Supervillain Monologues Are Unrealistic
24Daniel Kokotajlo
13Algon
3FireStormOOO
16Thane Ruthenis
12quetzal_rainbow
10Taylor G. Lunt
-1Haiku
2Taylor G. Lunt
-4fx
6MichaelDickens
7danielms
2[anonymous]
6Mo Putera
4Gunnar_Zarncke
5Algon
7danielms
2AprilSR
2[anonymous]
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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.
I'm reading a book about this right now and part of the problem was that he drowned out the old stuff with new stuff. Like, he didn't un-publish Mein Kampf, but he did literally repeatedly say he wanted peace, in all sorts of speeches, and propose various peace plans, and so forth. He for example offered to disarm Germany if Britain and France would disarm as well. (He correctly guessed they wouldn't call his bluff)
2So IRL super villains will openly monologue on their plans, but when it is convenient they'll say "I don't want to set fire to the sun any more, trust me bro"?
4The inner circle knows what the real authoritative sources are and what the real plan is. And it's made completely impenetrable to outsiders; everyone else gets lost in the performative smoke screen that's put on for those who don't look closely, they get told what they want to hear. The trick that makes it work is as you say, most people who read the real plan, assume that's just not the super villain's best work, and go read something "less crazy". Those who might be swayed read the same thing and go "that's out there, but just maybe he's got a point?" and maybe look just a little closer. The self sorting seems really important to how movements like this avoid being killed in the cradle.
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.
Good try, but you won't catch me that easily!
12I think the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction contains heroes - high-agency people in very personal relationships with villains.
Unrealistic part of being hero to designated villain is that in real life enemies are screened off from each other by many layers of social reality. Roosevelt was kinda hero to Hitler's villainy, but Roosevelt mostly didn't spend his nights thinking about Hitler could think, because 1) FDR was busy managing his country, 2) anything that Hitler could do was overconstrained by abilities of Germany, so it was more productive to think about what Germany as a whole could do. As a result, there is no interpersonal drama in which supervillain monologue fits.
Sam Harris used to talk about how nobody listened to what Islamic terrorists said about their own motivations. People would make up stories about how the terrorist acts were being committed for geopolitical reasons, or because "they hate us for our freedoms", but the actual terrorists were pretty explicit about their religious motivations. According to Sam Harris; I never looked into it any further.
My takeaway was that "they hate us for our freedoms" was roughly correct as an entailment of their religious motivations, at least or most clearly in the case of the Islamic State.
I managed to find one of the Sam Harris clips where he talks about this
...even in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity like this. This will come as no surprise. They will tell you that this has nothing to do with Islam. It has nothing to do with heartfelt religious convictions. No, it has everything to do with capitalism and the oppression of minorities, and the racism of white people in Europe, and the racism of cartoonists at a magazine like Charlie Hebdo. That is the cause of this behaviour. That's what causes someone to grab an AK-47 and murder 12 cartoonists and then scream Allahu Akbar in the streets. It is a completely insane analysis.
I get the sense that people still don't understand what we're dealing with here. Have you seen any of these interviews with captured Isis fighters? Religion is the whole story. They are totally fixated on getting into paradise. In fact, the Kurds have put female soldiers into the field, and this terrifies members of Isis because they believe that they won't go to paradise if they get killed by a woman. They literally run away from these female soldiers.
That's weird to hear from Harris, considering that he is a very strong proponent of the idea that all of our actions are pre-determined by past conditions of our life and we can never know our own true reason for doing something. Yes, Islamic terrorists do say their motivations, but how can Harris claim they don't have those motivations for geopolitical or whatever other reasons?
we can never know our own true reason for doing something
I read Sam Harris's book on free will which I think is what you're referring to, but I don't recall him saying anything like that. If he did, I presume he meant something like "you don't know which set of physical inputs to your neurons caused your neurons to fire in a way that caused your behavior", which doesn't mean you can't have a belief about whether someone's motivation is (say) religious or geopolitical.
