12 KiB
Crosspost from /r/writing: How to Write About Characters Who Are Smarter Than You
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Author: u/DaystarEld Pokémon Professor*
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Score: 15
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Created: 2015-02-14T18:58:39
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+20] Time flies like an arrow (43 minutes later)
This is about the "aesthetic impression of intelligence", not about actual intelligence. And The Imitation Game falls into a lot of the intelligence tricks that define a lot of fiction - things like someone being really fast at crosswords (or whatever) in order to show their intelligence in a way that the audience just has to take for granted.
And the aesthetic impression of intelligence isn't bad! It's a perfectly fine device if you need to get something across to the audience quickly. But it's not real intelligence.
That said, part of the reason that The Imitation Game has a much better intelligence density than other movies is that it draws from history, and that's an easy way to write about characters that are smarter than you, since it's fairly easy to verify intelligence after the fact rather than coming up with your own products of intelligence.
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (an hour later)
This is about the "aesthetic impression of intelligence", not about actual intelligence.
Yeah, as the title says, "How to write about characters who are smarter than you." It's an interesting distinction, since it seems to imply that writing actually smarter characters isn't so much about making sure they actually say or do smart things as it is making sure what intelligence they have is communicated to the reader. Which, in most of fiction, is a good enough first step I suppose: especially since just getting past the whole "Shotgun jargon at the audience and then explain it in simple terms" trope needs to die a fiery death.
That said, part of the reason that The Imitation Game has a much better intelligence density than other movies is that it draws from history, and that's an easy way to write about characters that are smarter than you, since it's fairly easy to verify intelligence after the fact rather than coming up with your own products of intelligence.
True: I considered watching it because I loved reading about Turing's life and work (and really enjoy Cumberbatch as an actor), but also because I was curious to know if it pushes the envelope in terms of how the intelligence is displayed on screen:
And The Imitation Game falls into a lot of the intelligence tricks that define a lot of fiction - things like someone being really fast at crosswords (or whatever) in order to show their intelligence in a way that the audience just has to take for granted.
Apparently not. Ah well. Did you enjoy it anyway?
u/alexanderwales [+8] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
Yeah, I though it was enjoyable. It's a little bit Hollywoodified, in the sense that they set up some historically inaccurate conflicts for the sake of drama, but it does hit some of the highlights, and does make an honest attempt at showing intellectual effort (even if it falls short at times).
My gold standard for fictionalized Turings is Cryptonimicon by Neal Stephenson, where you can tell that Stephenson not only took the effort to actually understand the math and engineering, but also took the effort to knowing all of it well enough to communicate all that stuff to the reader. Film is more difficult, since you're constrained by time. Most of what constrains The Imitation Game is the belief that cognitive conflicts aren't enough to be the center of a movie - instead you need emotional/political/romantic/authority conflicts.
u/PeridexisErrant [+5] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (10 hours later)
Yeah, I though it was enjoyable. It's a little bit Hollywoodified, in the sense that they set up some historically inaccurate conflicts for the sake of drama, but it does hit some of the highlights, and does make an honest attempt at showing intellectual effort (even if it falls short at times).
Huh. I hated it, more than any other movie I've watched in years.
It seemed to me to fall into all the standard fallacies about brilliant mathematicians (/ scientists / etc) being antisocial weirdos, which was emphatically not the case for Turing. Then they dropped much of the actually awesome historical context, to insert bullshit plot lines of their own devising. The people are stupid, the organisations are stupid, the plans are stupid, the drama runs of the idiot ball... it looked like the director was allergic to competence. I am confident that I could do far better than the characters, whereas without historical knowledge I couldn't help the real Turing much.
Basically I was intensely disappointed that it wasn't more historically accurate, and offended by many of the changes they made. A movie closely based on Turing's life would have been (IMO) better in every way than the loosely-inspired-by drama that they make.
Then again, I went through Primary and High school reading about this period and others in cryptography books my Grandpa gave me, so I care more than most people...
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (11 hours later)
It probably helps that I went in with very low expectations.
