How to Write Deep Characters

I seem to remember a story about Warren Buffett: whenever he tried to teach people to trade, they failed miserably. When people asked him on why he didn't follow his own teachings on specific successful trades he did, he simply said "Oh, I changed my mind at the last second."

I've never seen sources for it though, so take it with a grain of salt.

Speaking as someone who more-or-less accidentally did the same thing, having it explained this way was very helpful. Thanks, Eliezer!

Heh, every now and then I get a compliment which actually does make me feel like a proper genius in the pre-Dweckian unhealthy sense because it compliments something I accomplished with literally no effort. Likewise when somebody congratulates me on all the effort I must have put in to get HPMOR's time-travel plots straight. I do those in my head without any notes, and it doesn't feel difficult. I wonder if any other mathematician or mathematician-lite would say the same thing I would, that time-travel plots are much less complicated than even slightly serious math.

Genre people and litfic people love flinging shit at each other, and it rarely makes much sense to a person actually familiar with the writing. Far as I can make out, it's because of generalising from a little evidence - a lot of the insults make more sense when you look at the more-likely-to-be-recommended stuff (for example, Ian McEwan wrote a whole book which can be very easily strawmanned into "these poor people are really badly off; but you shouldn't give in to the temptation to therefore dismiss all rich people").

Even positive reviews that cross the divide are horribly condescending.

I have no "so bad it's good" gene, so I would usually stop reading such a work instantly, like a fanfic with multiple spelling errors in the first chapter. If I had to name a work I read all the way through, Lev Grossman, The Magicians. It's well-written along all other dimensions but I found the protagonists to be needlessly existential - the 'protagonists bored with everything' turned what could have been a great book into a merely good one. That is a literarily influenced SF&F story, of course.

I suspect TvTropes is the best reference for determining basedness here.

Why is "good" vs "stupid" a conflict? Are they contradictory?

See the OB post linked at the top.

I think the characterisation in BSG is actually surprisingly deep. Not that good characterisation always has to mean very complex characters: well-drawn simple characters can be very effective. But I think the personalities of the main characters in BSG are much more realistic and plausible than most of other things I've seen.

Can't think of many evil vs. evil characters either. Many of the main characters are struggling with their place on the principle vs. pragmatism spectrum. In terms of 'evil' characters, there's one I can think of who's pretty much straightforward Freudian evil (totally evil, but somewhat justified psychologically) and one who just seems to not have ever obtained any ethics or indeed empathy at all, while only ever doing one noticeably evil thing that I can remember (as being without empathy doesn't instantly make you mad axeman).

GoT, I dunno. Some of them are deeper than others. For a lot they just have widely divergent senses of good: they might just care about a single person, or about family, or about a grudge... But I have nothing against boldly drawn characters of that type, they can be very enjoyable to read.

Interesting point at the end about the personalities of the audience: if the 'shallow' or 'evil vs. evil' characters are capturing real, damaged personalities and plausible relationship conflicts, (and the BSG relationships are definitely plausible to me) then surely they're doing something right?

Theres a difference between deep, well written and compelling characters. GoT and BSG gained praise for having well written/compelling characters, and particularly for making them realistic. A real person or a well written character may have a single overriding obsession that means they are not deep or complex, but are very compelling to watch. Conversely someone can be deep but dull (trivial example: composed of a hundred sub agents obsessed with different accounting standards).

I don't think it is an indicator that the audience is messed up. I haven't seen Battlestar Galactica but regarding Game of Thrones, if the boards are any indicator of the audience, then most people seem to root for the more morally acceptable (good) guys, and are disappointed that they keep getting screwed over. The show is also known for unexpected character deaths, so it could just be an indicator of the audience wanting to be surprised or in a state of suspense.

Many of the characters seem straightforward, but you could almost imagine each House as being an individual, and the members of each House as the "parts", each with competing (but somewhat aligned) morals, goals, methods, etc.

That got me curious whether you consider Commander Adama more evil than good.

Conflict, in one form or another, lies at the center of every story. This is widely considered the first rule of writing. Novices should not consider defying it. Almost any book on writing will tell you this, often on the first page.

Some early science fiction isn't so much about conflict as it is a relation of an unlikely experience. But then, the stories I have in mind weren't exactly that great. So that's not exactly evidence against the assumption. Still, I think a sufficiently skilled writer could create an enjoyable story without conflict, but it would be like a painter throwing out a primary color.

One of my favorite of OP's short posts is Building Weirdtopia. (Yudkowsky's no spoilers approach to scientific pedagogy is such an intriguing one, I'm a quite sad he hasn't spun it into a novel yet. I'd seriously love to read a Neal Stephenson-length epic about a child in such a society recapitulating modern science, but maybe I'm just weird that way.) It strikes me that one could write a novel about a Weirdtopia that has no conflict, featuring only exploration of a counter-intuitive, yet highly intriguing, world. Conversations within, and descriptions of, this strange world (so long as the writer is very, very clever) would keep my interest. But then, this would be more like speculative anthropology than a story.

You're confusing "evil" with "unsympathetic".

I don't think he is.

Perhaps "evil" here just means a object-level match against some entries in Nega-Frankena's list of of disvalues, including: death, apathy and stasis, sickness and enervation, pain and frustration of all or certain kinds, unhappiness, blight, malcontent, etc; untruth; delusion and lies of various kinds, incomprehension, folly; ugliness, discord, monstrosity in objects contemplated; numbing experience; morally bad dispositions or flaws; mutual contempt, hatred, enmity, defection; unjust distribution of goods and evils; mania and obsession in one's own life; helplessness and experience of impotence; pointless abnegation; enslavement; strife, terror; tedium and repetition; and bad reputation, disgrace, shame, etc.