Hey, everyone. I'm just writing to see if there's a particular aspect of The Petriculture Cycle that I ought to address outright in the actual story, or if most of my readers are already assuming it.

Is it clear from the story that Celestia is smart? I know that in Inscape she said that Twilight and Luna were smarter than her, but I worry that that left the impression that her intelligence is merely above-average, when her statement says more about how smart Twilight and Luna are, because Celestia is a genius in her own right. (I've described the scenario to my prereaders as being similar to saying that Bill Gates has a lot more money than Mitt Romney. It's absolutely true, but it doesn't tell you very much about Romney's net worth.)

Anyway, your thoughts are welcome.

She is smart, no question. She was smart enough to play along with Twilight's requests in Inscape, and this ultimately allowed Pinkie to hone her powers as an imaginary friend.

She may not claim to be as smart as Twilight and/or Luna, but the difference between them is the type of smarts. Celestia, to me, is the 'chessmaster' style of smart, trying to plan her moves ahead of her opposition, using years of experience. Twilight, by contrast, is 'book' smart; highly knowledgeable, and eager to learn more. As for Luna, I can't say, given that she doesn't have quite as prominent a role in the fic(s).

1459235
Whenever it comes to Princess Celestia, Luna, or Twilight, I just assume their intelligence is incredibly high.
Fics/series like this, Lines and Webs, the optimalverse and others only affirm that belief.

1459280
I'd have to agree with Leo Archon. though i have noticed a few moments of "chessmaster can't play checkers" & "book smart, street dumb" from them both...

I would think its actually really hard to show Celestia's raw intelligence.

That's because there are a couple of ways a fictional character's brainpower is usually demonstrated; 1) how quickly they figure something out or 2) coming up with a plan to deal with a problem.

Celestia is at least 1000years old (I can't recall if you've defined her age in the Peticulture Cycle), 99 out of 100 problems she runs into she's seen before and she knows what she did last time.

So she usually doesn't have to solve the problem from scratch like Twilight Sparkle would.

Even with only average intelligence, Celestia would typically be the first in the room with the correct answer.

Okay, a lot of people come with the preconception that Celestia is smart, or is a chessmaster character, and knows her next twelve moves or something. Those people you aren't going to need to convince, you're only going to need to provide absence of evidence and that is what they will assume. Personally, I'm not so invested in that idea myself but that just means I have other preconceptions. It's hard to separate out what comes from preconceptions, and what comes from your take on Celestia specifically, but I'll do my best.

So how smart is she in Petriculture? And what do you mean by smart anyway? There are lots of different ways to be smart. You can't just measure smartness an summarise it as a one-axis number. Someone once said to me: "for a guy as smart as you are, you're pretty dumb" and I always thought that was one of the truest insults I've ever been paid.

So how "smart" is Celestia, and what "smart" things has she done? I think the smartest thing so far was freely admitting that she isn't as smart as Twilight and Luna, and that's more wise than smart. She pretty much admits that she has no chance of catching out either Twilight or Luna in a battle of wits, basically, she's completely out-classed. If it was anywhere close, you'd expect chance to play a big enough role that she wouldn't all but giving up before the game began. And given Twilight out-classes Luna, Celestia is depicted as being separated from Twilight by this degree of separation twice.

I always got the impression from that the your Celestia was of above average intelligence, nothing to sneeze at, but nothing to write home about either. She's just this pony, you see, with a heck of a lot of responsibilities to fulfil who's trying her best. What she is, however, is wise. She's wise enough to know her own limitations, and she isn't so prideful that she won't admit them or ask for help.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with having those qualities in a character. They make for an interesting take.

1459235

(I've described the scenario to my prereaders as being similar to saying that Bill Gates has a lot more money than Mitt Romney. It's absolutely true, but it doesn't tell you very much about Romney's net worth.)

