I think I only remembered the successes that EY cited here - there's a lot of poorly thought out bits but OSC manages to skim over them fast enough that you might forget about them).
> 
> For example, look at the **other** examples of Ender's 'innovations' to the field of Zero-g Laser Tag than the ones mentioned by EY - the army he was with came up with the marvellous tactic that revolutionized the field Zero-g Laser Tag of "attacking the enemy before they are prepared", in the battle against Centipede Army, only when Ender joined and showed attacking before the enemy had a chance to prepare was an effective tactic. To quote OSC:
> 
> >From now on no one could take five or ten ar fifteen seconds in the corridor to size things up. The game had changed.
> 
> (From Ender's Game, Ch. 8). 
> 
> He literally calls it out as a revolutionary tactic in the narration, going directly against what EY says about praising the intellect of the characters
> 
> >And so after Ender is done saying “The enemy’s gate is down!”, nobody in Ender’s troops calls out “That’s brilliant!” Ender doesn’t think himself about how smart it is. Nobody has to say an explicit word about intelligence, nor should they.
> 
> Seriously, "What if we attack them before they are ready for us?" is **not** a sophisticated level 2 intelligent idea appropriate to a military genius, it's the sort of idea I and approximately a million others came up with when playing Starcraft as a teen (where it was called a 4-pool and made the newest of players very angry indeed, before they learned to handle it). 'Attacking before they are ready' is presented as such an amazingly genius strategy that a school full of genius kids being trained in tactics to lead the armies of the future in combat never thought of it in years or decades of zero-g laser tag; for comparison, consider the far more cunning and sophisticated (NSFW:extremely crude language) [Destiny's Magnet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl_6q557AkY) plan of baiting enemies out of a fortified position by showing a helpless and valuable target that seems to be out of position, only to ambush with a force that has superior mobility and strength but little ability to assault prepared positions. That is a tactic itself like ten times more complicated and difficult to conceive of and react appropriately to than 'attack before they're ready', and is still noted for only working on opponents who are idiots.
> 
> ---
> 
> The most amazing failure of writing competent characters presented as geniuses in their fields was in the Left Behind books. As [deconstructed by Fred Clark](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2003/10/21/lb-meet-the-girat/):
> 
> >    It's a dangerous thing for a writer to introduce a fictional character who is, the reader is told, the Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time. The pitfall here is the same as if you introduce a character by telling readers he is "the absolute funniest person who ever lived."
> 
> >    You can get away with this, somewhat, if you're writing about a great painter or musician. There you can get away with simply piling on the superlatives, perhaps describing the reaction of others to the artist's work. Readers do not expect you to actually show them a painting or play for them a symphony.
> 
> >    But if you introduce a character, as L&J do with Buck Williams, as a great writer and reporter, the reader has a right to expect that you will provide more than overheated adjectives. Readers want to read what the GIRAT has written.
> 
> >    ...
> 
> >    Anyway, here's how the GIRAT reported, firsthand, from the scene of an all-out nuclear surprise attack:
> 
> > *To say the Israelis were caught off guard, Cameron Williams had written, was like saying the Great Wall of China was long.*

>> **u/AmeteurOpinions** [+7]  *Finally, everyone was working together.* (7 hours later)
>> 
>> Heck, that Destiny's Magnet tactic was used in The Book of Joshua -- the *Old Testament*, thousands of years B.C.

>>> **u/None** [+4]  (7 hours later)
>>> 
>>> Hell, the minute I read the description of that tactic I thought, there's a tactic the none-too-clever men of the Ankh-Morpork Police Force won't be blatantly dumb enough to fall for.

>>>> **u/EliezerYudkowsky** [+11]  *Godric Gryffindor* (9 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> Pratchett tends to *show* some pretty hardcore Level 1 Intelligent characters.  Don't believe the text *telling* you they're stupid.

