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I heard that there was a recent show called "Test the Nation" where they
did IQ tests of various groups eg: blonds, doctors, teachers... so I found
an IQ test page and guess what... I'm a genius. The real genius is the guy
who made the test to flatter your ego enough to make you consider
sending him $10 to get a full print-out, which I neither did, nor
recommend. But it was fun anyway. check it out.
www.iqtest.com
I did check it out, and took the test, and of course it said I'm a genius (this is what all IQ tests say, so that didn't make me suspicious--nor did the reported score of the aforementioned wise person, who is also a genius). But I checked out the sample profile (you have to pay to get your personalized profile) and noticed immediately that the sample profile was for a person with a score of 149.
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Your General IQ Score of 149 shows how able your mind is in general. Anyone with a General IQ Score this high is considered to be a genius. Less than 2 out of every 100 persons would be expected to have a score this high.italics added for emphasis
Also, all the questions were really easy, even when they were phrased poorly so as to be ambiguous (The FAQ explains that this is because smarter people will interpret the question one way and less smart people will interpret it the other way...I think that a person smart enough to see both interpretations will deliberately choose to interpret it in the more "common" way, so this methodology is flawed, besides being circular). So I would question whether many people literate enough to navigate to the page and understand how to use a form would do really poorly.
Anyway, thinking about this test, and the genius of those who marketed it, I am reminded of a scene from a recent bestseller, The DaVinci Code (or something like that), which I overheard (it was an audiobook) as I was feeding my mom's fish.
The scene was pretty much defined by the moment at which one of the various "scholars" sitting around and trying to decipher some mystery or other proceeds to prove he is a master of ancient languages by reciting the Hebrew Aleph-Beth...from memory! The author makes much of the level of genius required to master such a mental feat. Of course, during the entire scene I was laughing out loud at the idea that these were supposed to be serious scholars of anything, let alone ancient languages. That moment merely crystalized the entire tone of the text being read.
Thinking about it, I wonder....
Is there any room in the marketplace for genuinely intelligent characters? It always bugs me when a character who is supposed to be really intelligent and highly educated acts particularly stupid and obtuse. I usually blame it on one of two things, either the author being ignorant or the author forcing the plot at the expense of realism. But I wonder if I should blame it on a third thing, the demand of the marketplace for characters that are only slightly above average, but within the world of the story are heroic, not just in intellect but in virtue, charm, lifestyle....
Of course this also explains why the villains have to engage in epic stupidities in order to allow the heroes to win. It isn't because the authors couldn't think of a clever rather than obvious way for the hero to win, but because it has to be fairly obvious to the average reader.
All this is very well and good, but I wonder...is it really so well and good? Isn't selling a dishonest IQ test bad? And is selling people on the idea that great people are only circumstantially different from mediocrities really such a good thing either?
P.S. The site also has some consciousness raising exercises...I liked the following.
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Choice one: In this life, you are the absolute ruler of the whole world. You are a young, wise, sexy, 134 IQed, PhDed, devout and charismatic leader with the body of a gymnast.
Thanks for the diversion.
I think true super-genius types might be more narrow in their thinking (perhaps their genius is in some areas but not others?) depending on the subject, so they can be human and miss something. A smart person could be over-zealous in their efforts and miss something... guess a protagonist can make mistakes, just not stupid obvious ones that, as you say, an intelligent person would not make.
Of course, I would never make mistakes... (oops, you read my story - never mind!)
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And is selling people on the idea that great people are only circumstantially different from mediocrities really such a good thing either?
I vote no. Unfortunately, I think it's all part of the politics of envy thing -- that success is only a result of luck and/or underhanded shenanigans, not the result of preparation and hard work. I think it's perceived that a portion of the reading public which thinks that way would feel put off by characters smarter than they are.
In Character and Viewpoint, OSC mentioned not having your characters too intelligent, although clever is okay. That bugged me. Seemed to pander to the Bart Simpson's 'underachiever and proud of it' mindset.
OSC mentions Indiana Jones -- clever outside the university, but bumbling professor inside. Personally, I'd have found Jones much more appealing had he left off the bumbling part. Intelligence is so much more attractive.
