scrape_r_rational/data/cache/2m65pm.md

Writing 'Level 2 Intelligent' Characters

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• u/Escapement:

  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:

    Heck, that Destiny's Magnet tactic was used in The Book of Joshua -- the *Old Testament*, thousands of years B.C.
    

    • u/None:

      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:

        Pratchett tends to *show* some pretty hardcore Level 1 Intelligent characters.  Don't believe the text *telling* you they're stupid.
        

        • u/None:

          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:

            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:

              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:

              Snuff was pretty bad. I haven't read the others you mentioned.
              

        • u/OffColorCommentary:

          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:

    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:

      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:

        Yuuuuup.
        

      • u/dokh:

        Both in and out of universe. Harry gets the joke.
        

• u/alexanderwales:

  > 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:

  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/None:

  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:

    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:

  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:

    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:

      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/Transfuturist:

  Why did he have to mention Perfect Lionheart...
  

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