Supervillain monologues are strange. Not because a supervillain telling someone their evil plan is weird. In fact, that's what we should actually expect. No, the weird bit is that people love a good monologue. Wait, what?

OK, so why should we expect supervillains to tell us their master plan? Because a supervillain is just a cartoonish version of a high agency person doing something the author thinks is bad. So our real life equivalent of a supervillain, or rather the generalization of one, is just a very high agency person doing something big. And these people tell you what they're going to do all the dang time! And no one believes them.

Seriously, think about it: what does Elon Musk want to do? Go to mars and make a non-woke ASI. What does he do? Try to go to Mars and make non-woke ASI. What does he say he's going to do? Go to mars and make non-woke ASI. What do most people think he's going to do? IDK, something bad or something good depending on their politics. They probably don't know what his plans are, in spite of him repeatedly saying what they are. Instead, they hallucinate whatever story is convenient to them, IDK, saying that he "hates Muslims" and is "dedicated to destroying Islam" or whatever instead of going to Mars and making non-woke ASI. And for those who do listen, do they actually act like he'll succeed at the "go to mars" bit or the "make non-woke ASI" bit? No! No they don't, except for a rare few.

Hitler wanted more land for the Germans, and only for the Germans. He repeatedly said he'd do this, and then he did it. What did the elites of the time think about this? Nothing, because they didn't read his book detailing his evil plans. They thought, instead, that he didn't have any great territorial ambitions, that he wanted peace, that he wasn't one of history's greatest monsters. They just hallucinated a bunch of motives to him.

The CCP, and Xi Jinping, are very clear that they want to reclaim Taiwan (and read Goethe), and they are willing to risk a war with the US for it. They keep saying this, repeatedly. What does the US think they want? "The CCP is going to destroy us", "the CCP is trying to take over the world with its belt and road initiative", "the CCP is racing us to be first with AI", "the CCP loves Russia" or whatever other hallucination is the flavour of the month. Most people just don't care enough to listen.

Paul Graham talks about how people won't invest in good startups because they think their idea is dumb. I think this is just a special case of the above. High agency people will take actions that are outside the conception of consensus reality. Because most people aren't agentic, because they are not general purposes intelligences most of the time, because they are boundedly rational, because they are just following socially-carved grooves of thought and deed most of the time, they won't be able to see what these high agency actions are. Instead, they'll do a surface level pattern match to something inside consensus reality, see that this thing is dumb, and then dismiss the action and the actor as not worth the effort.

You have people who are literally aiming to shift the dynamics of the entire future lightcone right now, based off a detailed and rigorous world-model, that are laughed off as weird performance artists. Janus is writing to hyperstition the hyper-object at the end of time that she prefers, and you're laughing. Many, perhaps most, of you read this paragraph and are wondering if I've suddenly gone crazy. So it goes.

My point is, that if you are a nascent super-villain, don't worry about telling people about your master plan. Almost no one will believe you. So the costs are basically non-existent. And in fact, if you're going to need minions, which you probably are, this means that you'll need to tell as many people as you can about your plan to find someone who's got that rare set of intelligence, curiosity, the right assumptions and overall vibes to help you. You can't be restricting who's going to hear you. So: monologue. Monologue, monologue and monologue!