posted
When Ender faced the last defense of the Buggers he gave up on the sheer numbers of the enemy. Only after Bean said jokingly (referring to battleroom) "their gate is down" did Ender realise the possible action. Bean would later suggest that he knew all along the possible action subconsciously in a later book. Also, IF given time he could live long enough and would become more intelligent than anyone of the other characters, even Jane and the Buggers.
Considering this, he would thus become a better tactician then Ender. Perhaps he already was.
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posted
Remember Bean was better able to think in terms of small tactics in the fight because he was given less responsibility to oversee strategy on a larger scale. He was to keep a general eye on the overall strategy but as long as all was well his considerable mind was able to focus on such minute issues as detonating the little doctor inside the ship instead of launching it. It was Ender who learned what he learned subconsciously about what the Bugger’s had deduced from the conduct of the ships throughout the campaign, that they had learned to expect the Humans to preserve their lives and fight in a manner that reflected a high value on each individual of the species.
posted
Well.. that makes sense but bean was an overall better stradegist. He was even YOUNGER than Ender when he arived and Graff said if they had found bean first they would have used him instead of Ender.
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quote:IF given time he could live long enough and would become more intelligent than anyone of the other characters, even Jane
I thoroughly disagree with this, unless your "IF" includes Bean's brain growing to the size of a large planet, and even that may not be large enough. The reason is that Jane has so much more processing power than anything Bean could ever have, and her philotic connections are a lot faster than Bean's neural connections. Not being bound by the speed of light limitation certainly gives Jane quite an advantage.
quote:Graff said if they had found bean first they would have used him instead of Ender.
which I think would have been an enormous mistake. Even Bean was able to realize that although being a great strategist, he was not a great leader.
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posted
The answer is: Of course Bean was a better strategist. He WAS smarter, as it says throughout the books. As camus said, Ender was only a better leader, as he commanded respect and loyalty.
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posted
I disagree about Janes processing power being enhanced by philotic connections, there is never any mention of a faster then light processor, merely philotic "data transfer cables" so there is still a light speed limit to her processing. That said there is no doubt that the brain is slower then lightspeed. There is a case to be made about how many different issues Bean might eventually be able to process in parallel but I find it hard to believe that growth alone causes a limitless incress in mental power, if that were the largest brains in nature would show greater intellectual power.
posted
But according to the books, larger Bean got the more intelligent he became.
Also, as for the 'limitless' increase in mental ability due to brain size; Anton's Key anyone? Here's a big IF: Were Bean able to survive for as long as Jane (Impossible as he would grow larger then planets, but its an IF), he would thus become more intelligent then Jane because his ability to learn is indeed limitless.
posted
This response is to those who are confusing tacticians and strategists: Bean was a better tactician, Ender was a better strategist.
Ender was better at the big picture view of how things were done and creating the overall plan. Bean was better at using his smaller units to win smaller tactical situations that helped the overall larger strategic campaign.
It says as much in EG when it talks about Ender getting to know how the other members of his Jeesh worked together. It says Bean was less effective at operations which put him in charge of half a fleet than Alai was, but that he used smaller fighter groups with the precision of a scalpel.
Bean was the tactician, Ender was the strategist. There's a difference.
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quote:Originally posted by Launchywiggin: Ender was only a better leader, as he commanded respect and loyalty.
From this we have to see that if Bean had really been given a chance he very well could have been a wonderful leader. Look at what happened in the Shadow books. I think it was in Shadow of the Giant that they talk about how his men would follow him into anything. If they had found him before Ender and he had been able to me the jeesh before Ender did he could have been a much better leader. Bean was better with stategy. He also knew to study up on who you were working with, something Ender didnt do. (ex. Dragon Army, first meating in the battle room. Enders Shadow version)Bean might have been the right one, if he had been found at the right time.
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quote:It says Bean was less effective at operations which put him in charge of half a fleet than Alai was, but that he used smaller fighter groups with the precision of a scalpel.
It also says that Mazer influenced his assessment of Bean so that he wouldn't give him so much to concentrate on that he wouldn't be able to keep an eye on the whole battle should Ender not be up to snuff.
