Today I met a relative of mine named Eliezer Yudkowsky. First words out of his mouth: “Oh, it’s you! You’re the one who ruined my life!”
I also met Avi, who (I was told) used to come over to babysit me, and I would do his math homework for him.
And I was told that at one point during my distant youth, I was holding a camera and kept tilting it, and Uncle David kept telling me “Hold it steady!” without effect, and then Dad said “Hold it in a plane perpendicular to the floor” and that worked.
Just in case anyone was still claiming that my eleven-year-olds are unrealistic.
Just in case anyone was still claiming that my eleven-year-olds are unrealistic.
People still won’t buy your character, because reality is unrealistic (TVTropes). Orson Scott Card got the same reactions to Ender (although I can’t find the reference now).
It’s in the introduction to (later printings of) Ender’s Game, starting on page XIX:
For some people, however, the loathing for Ender’s Game transcended mere artistic argument. I recall a letter to the editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, in which a woman who worked as a guidance counselor for gifted children reported that she had only picked up Ender’s Game to read because her son had kept telling her it was a wonderful book. She read it and loathed it. Of course, I wondered what kind of guidance counselor would hold her son’s tastes up to public ridicule, but the criticism that left me most flabbergasted was her assertion that my depiction of gifted children was hopelessly unrealistic. They just don’t talk like that, she said. They don’t think like that.
And it wasn’t just her. There have been others with that criticism. Thus I began to realize that, as it is, Ender’s Game disturbs some people because it challenges their assumptions about reality. In fact, the novel’s very clarity may make it more challenging, simply because the story’s vision of the world is so unrelentlessly plain. It was important to her, and to others, to believe that children don’t actually think or speak the way the children in Ender’s Game think and speak.
Yet I knew—I knew—that this was one of the truest things about Ender’s Game. In fact, I realized in retrospect that this may indeed be part of the reason why it was so important to me, there on the lawn in front of the Salt Palace, to write a story in which gifted children are trained to fight in adult wars. Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along—the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender’s Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective—the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult’s.
The nasty side of myself wanted to answer that guidance counselor by saying, The only reason you don’t think gifted children talk this way is because they know better than to talk this way in front of you. But the truer answer is that Ender’s Game asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way—especially those whose whole career is based on that—are going to find Ender’s Game a very unpleasant place to live. Children are a perpetual, self-renewing underclass, helpless to escape from the decisions of adults until they become adults themselves. And Ender’s Game, seen in that context, might even be a sort of revolutionary text.
Because the book does ring true with the children who read it. The highest praise I ever received for a book of mine was when the school librarian at Farrer Junior High in Provo, Utah, told me, “You know, Ender’s Game is our most-lost book.”
Some eleven-year-olds might be that way, but if your sample consists mostly of relatives of geniuses, it’s going to be pretty skewed, I would think.
There’s no causal link between Harry and Draco and Hermione and Blaise and… I dunno who else people are claiming is unrealistic. Still, four unrelated genius-level children out of the, I don’t know, one hundred first year Hogwarts students? It’s not entirely unfair to see that as statistically unlikely, even if theoretically possible.
I don’t get the impression that Draco is especially brilliant (for a real eleven year old, he would be, but Eliezer’s characters don’t act eleven in general,) but rather that he’s especially well trained. He might be a one-in-a-hundred intellect, but he’s had an education that not one muggle in millions gets.
Blaise is clever, but likewise learned from an exceptionally duplicitous mother, and had Dumbledore passing him notes.
Hermione of course has great scholarly talents in canon. Harry—I’ve seen people argue that he would have been a genius in canon if the abuse didn’t warp him, and here he obviously had an excellent environment for developing mental abilities. But Harry does see himself as an anomaly. Some people here (apparently not believing nurture can explain that much) have a theory to account for him. As for Draco and Blaise, we know for a fact the former had extensive training. On a meta level, increasing Harry’s intelligence required a smarter Voldemort and thus a smarter Dumbledore. Lucius Malfoy then needed smarts in order to produce a more-or-less canonical starting point for the story. And his erstwhile (?) Lord would not pick an idiot as a servant (not if he could find a way to control a smart minion.) Notice this means that, if MoR!Voldemort affected Harry’s intelligence, three out of the four names you mention would have an indirect causal link in-story as well as in reality.
Their being smarter on average than Muggles doesn’t seem particularly well supported by the story so far, except insofar as the average intelligence of characters in the story is raised by virtue of being written by Eliezer.
Today I met a relative of mine named Eliezer Yudkowsky. First words out of his mouth: “Oh, it’s you! You’re the one who ruined my life!”
I also met Avi, who (I was told) used to come over to babysit me, and I would do his math homework for him.
And I was told that at one point during my distant youth, I was holding a camera and kept tilting it, and Uncle David kept telling me “Hold it steady!” without effect, and then Dad said “Hold it in a plane perpendicular to the floor” and that worked.
Just in case anyone was still claiming that my eleven-year-olds are unrealistic.
People still won’t buy your character, because reality is unrealistic (TVTropes). Orson Scott Card got the same reactions to Ender (although I can’t find the reference now).
It’s in the introduction to (later printings of) Ender’s Game, starting on page XIX:
Thanks!
Which particular effects were annoying him?
Google shadow, of course.
Some eleven-year-olds might be that way, but if your sample consists mostly of relatives of geniuses, it’s going to be pretty skewed, I would think.
There’s no causal link between Harry and Draco and Hermione and Blaise and… I dunno who else people are claiming is unrealistic. Still, four unrelated genius-level children out of the, I don’t know, one hundred first year Hogwarts students? It’s not entirely unfair to see that as statistically unlikely, even if theoretically possible.
Keep in mind that Blaise’s plan was Dumbledore’s.
I don’t get the impression that Draco is especially brilliant (for a real eleven year old, he would be, but Eliezer’s characters don’t act eleven in general,) but rather that he’s especially well trained. He might be a one-in-a-hundred intellect, but he’s had an education that not one muggle in millions gets.
Blaise is clever, but likewise learned from an exceptionally duplicitous mother, and had Dumbledore passing him notes.
Hermione of course has great scholarly talents in canon. Harry—I’ve seen people argue that he would have been a genius in canon if the abuse didn’t warp him, and here he obviously had an excellent environment for developing mental abilities. But Harry does see himself as an anomaly. Some people here (apparently not believing nurture can explain that much) have a theory to account for him. As for Draco and Blaise, we know for a fact the former had extensive training. On a meta level, increasing Harry’s intelligence required a smarter Voldemort and thus a smarter Dumbledore. Lucius Malfoy then needed smarts in order to produce a more-or-less canonical starting point for the story. And his erstwhile (?) Lord would not pick an idiot as a servant (not if he could find a way to control a smart minion.) Notice this means that, if MoR!Voldemort affected Harry’s intelligence, three out of the four names you mention would have an indirect causal link in-story as well as in reality.
They have magic, and they are physically sturdier than Muggles. Maybe they are also on average smarter than Muggles.
Which constitutes evidence for Terry Tao being a wizard.
Their being smarter on average than Muggles doesn’t seem particularly well supported by the story so far, except insofar as the average intelligence of characters in the story is raised by virtue of being written by Eliezer.