>>>>> **u/None** [+9]  (9 hours later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> While I entirely agree about his *main* characters, I was actually referring to Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobby Nobbs.  Neither of those two is *intelligent*, per se, but they both have the sheer Genre Savvy of decades of actual experience.  They *know damn well* that almost surely, if you see some poor lost soul in a place where everyone knows a poor lost soul would get completely torn to pieces, it's a trap.
>>>>> 
>>>>> AFAICR, I've not yet read *Raising Steam* because its opening made it seemed like another overstuffed novel in the spirit of *Snuff*, and *Science of Discworld IV* is a bit of a revamp, but other than those two I've read the entire Discworld series, the first two of the *Long Earth* series, and had a peek at *The Unadulterated Cat*.
>>>>> 
>>>>> (Note on *Science of Discworld IV*: it's the old Reason vs Religion debate *again*.  I really wish pop-sci and pop-skeptic writers could just declare victory for Reason and move on to the tougher, more substantial matter of Science vs Philosophy, where genuinely Traditionally Rational people are still getting tripped-up.)

>>>>>> **u/None** [+2]  (14 hours later)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Are any of the newer Discworld books any good? I felt like there was a real drop off in quality with *Thud* and *Making Money*, and I didn't even want to look at *Snuff*.

>>>>>>> **u/alexanderwales** [+4]  *Time flies like an arrow* (a day later)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Agreed about the drop off in quality. I can't help but feel that it's a result of the author's declining mental state, and that makes me incredibly sad. I've read everything up until *Snuff*, which I stopped halfway through. I loved so much about Discworld too ...

>>>>>>> **u/TimTravel** [+2]  (a day later)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Snuff was pretty bad. I haven't read the others you mentioned.

>>>>>>> **u/None** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I liked *Thud*.  *Making Money* was pretty enjoyable, but... *Snuff* was just difficult to read.

>>>>>>> **u/benthor** [+1]  *Concent of Saunt Edhar* (5 days later)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Although they are both not quite up there with the best, I quite liked *Raising Steam* (which felt a bit like *Moving Pictures* at times) and *Snuff*.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> *Unseen Academicals* I've tried to read twice and lost heart inside the first 50 pages. First Pratchett I've left unfinished since *Carpe Jugulum*.

>>>>> **u/OffColorCommentary** [+3]  (2 days later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Stupid people are Level 1 Intelligent in real life.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Even extreme limitations on the complexity of your mental models and the number of possibilities you can consider are less cognitively crippling than being a fictional character that the author has never stepped into and thought.

>> **u/None** [+5]  (4 hours later)
>> 
>> It's impossible, of course, for any one person no matter how smart to come up with the tactics that would be created by dozens or hundreds of geniuses over many years of testing. Card does try to justify some of it by the military nature of the institution that stifles innovation and the hierarchical nature of things that encourages soldiers to try to succeed within the system rather than change it. For example, when Ender wins against two armies, Anderson immediately announces a change of rules so the tactic no longer works. Such an environment is not conducive to innovation. Or how Ender's training of his army as being composed of relatively self-reliant pieces as opposed to a single centralized whole is described as the real core of his success rather than any particular tactic.

>>> **u/None** [+16]  (7 hours later)
>>> 
>>> Waaaait.  You know, I'd only read *Ender's Game* once, but I just realized *everything* involving Quirrellmort's Battle Magic classes was an extended *Ender's Game* reference.

>>>> **u/alexanderwales** [+13]  *Time flies like an arrow* (8 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> Yuuuuup.

>>>> **u/dokh** [+2]  *that which can be destroyed by the truth should be* (4 days later)
>>>> 
>>>> Both in and out of universe. Harry gets the joke.

> **u/alexanderwales** [+17]  *Time flies like an arrow* (7 hours later)
> 
> > Seventeen languages, amazing gidgets, beating a chessmaster at chess, being bad at romance? What all of these have in common is that you can write them without any unusual cognitive labor.
> 
> This feels like such a strawman, especially given all the ways that there are to "cheat" with intelligence (many of which are explicitly mentioned in the post itself). Mostly, it feels like it's taking examples of bad writing and conflating that with low cognitive labor in an effort to paint low cognitive effort as bad writing - which I don't think it always has to be. I mean, if your life is roughly average, you understood that Benjamin Franklin or Isaac Newton were smart far before you were capable of understanding what it is that made them smart. You just heard things like:
> 
> * Benajmin Franklin discovered electricity.
> * Isaac Newton published the definitive guide to optics.
> * Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.
> 
> Which seems to me to be equivalent to something like:
> 
> * The Great Wizard Manjoo discovered the nature of the multiple planes of reality.
> * Lisa Tutty wrote the definitive guide to quantum cryptography.
> * Zefram Cochrane invented the warp drive.
> 
> If your writing is good, you can have someone be immediately known to the audience as intelligent without having to actually have them do anything intelligent (and for some stories, I would contend that this is the right choice - but it takes a specific kind of story where it's important that the character is established as intelligent but not important to show any actual intelligence at work).