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posted
I do not think Bean is a worse Strategist then Ender, however Bean never believed the Buggers were the real threat did he? Not until he determined that the Ansible existed. He was focused on the 'War for Mastery of Earth' and human tactics and human nature. Ender was gullible enough to believe in the Bugger threat and therefore he spent his efforts learning about the Buggers and understanding them. He was the Bugger Expert while Bean was the Human expert.
posted
1) bean could look at the whole picture and see the answer. 2) bean was less obssed with winning than ender was 3) bean himself said he had no plan for the last battle
so all-in-all i think bean could think faster and the answer(most of the time) would come instantly and without flaw. Ender however didnt care how he won as long as he did win. bean could be satisfied with looseing as long as he learned something from it.
so yes i think bean was a better stratigist, but ender was a better commander.
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Bean was great at seeing the big picture, but Bean didn't have a desire to win at all, which made him a terrible strategist in this situation. Bean assessed the situation and within Ender's Shadow, he determined it was hopeless. So he refused to take command of the army. Bean assessed the situation and decided that humanity had lost and "oh well" pointing out that it wasn't the commander's fault, it was just the fates of war.
Bean said what he said for many reasons, maybe subconciously he thought about it. But his concious mind urged him to give up. And the novel makes that pretty darn clear.
As Graff and others note in Shadow of the Giant, everyone knew that Bean didn't have much hunger in him - he fought for whatever but his own desire to "win" wasn't really there.
Bean was a great commander FOR Ender and FOR Peter Wiggin. But he was that commander because THEY had desires to win and they pushed those desires on him.
Yes, he was super brilliant, but Bean also had faults, and at times big faults. That's the one thing I didn't really care for in the Shadow series is that Bean often comes off as a greek-hero/god rather then a person with any frailties.
But he makes several key mistakes along the series to at least try to instill into people that he makes mistakes (Calling for Carlotta on an emergency to come to Thailand, as an example, which got her killed).
In the case of the battle with the formics, Bean himself noted he had no strategy. Ender was able with encouragement, nothing more, to develop a plan of attack that built on what he knew the buggers would believe and used it against them.
Bean didn't have that, in fact, he criticized the plan in his head while it was going on; while Ender understood that it was the way to keep as many ships as possible for a run at the planet.
Bean was a fantastic calculated statician. He later became a great commander. I'm sure Ender wouldn't care either way. And I'm sure in the timeline Bean would know that it was Ender who wrote "The Hive Queen" etc.
There were moments, especially in "Ender's Shadow" and "Shadow Puppets" where I felt as though Bean was made out to be too.. over the top powerful. But taken as a whole, if we can evaluate the faults as well, then I think that's a better picture of the situation.
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posted
ok, I would like to point out that this argument was one the teachers had over and over and OVER in Ender's Shadow.... As Graff pointed out, Ender won, so it was obviously good enough. More than that, Bean DID know he was killing people, and if he ever had to have full responsibility for that much mass destruction, he might not have managed to handle it. More though was the fact that being the better tactition OR strategist wasn't what won the battle. What won was the fact that Ender was a lover and a leader... Bean didn't develop those abilities until later on, when he was OLDER. There is something to that I think, and I loved OSC for demonstrating that even though these kids were really smart, and advanced in alot of ways, they were still growing and developing, and not just mini-grown ups. I espescially liked that he had them develop certain abilities in very strange orders and at vastly different times than even eachother. This is about the truest depiction of remarkably gifted children I've ever seen!
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posted
One important thing that no one has said is that Ender's and Bean's performance in the final battle in EG can't be compared. Every piece of information Bean had was scrounged from any source he could get it from. In the end, Bean believed the following war on the Earth would be more important because he knew that he was being lied to constantly about what was really important, and he finally decided that all that was in his power to accomplish was to do everything he could to help Ender.
Ender had been told everything he *needed* to know, because he was "the chosen one".
I think if Bean had been chosen, his interest in the Buggers would have developed a lot more, and that, given his training with Mazer, he could well have won that final battle. I know there is the consideration of Bean's relationship with his subordinates, but if the teachers hadn't undermined Bean's ability to command from day one (proably because they saw that he could well have led a student uprising--like he does after Ender leaves) maybe Bean would have had a few friends. All I'm really saying is--if Bean had been told what Ender was told, and trained as Ender was trained, things could have been very different.