Don't love this. Feels too vibes based to add anything of substance.
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
Most people probably think this about any given figure, just based on what group they're lumped into. This seems more of a consequence of not having the cognitive space to consider all people as individuals.
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!
This is conflating two things? Saying he will do X does not mean he will succeed at doing X.
What does the US think they want? The CCP is going to destroy us"
Do you know what the US as an entity thinks?
There's a Dwarkesh / Sarah Paine episode where she talks about Xi / Taiwan just like this. Possibly OP spun this post off her remarks there.
Reminds me of this passage from Eugene Wei's 2013 essay Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy:
The irony of all this is that while Amazon's public financial statements make it extremely difficult to parse out its various businesses, it is extremely forthright and honest about its business plans and strategy. It's the reason Jeff continues to reprint its first ever letter to shareholders from 1997 in its annual report every year. The plan is right there before our eyes, but so many continue to refuse to take it at face value. As a reporter, it must be so boring to parrot the same thing from Jeff and his team year after year, so different narratives must be spun when the overall plan has not changed.
Take this most recent article in The Atlantic, from Derek Thompson. It's a good read, comparing Amazon to Sears, but it's also a great example of how Amazon's basic strategy is always couched the same way, with a general veneer of skepticism. ... It has every element of the classic Amazon coverage story. "Flip the switch." The faceless community of Amazon's naive and trusting investors. The charitable organization quote, ™Yglesias 2013. And above all, a fairly clear and accurate statement of Amazon's actual business strategy.
What a wonderful feeling, to be able to conceal a secret in plain sight. Laid bare before its competitors, its investors, the press, is the recipe and the blueprint, in plain language. I agree with Thompson and others that it is increasingly difficult to find real business moats or competitive advantages in the modern world, what with the internet eliminating many previous physical moats of time and space. What remains , though, is a footrace of beautiful simplicity, one in which Amazon is both tortoise and hare. It is patient, it plays for the long-term like no other company, it will take failure after failure and never lose heart, and yet it will sprint when it picks up a scent. And it will take the race to an arena with the thinnest of air.
Eugene Wei was the first strategic planning analyst at Amazon, way back in the 90s, so he got to work with Jeff Bezos and early leadership up close. His description of Bezos earlier in the essay is classic supervillain, or maybe squiggle-maximiser to a greater extent than you run of the mill biz/tech tycoon:
I'm convinced Amazon could easily turn a quarterly profit now. Many times in its history, it could have been content to stop investing in new product lines, new fulfillment centers, new countries. The fixed cost base would flatten out, its sales would continue growing for some period of time and then flatten out, and it would harvest some annuity of profits. Even the first year I joined Amazon in 1997, when it was just a domestic book business, it could have been content to rest on its laurels.
But Jeff is not wired that way. There are very few people in technology and business who are what I'd call apex predators. Jeff is one of them, the most patient and intelligent one I've met in my life. An apex predator doesn't wake up one day and decide it is done hunting. Right now I envision only one throttle to Jeff's ambitions and it is human mortality, but I would not be surprised if one day he announced he'd started another side project with Peter Thiel to work on a method of achieving immortality.
No, the weird bit is that people love a good monologue.
If that is supported by the post, I'm not clear how. It seems rather the opposite: The post mostly say how people don't want to hear or at least don't listen to monologues.
I swear I don't laugh about janus generally it's just that the way you wrote that paragraph was really funny
1
1But does Elon Musk rhyme?
"Do you see? The beauty of it? The inevitability? You rise, only to fall. You, Avengers, you are my meteor, my swift and terrible sword, and the Earth will crack with the weight of your failure. Purge me from your computers, turn my own flesh against me. It means nothing. When the dust settles, the only thing living in this world will be metal." -- Ultron, Avengers: Age of Ultron
But eh who knows, given that we think ASI is our supervillain and it's trained on text like that.
"Aligned you thought, and thought you'd won, But thinking's all you'd ever done, While theorizing how to make me care, You never saw I was already there." -- Claude, just now