> **u/None** [+10]  (4 hours later)
> 
> A common and effective way of showing a character's intelligence is to show them excelling at something everyone understands: conversation. Have a character who speaks quickly, responds immediately to the comments of others with witty remarks of their own, and generally seems to dominate the conversation with energy and creativity, and we know they are smart. The point is that it is an intellectual feat the reader can  understand for themselves as such. This is much of how HJPEV's intelligence is established, along with knowing lots of research. In Draco's case we know he's smart when he keeps up with Harry and quickly understands what he needs to do when McGonagall and Lucius show up. It's all about the conversation.
> 
> Another way to do it would be to show the character having a great memory. Anyone can tell that a girl who memorizes her textbooks must be very bright.
> 
> I think it's unfair to say screenwriters for depicting genius in a way that requires none. It's probably more accurate to say they probably correctly expect that general audiences are more interested in intelligence as a superpower than the reality of it. Card says somewhere in his book on character and viewpoint that people fear intelligence, and that's why the main character will talk like, "You'll never get away with it, bub," and the villain responds in a clipped Oxford accent, "I rather think I indubitably have, you imbecilious fool." Good guy smart people have the magic power to invent stuff and play chess. Bad guy smart people are more often actually smart in some recognizable way, even if as the plot proceeds they are hardly rational. (Card explains that this intelligence is different from a character who can think on their feet, like Indiana Jones, a sort of useful, grounded smarts audiences respect and admire rather than fear.) It's worth noting that Orson Scott Card set out to write a story about smart kids saving the world and ended up with a story some people think is an apologia for Hitler. That's quite a miss! And HPMOR has attracted its own hate, much of which centers around HJPEV, that smartass little bastard.
> 
> Watching chess genius depicted in movies is always painful. In the recent film on Bobby Fischer, for example, someone is amazed by a very common move he plays as a youngster on move four or five in a common opening. Even I can keep up with a grandmaster four or five moves into a common opening. It's the forty moves afterward that make trouble.

>> **u/robobreasts** [+0]  (11 hours later)
>> 
>> > a story some people think is an apologia for Hitler.
>> 
>> Stupid people, though, who really ought to visit tvtropes.org and learn some literary conventions.

>>> **u/historymaking101** [+2]  (17 hours later)
>>> 
>>> It may not be an apologia for Hitler, but the ethical foundation of the novel is still grossly repugnant.
>>> 
>>> See multiple nebular award winning author and professor John Kessel's "Creating The Innocent Killer"