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posted
I've read all of the Ender Series and only Ender's Shadow of the Shadow Series...
I'm jumping back to Bean Counters comments on Jane: I thought that she could think at lightspeed? Isn't that part of what made the anisble possible?
Also - to me, in some ways Bean echos familiar of Jane. I mean this in the way he can look at something and understand, in his ability to focus on many things at once and in his 'secret' watching and learning of Ender.
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posted
Leroy - if Bean had been told what that Ender was told? Just curious what information you mean because it seems to me like Bean figured out a lot of what Ender was told and then figured a fair amount of 'extras' out on his own. Which things am I forgetting about?
I agree with you about the training part - it's one of those... We'll never know... things.
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posted
Bean was never told the extent of the hive mind. And as for the things that Bean only knew because he guessed them, it's stated somewhere that Bean had a policy of doubting anything he had only guessed. Further more, if Bean had been just handed all the information that he had to dig to get, just think of what he would have guessed based on that information.
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You know, I had never thought of how different it would be if Bean HAD been given all of the information up front and processed it from there!
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posted
tmservo's right. To answer the question posed originally: he was always a better strategist and tactician than Ender. He just didn't have the need to utterly destroy potential future threats that Ender did. And since Jane didn't become the superbrain she eventually did until years and years after Ender left, during the Formic Wars he was smarter than her too.
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posted
Why do you think Ender felt that need? What do you think about the subsequent books 'forgiving' the destrution of the Buggers?
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posted
Question one I thought OSC went over pretty thoroughly in Ender's Game and then more in Ender's Shadow. One conversation sticks out between Graff and one of the insructors where they talked about how strange it was for a kid from suburbia to end up a killer and for a kid from the streets to end up solving problems relatively peacably. I always thought it was Peter's influence in his life up to that point.
The 'forgiving' the destruction of the Buggers? Like them forgiving him?
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posted
So you'd say it was inherent in his personality?
I sort of meant it in more of the author's (hypothetical) point of view. The (arguably) most horrible thing that Ender did in EG was to destroy the Buggers... The next book went on to show that he actually hadn't destroyed them and spent lightyears searching for a place for them to exist in again...
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posted
I'd say it was inherent, yeah. I'm pretty sure that's why they picked Ender for the Game and why it had such a reaction to him.
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posted
Indeed I have! I spent a summer some time in Middle School reading all the OSC I could find. I read most of what he's written, and own all the EG-related books I could get my hands on that I re-read pretty much yearly.
quote:Originally posted by cmc: Why do you think Ender felt that need? What do you think about the subsequent books 'forgiving' the destrution of the Buggers?
The books state that Ender never felt that he was good enough. In Ender's Shadow, Bean notes that "Ender wasn't larger-than-life, he was exactly life-sized, and so his larger-than-life burden was too much for him." (That's a paraphrase. My book is in a different state at the moment). I think that Ender was just faking his way through, and that he expected to fail any second. That's why, above all else, he feared ever having to face a rematch with any of his enemies; he never knew how he managed to win this time, so how could he bet on winning again?
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Whatever confidence Ender may have gained from leading his Army was lost when he realized just how large the challenge he faced was... (imho)
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posted
I think sometimes the whole crushing-my-oponents-so-they-will-never-recover thing is read as being a little too Peter-y. For me, it wasn't about some unconcious desire to repeat the cruelty that Peter enacted on Ender as a child, it was fear. Peter was only related in that all Ender's enemies were tied to Peter, and Peter was the only enemy Ender never defeated--the only enemy who might someday strike again. I DO think that Peter's relationship to Ender explains why Ender never felt absolved of his crime against the Buggers. Ender saw each of his "victories"--against Stilson, Bonzo, and the Buggers--as a reenactment of what Peter did to Ender. Ender was told, "You are going to be the perfect balance: Valentines empathy, and Peter's ruthlessness" But Ender only ever wanted to be Valentine, and the Peter inside him ate him up for the rest of his life--mostly because deep down, Ender kind of liked winning, like we all would.
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