Optimize Literally Everything

The strange, vast thoughts of Eliezer Yudkowsky

Thoughtful Responses and Intelligent Mistakes

One unavoidable difficulty of trying to put optimizing sparks inside your characters is that none of the characters want your plot to happen.

You want the hero and villain to struggle heroically. Or maybe there’s no primary antagonist and the hero is up against Nature, or themselves, or has to resolve a romantic confusion. Regardless, if the protagonist encounters no obstacles on the way to getting what they want, you have no story.

But the protagonist does not want your obstacles. The protagonist has watched their own share of romantic comedies and is making sure to communicate with their crush. The villain wants the heroes to die in chapter 1, and sends extra troops to make sure it happens. Every Level I Intelligent character wants to take your conflict-driven plot and throw it out the window.

That’s what takes the brain-sweat. You must so cleverly craft every character’s situation that, given what they know, their inner spark’s output works for your plot.

Writing intelligent villains means you have to do a lot of extra thinking to figure out how the heck the hero gets out of the villain’s base alive, when you would not make your ventilation ducts large enough to crawl through.

And this may require you to junk your first plot idea, and dismiss your second plot idea, and let the problem percolate through your mind for a week before you come up with a good-enough idea that nobody is being completely stupid.  If you foresee a loophole in Ch. 63, you exercise your authorial prerogative of time travel, and go back and set up something that eliminates the loophole in Ch. 17.

My first idea for how Harry would escape Azkaban was that he would cut through the walls using partial Transfiguration, and then escape on an ordinary broomstick. But other wizards could cut through steel walls with ordinary magic, and if it were that easy to escape Azkaban, somebody would have done it before. The Aurors would have broomsticks of their own, I realized. As for riding out on a fast racing broomstick that could outrun the Aurors, as an ordinary thriller novel might try—no, bull, Amelia Bones would think of that, and make sure her own people had sufficiently good broomsticks to block a Firebolt from escaping. Harry has to think of an escape plan containing some element that Amelia Bones would not be expecting, would not have prepared for, even when she’s trying to be clever.

This takes work and writers are lazy, which is why the Hollywood villain leaves the hero in a deathtrap, laughs, and exits the room.

Sometimes, you will have no choice but to have your character make a mistake; you may even want the character to make that mistake because you are trying to make a point about it.  That is why the title of this section is ‘thoughtful responses’ and not ‘optimal responses’. But yea, I say to you, be careful here, for I fear that it will be very easy to slip back into the morass of Plot-Induced Stupidity. A respectable character should not be making stupid mistakes.

Ideally, if your protagonist is doing the wrong thing, it should be a wrong thing plausible enough to fool most of the readers on a first read-through, to seem like a thoughtful and clever response on a first read-through, even if the character looks back twenty chapters later and curses for all the ways they could have known better. (See, e.g., half the things Harry does in HPMOR, and the early reviews that were left when those chapters were initially posted.) If your plot does not allow the character to realize what you know to be the truth, then don’t have them ‘just not think of it’, have them come up with a different realization that nicely fits a subset of the character’s observations so far. (But don’t twist your world to lie to the character. Antagonists lie, reality doesn’t lie. If your world lies to the character then the story’s mysteries will no longer be solvable.)

Your character may not solve the plot on the spot, and their responses may not be optimal; but they should always be thoughtful. When you must have an intelligent character make a mistake, that mistake should be the result of thinking almost the right thought and making one tiny little cognitive misstep along the way.

Part of the point of HPMOR is to take the reader along with Harry through the process of Harry learning better about his mistakes.  That requires that there be mistakes.  But this doesn’t mean that Harry suddenly turns into a complete anti-rationalist when the plot requires it.  It doesn’t mean that the story tries to carefully excuse Harry’s mistakes.  It doesn’t mean the story sets up Harry up to be emotionally overwrought at the moment where the plot requires an error, so that the author will have a good excuse for the character turning stupid.  Harry’s mistakes are the result of Harry trying to be rational, trying to do the right thing, trying to pick a thoughtful and optimizing response, and ending up not quite good enough.

From HPMOR, Ch. 78:

Later, looking backward, Harry would think of how, in his SF and fantasy novels, people always made their big, important choices for big, important reasons. Hari Seldon had created his Foundation to rebuild the ashes of the Galactic Empire, not because he would look more important if he could be in charge of his own research group. Raistlin Majere had severed ties with his brother because he wanted to become a god, not because he was incompetent at personal relationships and unwilling to ask for advice on how to do better. Frodo Baggins had taken the Ring because he was a hero who wanted to save Middle-Earth, not because it would’ve been too awkward not to. If anyone ever wrote a true history of the world - not that anyone ever could or would - probably 97% of all the key moments of Fate would turn out to be constructed of lies and tissue paper and trivial little thoughts that somebody could’ve just as easily thought differently.

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres looked at Hermione Granger, where she’d sat down at the other end of the table, and felt a sense of reluctance to bother her when she looked like she was already in a bad mood.

So then Harry thought that it probably made more sense to talk to Draco Malfoy first, just so that he could absolutely positively definitely assure Hermione that Draco really wasn’t plotting against her.

And later on after dinner, when Harry went down to the Slytherin basement and was told by Vincent that the boss ain’t to be disturbed… then Harry thought that maybe he should see if Hermione would talk to him right away. That he should just get started on unraveling the whole mess before it raveled any further. Harry wondered if he might just be procrastinating, if his mind had just found a clever excuse to put off something unenjoyable-but-necessary.

He actually thought that.

And then Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres decided that he’d just talk to Draco Malfoy the next morning instead, after Sunday breakfast, and then talk to Hermione.

Human beings did that sort of thing all the time.

(Discussion.)