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (11 hours later)
Yeah. I was told it was great :(
u/MMSTINGRAY [+6] (a day later)
Are you the PeridexisErrant of Dwarf Fortress fame?
u/PeridexisErrant [+5] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (2 days later)
Yes, though I didn't think I was that famous!
u/Osato [+1] (a day later)
He is.
u/MMSTINGRAY [+1] (a day later)
On a sidenote Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, is my favourite scifi/cyberpunk type book I've read.
u/capsless [+3] despiser of hpmor (2 hours later)
gonna have to agree with alex here. superficial intelligence is obviously something that is required as much as superficial any-other-trait, because the audience has to be told things as well as shown things -- but i don't think that's the type of intelligence most readers of this sub are interested in.
that said, i don't really want to read about characters who are smarter than me. i want to read about characters who are as smart as me. if there is a difficult puzzle that a character solves, or a character has a brilliant insight, but the chain of deduction is entirely inscrutable to me -- well, that's not particularly engaging. i want to read about solutions that did not occur to me in narrative time but would have conceivably occurred to me had i thought about it; the kind of solutions that are sufficiently esoteric to require effort to understand on my part, but not an uncomfortable level of effort.
edit: fixed the god-awful spelling
u/DaystarEld [+3] Pokémon Professor (2 hours later)
Interesting. I actually enjoy reading about characters smarter than me because that's one of the ways I learn to think in new ways. I can see how it might get frustrating if every single challenge is inscrutable though.
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (2 minutes later)
It's a bit shallow, but hits on many of the same points Eliezer has been writing about, especially concerning the distinction between "slipping your character the answers under the table" and finding puzzles for the audience to figure out alongside them.
Incidentally, has anyone here seen The Imitation Game? This article makes it sound worth watching, but then, it's the writer who's writing the article, so not particularly unbiased.
u/retsotrembla [+2] (3 hours later)
A good companion piece to Eliezer's short essay: Intelligent Characters
u/paladinneph [+2] (20 hours later)
to go to actual intelligence rather than the aesthetic impression of intelligence...
I love AI. I love finding out how they work :3
one of the "cheapest," but also really effective way to make an AI opponent more difficult without making it cost more resources is to... well, cheat. like in LoL, the bots have unfair vision of you- they will always ward the brush you're in, 'magically' knowing you're there, making them seem like they're just really intelligent and cautious, when they're actually just cheating.
ok, so you can't write Mr. Smartypants (and if you could, you'd instantly be as smart as him, because whenever you're faced with a problem, you could just go "what would Smartypants do?" and have the answer he'd give) but you can make him smarter by giving him unfair access to information he otherwise couldn't.
...like sherlock holmes. "this particular kind of mud only comes from X place" how does he know? did he research it? did he test it? no, he just lolmagically knew, thus making him more intelligent than otherwise possible. ...when he's really just cheating.
u/duffmancd [+2] (a day later)
I find it interesting that for lots of problems now anyone can just "lolmagically" know things, simply by googling for a few seconds. I wonder if it makes it harder to write knowledgeable characters set in the present. Sure, it's impressive to know that Queen Liliuokalani was the last monarch of Hawaii off the top of your head, but if the read can find this out in 10 seconds it doesn't lend much support to the idea that this character is the smartest man alive or the best investigator in the world etc.
Then again, I personally draw a strong distinction between knowledgeable and smart that most people don't seem to, so maybe it's still an OK (if overplayed) technique for general audiences.
u/paladinneph [+3] (2 days later)
I'm also drawing that distinction, I just didn't explain it very well. it was a mistake to mention holmes, as it gave you the wrong idea
ok- consider the game example. suppose I run two ganks on two bots
Bot A sees me leave my lane since there's minions nearby when I do. he takes my movement speed and the length of statistically likely ganking routes and places a ward in the brush where he estimates me to be at the time he estimates me to be there
bot B just cheats and can see me the whole time, so he places a ward in the brush where I am.
to the player, there's not much difference in behaviour between the two- they both seem just as smart. behind the scenes, bot B uses waaaaaay less memory.
think of it like how DnD handles intelligence: smartypants sits down at a computer and tries to guess the password. behind the scenes, a die is rolled and smartypant's high modifier is added to it. since it is higher than the difficulty check, smartypants now knows the password. from here, there's two options: produce a handwavium reason for knowing it (like holmes) or just give no explanation (like quirrel) (this was my mistake- holmes does this method, but he's more famous for handwaving it- to the point where it's overdone to comic effect. I'm getting at the core idea, not the dressing that disguises it)
why? because surely someone as smart as smartypants would be able to find some way to guess the password, even if the author wouldn't be able to. consider the bots again. there are legitimate ways to tell if you're about to be ganked- pro players do it all the time (it's usually based on the reactions of the opposing players you can see- a weak enemy that's playing aggressively is either a fool or knows his ally is there to back him up) so an sufficiently intelligent bot could too. ...it's just cheaper and easier to cheat.
intelligence, roughly is how good you are at attaining knowledge. to write someone smarter than you, just give knowledge to the character freely, even if they would ordinarily have no way to attain it.