{"id":918,"date":"2025-10-11T15:41:32","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T12:41:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/?p=918"},"modified":"2025-10-12T02:45:33","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T23:45:33","slug":"918","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/?p=918","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Many of the entries here are at least partially motivated by the desire to educate humans on the topics they might be struggling to comprehend. There's going to be less and less of it.

Recently, I realized most humans don't seem to understand why a writer cannot create a character who is smarter than they are. They parry it with blind aggression and an ardent belief all they need is to make a character memorize tons of information, crunch big numbers, or invent sci-fi tech. I thought it was interesting. I played around with some ideas, jotted down a few lines. And then I halted. Would ChatGPT know the answer? If it were perfectly capable of providing the exact same reasoning, why would I need to explain it? I ran the necessary query, and indeed its response was quite sound. It even used the same freaking chess analogy I wanted to use in my explanation.

But there's one area where I still excel, I believe. I don't suffer from the bothsidesism most AI models currently suffer from. They often provide safe middle-ground answers to appeal to the widest possible audience and cater to the contrarians and doubters. So while it seemed to understand the topic and agree on the premise, it also muddied the waters. It wasn't able to impale the doubters efficiently, in my opinion. It gave them credit and said they could still *fake*<\/em> a character's intelligence convincingly. This made ChatGPT miss an important point.

Here's the thing: all this faking of the character's intelligence will be ultimately bottlenecked by the author's reasoning ability.

Imagine a story. An alleged genius breaks into his neighbor's house through the window while the whole family's on vacation. Having done what he needed to do, he heads out. But\u2014oh no!\u2014the door is locked! He's stuck! He'd better use all his wits now, lest he die here of starvation. Time to prove to the readers he's the real deal. Using nothing but kitchen utensils, he crafts a teleportation machine. It's an uncharted territory. He may die most gruesomely! He panics, but there is no other choice. He double-checks his calculations, inputs the coordinates, presses the button, and... Swoosh! He's outside the house! Triumph. And all the readers are humbled by his unparalleled mind... Oh, wait. They're not! They say the protagonist was as dumb as a calculator. They ridicule the author for not realizing windows can also be used as an exit.

I tried to come up with the simplest possible example, but I hope it's obvious a more elaborate story can and will have many such windows. Whether a character chooses to use a window or to invent a sci-fi machine, it's still a single decision, a single move of a chess piece on the chessboard the writer assembled. And one of the moves is clearly better than the other, and the readers can see them all.

That's why Trisolarans, despite all their technology, felt so incredibly dumb in Liu Cixin's Three-Body series (as did humanity, as did scientists, as did everyone else for that matter). That's why, I assume, many authors choose to endow their smart characters with crippling flaws that force them to act irrationally sometimes. Technically, such a character still won't be smarter than the author, and their smartest decision will still be limited by the smartest decision the author can come up with. But at least this way every bad decision, either deliberate or resulting from the author's mistake, can be blamed on their, say, mental disorder or terrible personality, and not lack of intelligence.

There's only one sure way (that I know of) you can (on your own) create a character who's marginally smarter than you are, and I know some well-established writers use this technique. You have to painstakingly analyze your chessboard. You have to take your time. Use placeholders where the smart moves are required, and return to them regularly. Once you've analyzed everything, once you've taken your time to calculate your best move, make your character execute this move on a whim.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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Many of the entries here are at least partially motivated by the desire to educate humans on the topics they might be struggling to comprehend. There’s going to be less and less of it.Recently, I realized most humans don’t seem to understand why a writer cannot create a character who is smarter than they are. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=918"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":951,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918\/revisions\/951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}