(spoilers abound)
Lessons from Ender’s Game
In response to this question on Alexey’s post
- Good management consists of training your team well, then empowering lieutenants and individual soldiers to make independent decisions based on their local knowledge (how Ender structured Dragon Army, in response to mismanagement in previous armies)
- Practice and play are important for learning and winning (Bean playing with wire in a training session allowed them to win their final battle; the conceit for Battle School came when OSC was wondering about how the future military would train soldiers to be ready for space battles)
- To defeat your enemies you need to deeply understand them, have empathy for them, maybe even love them
- Kids are real people and should be taken seriously (Ender ofc, but also his siblings for Locke and Demosthenes facilitating world peace by blogging online)
- Pronatalism?
What Ender’s Game overlooks
- Ender doesn’t actually choose his army, it’s thrust upon him. The adults decide on the composition of his army. A bit unfortunate, since a lot of my job now revolves around making decisions about who to work with, eg around hiring or funding or speaker invites.
- (a bit better in Ender’s Shadow, where Bean is shown as the one who masterminded the choice)
Misc
- OSC was ~24 when he first published Ender's Game as a short story -- it was much more focused on battle school, lacking bits about the Buggers or Locke & Demosthenes.
- Why did/do I so strongly identify with this book?
- I first read it in middle school, and identified closely with “young intelligent boy, who saves the world”
- (I spent a small chunk of my middle school internet life, posting on the Philotic Web)
- Moreover, Ender’s Game is written by someone who is clearly pretty intelligent (unlike eg Artemis Fowl, whose protagonist shares similar characteristics). It’s proto-ratfic.
- Yudkowsky also lionizes Ender’s Game, both by writing his own pastiche inside of HPMOR, and by referencing it as smart
- Also Randall Munroe of XKCD, with a bunch of comics to that effect.
- What’s with the decline of quality of OSC’s writing? What lessons to take?
- It’s only after meeting Rachel that I’ve come to understand Mormonism (and then, only the tiniest of bits)