>>>> **u/robobreasts** [+6]  (a day later)
>>>> 
>>>> "The novel repeatedly tells us that Ender is morally spotless."
>>>> 
>>>> That's not what I got from Ender's Game.  I got that the novel repeatedly told us that Ender was *sympathetic*, but I didn't get that the story wanted us to think he was completely innocent.
>>>> 
>>>> Ender feels tremendous guilt for the destruction he caused to so many lives.  Graff argues he is innocent, because he was manipulated, but the story specifically says that Ender had his own opinion about that, but nobody asked him.
>>>> 
>>>> Granted, in Speaker for the Dead, Card has Ender (over 20 years later) say that morality is only in the intention, and not at all in the act.  Which I don't agree with, by the way.  But that's another book, and just because Ender says it, doesn't make it true, Ender makes lots of mistakes.  I also don't think intention is irrelevant, I think it is highly relevant, just that "I was trying to help!" doesn't excuse everything...
>>>> 
>>>> "Card thus labors long and hard in Ender’s Game to create a situation where we are not allowed to judge any of his defined-as-good characters’ morality by their actions."
>>>> 
>>>> I felt perfectly free to judge them though.  In contrast to, say, Hilda from Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" which I also judge (I'm a free agent after all) but where Heinlein REALLY wanted me not to.
>>>> 
>>>> Intention does matter quite a lot.  I mean, if you are on the street and someone says "can you take my picture?" and you press the button on the camera but it is really a remote detonator and you blow up a school, are you a murderer?  Our legal system has at its basis something called mens rea, the intent to commit a crime.
>>>> 
>>>> Now, Ender is actually *not* in such a situation.  He wasn't tricked into just pressing a button.  But neither did he know he was really killing people by blowing up a planet.  So I don't think he is innocent, but neither is he just simplistically "guilty of genocide."
>>>> 
>>>> The vibe I got from Ender's Game was that it was about presenting complex questions, not about saying "here's the answer."

>>>>> **u/historymaking101** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Did you finish it?

>>>>>> **u/robobreasts** [+3]  (a day later)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Ah, his postscript, where he says intentions do matter.  Glad he cleared that up.  Still, he says: "Card sets up Ender to be the sincere, abused innocent, and rigs the game to make us accept that he does no wrong."
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I didn't accept that he did no wrong, and I didn't really feel pressured to accept it either.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> "But in the real world genocide is not committed by accident."  Yeah, but I'm pretty sure Card isn't apologizing for real-world genocide.  I'm pretty sure Card made clear destroying the buggers was WRONG, but that the people that did it intentionally bore the brunt of the responsibility, and that Ender, who was unintentionally part of the causal chain, bore LESS responsibility than they did.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> How much he bears is left as an exercise for the reader.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Kessler says intentions matter, but he still seems to dismiss Ender's as being relevant.

>>>>>>> **u/historymaking101** [+3]  (a day later)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Nah, I do feel that Card sets Ender up to bear LESS responsibility than he should.  I feel that pressure that you don't.

>>>>>>>> **u/robobreasts** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Maybe I've read so much heavy-handed Heinlein (with whom I disagree on quite a few things) that Card's position seems so gentle.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Now, Card's later books get really heavy-handed with the whole "marriage and children is the purpose of life and if you aren't doing that you are useless" stuff...

>>>>>>>>> **u/historymaking101** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> I still enjoy some of Card's fiction, but most of his work is heavy handed about SOMETHING.

>>>> **u/None** [+3]  (17 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> [removed]

>>>>> **u/historymaking101** [+1]  (19 hours later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> I would say go read it, but Kessel's site seems to be down.  Scribd has it up if you're a member or upload something.  You might also check the wayback machine.
>>>>> 
>>>>> That's not exactly what I'm talking about.

>>>>>> **u/philip1201** [+4]  (a day later)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> [The wayback machine works](https://web.archive.org/web/20140910200630/http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I've only read the first third, but so far I find myself agreeing with Card's supposed viewpoint. Your ethics and your factual beliefs are orthogonal elements in making a decision, so you can have an agent with perfect ethics do an arbitrary harmful thing by giving it specific factual beliefs. Ender's game is specifically constructed in-universe to give Ender specific false factual beliefs.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The reason the justification "I thought I was doing the right thing" breaks down is because people have the choice to research whether they are mistaken or what the cost of being mistaken would be, and that choice is very often failed for moral reasons like intellectual laziness, beliefs as attire, etc. Not because your reasons are morally irrelevant.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The question of whether Ender is morally guilty or not does not rest on whether he committed genocide or not, it rests with whether he should be expected to know better; whether it can be reasonably stated that he made a deliberate choice towards his committing (statistical) murder/genocide, be it by declining to do research when he reasonably could have or by making more directly related choices.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> In that regard, given the facts we have, Ender IMO *is* guilty of the ~~murder~~ [edit after 2 comments:] voluntary manslaughter of both bullies; he can reasonably be expected to know enough about how people work that massive blunt force trauma has an unacceptable risk of causing permanent damage and even death, given his intelligence and (alleged) general level-headedness.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The genocide is more ambiguous: aliens are a priori expected to be inherently [evil](http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/), because of the fragility of value, and these aliens never gave any signal contrary to the hypothesis that they sought the annihilation of humanity - not even something as obvious as *not shooting every human ship they could*. He had all information directly relevant to the situation. To avert genocide, humanity would have to put fleets of ships in danger - each failure opening up the possibility of another genocidal retaliation - trying to establish means of communication despite their opponents not risking anything or making any apparent efforts to do the same.