But levels of wealth are far more spread out in terms of orders of magnitude than levels of intelligence (assuming pony genetics and neurobiology[1] work in ways that are). There's nine or ten orders of magnitude to play with there. Intelligences, for the degree that they can be measured, fall on a bell curve. Each time you move a standard deviation away from the mean, you lose a heck of a lot of the population. Here are some numbers:

Standard deviation : Percentage of population above this level
1 : 15.8
2: 2.27
3: 0.134
4: 0.00316
We will now transition to using units of ponies per billion.
5: 287
6: 0.987
7: 0.00178

As you can see, space starts running out rapidly.

[1] I thought I was making this work up, but Chrome didn't red underline it.

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Neurobiology is indeed a word, along side Neurophysiology and Neuroscience.

1461863 - It's not a precisely mathematical ratio, by which I mean that you couldn't say that "W(r)/w(g) = IQ(c)/IQ(t)"

What I mean is that knowing that Twilight (and Luna, and Pinkie, and Penumbra)* is much smarter than Celestia tells you more about their intellects than hers.

(Incidentally, Discord is about as smart as Celestia.)

1462187
I'm not saying its precise either, just that any one trait is not distributed over such a wide range that you can fit so many intelligence "power levels" in there. It's not at all like wealth levels or even radioactive decay (55 orders of magnitude! ) So knowing there is a tower of going from Celestia to Luna to Twilight does tell me something about Celestia. Even if we make each step as short as possible [1] and push Twilight up as far as we reasonably can (perhaps she's the most intelligent pony you could expect to find in a sample size of 10 billion ponies).

(Incidentally, Discord is about as smart as Celestia.)

Your Discord is weird. Maybe he is smart in some ways... he certainly seems to have shown some off-camera smarts in taking over Equestria, but he also doesn't seem to be able to get empathy properly. To be fair, empathy seems to be a very difficult cognitive task. Very few members of the animal kingdom are to be able to manage it, and it takes a child until the age of six before they start developing a theory of mind (See the Sally Anne Test), but Discord doesn't seem to be able to do it properly. So if he is as smart as Celestia, then its in certain specific ways.

Ultimately, and these are just my opinions as a reader based on what I have read, I think the question of how intelligent your Celestia is is still quite open. Without further further evidence I tend to assume she is of above average intelligence and is capable of mental feats requiring that, such as managing the budget of the realm, understanding quantitative fields such as statistics or quantum mechanics, debating philosophy, being able to empathise with the plights of others, presenting a charismatic front, etc. I just don't see her as a Grand Admiral Thrawn [2] or Paul Dirac.

[1] We could, for example, argue that Celestia's assessment was pessimistic. A non-bruit force victory would be possible, but Celestia feared it wasn't very likely to work and also feared the consequences of trying and failing.

[2] You have your read the works of Timothy Zahn, right? Thrawn is the perfect example of how to a chessmaster well.

1462700 - Perhaps a simpler way to put it is that the comparison was meant to be hyperbolic.

As you speculate, Celestia is quite capable of all those mental feats that you mention, which, when coupled with the fact that she has accumulated roughly 1,000 years of experience more than anypony else, make her very effective intellectually, though by her own admission she hasn't devoted much effort to military strategy and tactics. What I'm hoping specifically is that I don't give the impression that her knowledge of magical theory is lacking. She's extremely powerful, and she backs up that power with considerable intelligence---just not as much intelligence as Luna.

And no, I haven't read anything by Timothy Zahn.

1462843
I've re-read the passage in question, and it appears that Celestia's assessment isn't quite as pessimistic as I seem to remember. But still, to answer your original question, if I were you, I'd try and work in a reminder somehow. For many readers (like me!) it's been a while since Inscape. It probably doesn't have to be long, and you might even be able to get away with making it a tell, rather than a show.

(See clause 4 of Bookplayer's Essay, "Tell, Don't Show. Yes, you read that right.", namely: "You are making an important point or giving information that a reader needs to have absolutely clear for their understanding of a story.")