 There are just so many puns to choose from, which one should I use? Sender's Game? Bender's Game? Render's Game? Mender's Game? Hey guys, I'm Josh and this is Thunk. I'm just gonna take this off and put it right over here. I hope you don't mind. First things first, the Ender's Game movie is actually pretty good, and if you don't have any moral compunction about giving Orson Scott cards some of your money, despite the fact that he regularly writes bigoted and hateful stuff on his blog, you should see it. By the way, PBS Idea Channel has a fantastic video about that moral compunction thing. Link's for the curious. Barring a couple of weird omissions, Ender's Game is probably the best and most faithful movie that could have been made out of the book. Don't worry, I'm not gonna spoil anything. I'm just gonna talk about Ender himself, and why he's a problem. Ender's Game is pretty much the quintessential teenage nerd geek book. Its protagonist, Ender Wigan, is the archetype for the genetically superior gifted child that everybody who is good at standardized testing in school thought that they were. What's more, Ender's gifts make him a loner, unable to relate to his peers or make friends easily due to his staggering intellect, at least until he makes it to his school for the gifted where he can be with other kids bred to be super geniuses by the state. Ender is exactly what every teenage nerd or geek wants desperately to be, and his story is exactly what they want to hear. It's also the last thing that they ought to hear. In 2007, Professor Carol Dweck from Stanford published a study examining how a person's beliefs about intelligence influenced that person's ability to learn new things. According to Dweck and her co-authors, believing that intelligence is something that you're just born with rather than something that you have to work for and develop has a massively negative impact on a person's ability to learn. The stronger the conviction, the worse that person learns. Basically, if you just think that some people are born smart and others aren't, if you run into a tough problem, you're more likely to think, huh, I guess I'm just not smart enough for this. Whereas people who believe that they can work hard and get smarter are more likely to grind away at the problem until they find an answer and learn a lot more in doing so. What's unfortunate is that a lot of culture, and especially American culture, is saturated with the idea of the chosen few. I did an episode about this in the context of social Darwinism, so you can click that if you're confused. As a young nerd who is frequently harassed in school for acting like a know-it-all, Ender's Game came along and appointed my life where it was like rocket fuel for my conviction that I was just born smarter than everyone else, that I was one of the chosen few. It reinforced the idea that intelligence is totally genetic, a lie that my culture had been teaching me my entire life, which made it much harder for me to realize just how dumb I really was. Just to give you a quick example, I didn't realize that Kinga and Roo from Winnie the Pooh were named Kinga and Roo because they are Kinga-Roo's, until I was legally allowed to vote. Also, maybe if I had understood that I didn't make friends easily because I had the social skills of a piece of wet cardboard instead of thinking that everybody was just intimidated of the huge brain I was born with, I would have made more friends. Ender's Game is a fantastic book, and the movie is a pretty good movie, but their works of fiction, and as with most works of fiction, they grossly oversimplify reality for the sake of narrative. Worse still, if anyone buys into their fantasy that intelligence is solely the result of genetics, it actually makes them dumber, like 20 IQ points dumber. I'm not saying that your genes have nothing to do with how smart you are, I'm just saying that the more firmly you believe that they matter more than hard work and perseverance, the less of a chance you'll have to make full use of your genetic potential. Did you have any problems with Ender's Game, either the movie or the book? What did you think of the ethics of annihilating the buggers? Do you miss the hat already? Leave comments, let me know what you think. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and I'll see you next week.