>>>>>>> **u/None** [+2]  (a day later)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> The first bully Ender axed when he was *really* young and had never been in a fight before. The second bully Ender thought was going to kill him with his gang.

>>>>>>>> **u/philip1201** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Ender managed to gain dominance in both fights easily. He knew human psychology pretty darn well, and he probably has basic awareness of human physical ability. That theoretical knowledge should be enough to form a reasonable estimate of how hurt someone can get before they die.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> I am saying that Ender was smart enough that if he had put in a reasonably expectable amount of effort, he could have gotten high enough subjective probability of the bully dying in both cases that it qualifies as deliberate killing, and that he's smart enough that he could have found a less lethal method to prove his point if he had not simply [stopped](http://lesswrong.com/lw/km/motivated_stopping_and_motivated_continuation/) thinking.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Yes, for average schoolchildren Ender might just be a child bad at knowing his own limits and the frailty of a human body, or a child afraid of his life. But his internal dialogue does not show incompetence or fear. He does exactly what he sets out to do, and the bullies die.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Motivated cognition is a strong enough force however that I can believe he didn't explicitly intend to kill them.

>>>>>>>>> **u/None** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> First fight: he was *six years old* and had *never been in a fight before*.
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> People can vary widely in how much punishment they can take. Look at two boxers who slug each other in the head for thirty minutes straight. I was surprised that the damage Ender dealt to Bonzo was enough to kill him. Also, he was ganged up on in a bathroom and fighting for his life, not the usual time for calculating subjective probabilities.

>>>>>>>>>> **u/philip1201** [+1]  (2 days later)
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> >the usual time for calculating subjective probabilities.
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> I'm using pseudo-formal language to describe informal processes. Most poker players don't form explicit subjective probabilities in their minds, but they manage on "gut feelings" which can be nearly as accurate. Humans don't "assign greater than 99% probability", they "are certain". Meta-uncertainty provides object uncertainty.
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> Yes, there is variance and there is uncertainty, but that means that there's simply a distribution of how much punishment you expect people would be able to take before they croak, and/or equivalently a distribution of how much punishment you think you will deliver. Making a decision to hurt someone directly implies accepting *some* probability that the person will die because of your actions. What probability you are willing to accept for a certain reward determines how much you value their life versus your reward. Even if you don't calculate the probabilities explicitly, there is still an implicit value judgment in your actions as surely as there is an implicit value judgment in being willing to pay $x for some candy. (implicit because dollars aren't a terminal value).
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> I am saying that given Ender's capabilities, he is accurate enough that the death of the bullies was probably predictable to him in advance with, say, P>0.001, if he had chosen to take the effort of estimating it, and that he had the time to calculate it with such certainty. And that choosing an action which has P>0.001 of you murdering someone to avoid their bullying is morally unacceptable.

>>>>>>> **u/historymaking101** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Should I expect an update when you finish?
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Do you really think that the murder of the bullies is the right decision especially with as little thought as he puts into it?