I think of Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged as an intelligent character. I'm sure there are others.
Card might know more about tactics and strategy than would be expected of a bright six or even ten year old, but if you read Ender's Game, he somehow hits on the fundamental principle of superior commanders, nurturing and rewarding intelligent initiative in subordinates. Most military "experts" still don't get this idea, even though it has been the secret of every winning commander in history, and every commander that forgot it turned into a loser no matter how glorious his previous achievements. And yet Card has never made any special claim to military acumen...possibly because our culture tends to emphasize the domineering "you don't get paid to think" leader who is the very antithesis of effective command.
As for smart heroes getting things done too easily, I'm also in favor of actually smart villains. Partly because I don't buy into all that "only mentally ill people can be evil" crap. That may be true of your stock villain that any sane and modestly intelligent person could defeat in about ten seconds, but real world villains are usually just evil rather than insane.
I haven't run across this in books as much as it happens in television shows. I guess that is why I am more and more loosing most interest in the tv.
I think that if your main character is going to be a genius, then you will have to work hard to make them someone that can be related to. I think OSC's point in making characters overly intellegent has to do with the reader being able to relate to the character. If the character is so much smarter than everyone else and is written that way, most readers could feel either intimidated or to distant from the character to care about them. The villan can be a genius with no problem, we want the reader to dislike them.
LDS
On genius (or lack thereof) in novels.
I belive the danger with trying to make characters too intelligent is that it's incredibly difficult to create a believable character who's smarter than the author. It can be done with careful research (and feedback from real geniuses), but to convince genius readers that your character is one of them - that's hard to do for those of us who possess average intelligence.
Better for us to stick with characters we can portray convincingly - or to conduct some serious research beforehand.
I've read Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. In all, it's one of the best (read most entertaining and thought provoking) books I've read in years. It does have some flaws, though it is brilliant in its way.
About the scene in question and writing genius: Brown is a teacher himself. But his characters are a Harvard professor in Symbology, another professor of (I can't remember, exactly, but his specialty is the Grail legends - medieval lit., maybe?), and a Cryptologist working for the French government. They are three high-caliber characters, and I think the scene you're refering to is simply a moment of less-than-perfect research.
"less than perfect preparation."
Sorry
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the fundamental principle of superior commanders, nurturing and rewarding intelligent initiative in subordinates.
If only the corporate world would get that right.
Seems to me there is intelligence with obnoxious personality attached, and intelligence with likeable personality, just as there is ignorance, even stupidity, with each type of personality.
Looking more closely at Indiana Jones, he had to be intelligent, given his professorship and knowledge in his field; the bumbling really was a different aspect of his personality, like the (real?) absent-mindedness of Einstein.
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But I agree with him that char's shouldn't be too smart. If they were they could just fix everything with no problem.
Intelligence has its limitations, its bumps in the road, and carries no guarantees. It takes time and effort to get through problems. Didn't Edison go through thousands of failures before the bulb lit? Looking at the combined intelligence in organizations like NASA (an intelligent entity could be considered a grander scale of a single intelligence), and there is still room for drama with no guarantee of success. Not to mention the human emotional element.
And even intelligent people aren't perfect. They have their moments. They also have areas of greater and lesser expertise. And they, as anyone, are subject to emotional short-circuiting.
The problem might be authors writing intelligent characters as mental supermen instead of human beings with greater than average intelligence.
Are we possibly talking of somewhat different things -- genuinely intelligent characters vs geniuses?
Just because your character is SMART (however smart you want them to be), doesn't mean s/he has COMMON SENSE. I know I heard that enough from my parents - I don't use my sense, or that I don't THINK! Preparation and timing play a role too. Book sense/knowledge vs. street sense/knowledge can play a role, and when you have a character from each side work together, the combination can be both annoying and electric.
I don't think an intelligent character is a put-off - I think a smart-ass or know-it-all types turn readers off; such types are often found to be villainss (let me tell you my plan before I kill you - oops, you got away), or the irritating characters protagonists must put up with to win the day.