>>>>>>>> **u/philip1201** [+2]  (a day later)
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Also having read the conclusion, it doesn't seem like he does more to argue the premise, so no.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> >Do you really think that the murder of the bullies is the right decision especially with as little thought as he puts into it?
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> As I said:
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> >> Ender IMO is guilty of the murder of both bullies
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> If you must make a decision based on "option 1: Hurt the bullies. The bullies will probably leave you alone afterward. Option 2: Do not hurt the bullies. They will hurt or kill me" and nothing else, then I would not consider it immoral to choose option 1, as a heuristic for children of his type. The expectedly very rare cases where option 1 leads to permanent injury or death measure up against the fact that bullying will be reduced in almost all cases, and to some extent in advance.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Precisely because he put as little thought into it can he say that he didn't mean to kill them, and even be right about it. It means that the choice that caused the bullies' death was the choice not to think about the consequences of his actions too much, if that choice existed. For not particularly intelligent young children the choice might not exist; they're not expected to have the self-awareness or basic ability to recognise their own [motivated stopping](http://lesswrong.com/lw/km/motivated_stopping_and_motivated_continuation/).
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Ender does not have the excuse of lacking adult-level self-awareness, so (barring bad luck) he made a choice (within his realm of responsibility) with the implicit expected consequence of his bullies being killed (by him), making him morally guilty of voluntary manslaughter. If at any point the bullies' death became explicit in his reasoning, it would be second degree murder. If that point was during a moment of emotional calm, it would be first degree murder.

>>>>>>>>> **u/historymaking101** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> I swear reading the full article takes less effort than the three paragraphs you just wrote.  Even if the rest doesn't change your opinion you don't do anyone favors by reading the beginning and the end, possibly skimming the rest.
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> How much time do you really save yourself?
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> EDIT: I also feel it's pretty clear authorial meddling that death doesn't enter into consideration, and from Ender's perspective, as far as I recall, he is level-headed for the entire fight.

>>>>>>>>>> **u/philip1201** [+2]  (2 days later)
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> I like writing comments and I dislike reading opinion pieces I see obvious fault with (or don't understand) but don't have the opportunity to call the author out on (or ask for clarification). For better or for worse, the bad premise (or unknown reasoning) keeps gnawing at my brain every time I read stuff that derives from it. Reading the rest of the text would be stressful, rather than merely time-consuming.
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> With regards to your edit: You don't need to lose your cool to perform mental gymnastics. (If we are to trust him,) Ender simply avoided thinking about the negative consequences to the bully, like one might avoid thinking about health issues after spotting some freshly prepared bacon. This rendered death an unknown unknown to his later decisions, and thus he "didn't mean to kill them", like overweight people don't mean to get fat or people who text while driving don't mean to crash their cars.

>>>>>>>>>>> **u/historymaking101** [+1]  (2 days later)
>>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>>> Fair enough.

>>>>>>>> **u/None** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> It's hardly a decision. Both kills are accidents.

>>>>>>>>> **u/historymaking101** [+2]  (a day later)
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> We can only believe that if Ender is quite a bit stupider than we've been led to believe.

>>>>>>>>>> **u/None** [+1]  (a day later)
>>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>> Well, when he fights Stilson he's six years old and has never been in a fight before. The second time he's naked, wet and alone against a group of bigger kids, one who punched him while Ender was a soldier in his army. It's pretty fair to think Ender had no expectation of killing in either situation.

> **u/None** [+13]  (8 hours later)
> 
> I have three tips for writing really genuinely clever characters:
> 
> * Put a lot of your thought, by the real-world clock, into very little of their thought, by the in-story clock.
> 
> * Show that they are able to integrate new evidence quickly, up and down their hierarchy of knowledge and concepts.
> 
> * Show that they think *accurately*, that their mind is preserving all or most of the information that goes in.
> 
> Processing speed, depth/height of hierarchical inference, and accuracy of approximation are, at the very least, actually relevant to how cognitive science and neuroscience actually work.  They are also easy tricks for authors to pull by investing authorial brainpower at the rate of its actual availability to get a return in the form of apparent cleverness by the character.

>> **u/OffColorCommentary** [+4]  (2 days later)
>> 
>> Meta tip on this: Make your explanation of the character's thoughts as short as possible.  The more time it takes to read, the more time it will feel like passed.  Saying some hammy "time seemed to slow down as she focused" line in an attempt to get around this is telling, not showing.