Heinlein certainly wrote some irritating characters of this sort, but also some smart ones that mess up - you like them and believe them because of their humanity. Or maybe they show off their smarts, but it is to argue a point - sometimes that works for me, and sometimes it doesn't. So I would add attitude to the mix.
Also, sometimes intelligent characters are not the creative ones (maybe that is cleverness, maybe not). So again, a combination of characters of different types works as they pool their talents to solve whatever. If a character has it ALL, you don't have much of a story because as some one said, they could just fix it all. Your character needs some weaknesses or flaws. So I think a character can be very intelligent - just write it right.
I personally liked Indiana Jones as played - I didn't see him as bumbling (though I see why he was thought of that way and why it could be off-putting) - just more interested and involved in his adventuring and in making acquisitions than his teaching. And since so many of his students were moon-eyed girls, they didn't treat him as a professor so much as an idol of fantasy - that surely put him off. He couldn't exactly share what he was doing with his students. He had flaws which made him accessible - his dad sure put him in his place a few times. I think also that the smart character is often a character with lots of inner thought processes going on, so they don't have social graces sometimes (hence the 'bumble' effect, or is it the 'nerd' effect?).
I think I might have trouble writing a super-intelligent character simply because I myself may not have what it takes to do so. I also don't think of myself as clever, and suspect it will take me eons to write clever plots and twists and endings... but maybe that means my characters will be acceptible?
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it's incredibly difficult to create a believable character who's smarter than the author. It can be done with careful research (and feedback from real geniuses), but to convince genius readers that your character is one of them - that's hard to do for those of us who possess average intelligence.
This is pretty much how OSC does it. An author with average intelligence can certainly write convincing characters that are more intelligent than the author by taking advantage of two things: more intelligent critiquers, and time.
Since a story does not have to be written as fast as it is likely to be read, an author with average intelligence can take the time to figure out things that a more intelligent character will figure out in a snap.
So you can make your characters look smarter than you because you can have them gain insights more quickly than you would, and you can have them think up possible solutions to problems faster than you would.
And so on. Use wise/intelligent readers and critiquers and take your time.
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...was that scene in the Da Vinci Code in which the "scholar" repeated the Aleph-Bet by heart supposed to be funny, or do you think it was meant to be a serious example of advanced intellect?
I don't know if it was supposed to be funny, I sure found it hilarious, but that was the only scene I overheard. But I guess DQ already answered the question well enough for me.
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Brown is a teacher himself. But his characters are a Harvard professor in Symbology, another professor of (I can't remember, exactly, but his specialty is the Grail legends - medieval lit., maybe?), and a Cryptologist working for the French government. They are three high-caliber characters, and I think the scene you're refering to is simply a moment of less-than-perfect research.
On another tangent,
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In real life is it the true geniuses that succeed , the person of average intelligence combined with common sense or the guy who invents a test for $ 9.95 and doesn't mind ripping people off?
I suppose that depends on what we mean by "real life" and "succeed" (and "true genius"). How do we define intelligence? I define it as the ability to adaptively predict the future based on prior experience. Basically, using induction to generalize ideas of what has happened, then deduction to accurately infer what will happen. If by "success" we mean successful adaptation to novel situations, then--pretty much by definition--the most genuinely intelligent will succeed more often than anyone else.
If we define success by some arbitrary criterion such as number of grandchildren, amount of theoretical currency instruments gained in a transient economy (Ultima Online Gil or US dollars, take your pick), or perhaps some measure of self-satisfaction and complacency about things in general (measured with electrodes on the scalp, don't you know), then I would guess that intelligence would have almost nothing to do with success...it would depend far more on a) whether a person was at all interested in pursuing that measure of success and b) luck.
Survival skills are worse than useless without some pretty hefty intelligence backing them up...all having survival skills means is that you'll tend to survive in a given environment. Worse yet, if your survival skills are adaptive but not predictive, then you can be trained by a person that gains even modest control over your environment...like the huckster selling high IQs. But that's just my opinion. I belong to the group of cyberneticists that want to teach computers not just how to play chess, but to decide whether or not they want to play chess or some other game.