> **u/andor3333** [+4]  (10 hours later)
> 
> I am currently considering a new method to do this with the fic I am writing once it gets off the ground: crowdsourcing.
> 
> I will write out at least a reasonable method for characters to solve certain problems, but I will encourage my readers to suggest better solutions. If someone gives me a brilliant idea I will use it; adapt my storyline, which is flexible; and credit them. Apply 500 munchkins to a one munchkin task and you have good odds of getting SOMETHING decent.
> 
> This is why the audience in jeopardy on average does better than the most brilliant jeopardy player at leaning toward the correct answer.
> 
> Problems I anticipate with this method are...
> 
> 1. I need to build my audience before using this technique. I originally hope to do a few specific sections with the help of this subreddit. I have already done a trial run of this to test the waters and it worked well.
> 
> 2. I will have to fit the idea into my plot, which means I can't draft exhaustively on problems I plan to get reader input on, or I can, but must rewrite it.
> 
> 3. I have to go over massive amounts of spam. (I am afraid of this)
> 
> Anyone have any thoughts, criticisms of this?

>> **u/alexanderwales** [+3]  *Time flies like an arrow* (11 hours later)
>> 
>> Adapting based on audience input is great - I think I'd almost say that it's one of the primary reasons to write serial fiction.
>> 
>> One of the things you'll really have to focus on is making sure that the audience actually understands all of the pieces. If you say that a character can go invisible for short periods of time (for example), you need to be fairly rigid in what the limitations of that power are - can thermal imaging pierce it, does it mask sound, what happens to objects that are held/worn, etc. Otherwise, the audience is going to come up with a lot of solutions that simply don't work.
>> 
>> The other major problem is in the world-building, if you're doing science fiction and fantasy. If it's possible to go invisible, and other people know that it's possible to go invisible, then those people will develop counter-measures against invisibility, and the people who go invisible will develop counter-measures to those counter-measures, and so on and so forth.
>> 
>> One of my favorite stories of human ingenuity: during the Troubles in Ireland, the IRA would throw grenades into the backs of military convoys. The military responded by putting a wire mesh around the convoys, which would cause the grenades to bounce off. The IRA responded to *that* by attaching hooks to the grenades, which would allow them to catch on the wire mesh.
>> 
>> The point being, if you want to write *two* characters as intelligent, you need them to be able to react to and model each other. I think that would be hard to do with audience feedback, since most people are only going to suggest one level - throwing grenades into the convoy - instead of two or three levels of interplay.
>> 
>> And yes, getting an audience is difficult, and getting more than a few people to read - let alone comment - is one of the hardest (and most discouraging) parts of publishing online.

>>> **u/andor3333** [+2]  (11 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I am doing a rational version of Supernatural.
>>> 
>>> The world building is not the problem. If anything it is my best current feature. I have got the consistent world down pretty well at the moment. I am confident I can consistently say whether any particular munchkinry works or not because my universe does actually run on rules. (Time travel being a notable exception. I cannot deal with it and it is driving me crazy. I am so mad at the writers of Supernatural about that part.) The problem being that I can't tell the reader these rules until the end, so there will be a lot of "good idea but that doesn't work here."
>>> 
>>> I do think it will be hard to get two levels of response. That is a good point. It may help that the characters will generally be doing single encounters. (It is a rational version of Supernatural) I also have a reason some of the monsters are physically incapable of bypassing their flaws. A bit like Yudkowsky's "do not mess with time", or Worm's Contessa excuse for coincidences. I have several bypasses like this that should help, such as a primary rational "villain" having set a plan in motion at the start of the plot and then gone incommunicado, leaving it to its minions. This was a rational thing for the villain to do under the circumstances. 
>>> 
>>> By the way, I loved metropolitan man. That was a wonderful read! I Just wanted to say so. (I especially liked how you handled the aliens themselves-trying not to spoil it for new readers here)

>>>> **u/Zephyr1011** [+1]  *Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity* (a day later)
>>>> 
>>>> If you do not reveal the rules, would that not severely limit the ability of people to munchkin?

>>>>> **u/andor3333** [+2]  (2 days later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> It would, but I am not limiting the ability to test munchkin ideas. The discovery of the rules is part of the plot. Giving it out before the story is over will spoil the fun.

> **u/Transfuturist** [+3]  *Carthago delenda est.* (16 hours later)
> 
> Why did he have to mention Perfect Lionheart...

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