There's another related aspect that's worth noting: supervillains are active, superheros classically reactive. The Joker hatches a plot and Batman stops him. Brainiac threatens to take over the Earth and Superman stops him. Doc Oc tries to blow up New York and Spiderman stops him. Etc. Etc. Ad infinitum et nauseam. If there's not any supervillain active on any given day in Gotham, Batman sits around preparing to fight them, letting most of the status quo stay unchanged.
To think about changing the status quo, think like a supevillain.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainsActHeroesReact
I so adore tropes, they give me something to subvert.
"According to all the stories, this ordinary world is what the extraordinary people try to protect. If you read a comic book about superheroes, it would be about superheroes defending all those everyday lives. The superheroes wouldn't be trying to cure AIDS or feed starving children in Africa or otherwise change the world. We have scientists for that sort of thing. No, a superhero is someone who defends that ordinary, everyday life from the forces that try to change it. Even if those stories come from our imagination, still, those are the people we praise above all others."
See also: HPMOR
There do exist at least a few superheroes who are trying to change the status quo proactively. I don't actually read that many comics, so I could be missing quite a few instances, but here are some examples:
Daenerys Targaryen (books): Though initially motivated solely by revenge and personal survival, she stops long enough to overturn several existing social orders in order to improve the average quality of life.
Nearly all of which turn out terribly if I recall correctly. Her freeing of the slaves for example on a utilitarian scale is somewhere between a particularly bad natural disaster and The 30 years war, especially since it seems unlikely to last.
Besides being basically at the head of a marauding horde that is a menace to settled civilization there are further reasons to doubt she has made a positive impact so far. My girlfriend recently had an interesting fired monologue on the subject, she hates the character and sees her as behaving like the worst possible stereotype of Western (in particular American) doogooderism and interventionism. And yes I did say stereotype so I'm not saying what follows is an accurate description of real world affairs.
If there's not any supervillain active on any given day in Gotham, Batman sits around preparing to fight them, letting most of the status quo stay unchanged.
Well, his secret identity spends his time making large amounts of money and giving it to charity.
The point is that a superhero can't take preemptive action. The author can invent a situation where a raid is possible, but for the most part, superman must destroy the nuke after it has been launched - preemptively destroying the launch pad instead would look like an act of aggression from the hero. And going and killing the general before he orders the strike is absolutely out of the question. This is fine for a superhero, but most of us can't stop nukes in-flight.
A dictatorship is different because aggression from the villain is everywhere anyway - and it's guaranteed that we will be shown at least one poor farm girl assaulted by soldiers before our hero takes action against the mastermind. Only when the villain is breaking the rules egregiously and constantly is the hero allowed to bend them a bit.
If you have a situation with both an antihero and a hero in it, the hero can be easily predicted - as opposed to the antihero,who is actually allowed to plan. Superheroes end up quite simple, since the rules they obey are so strict, they can only take one course of action (their choices tend to be about whether they follow the rules or not, and not between to courses of action that are both allowed). And that course of action often isn't the most effective.
Security thinking. If you want to keep your systems secure, you have to model intruders quite well, such that if you look at a device or environment you immediately notice how a malefactor could do things you don't want. You can do this and be the good guy.
Poacher turned gamekeeper works too. I worked at an antivirus company a while ago. Many of the researchers had been virus writers and l33t h@xx0rs in what they now regarded as their idiot youth, but had spent many more years using hacker thinking to defend against the people still doing that, and greatly enjoyed it.
You don't want to think like just any old supervillain. Most of them have systematic flaws in their behavior too. Besides the obvious, in a lot of stories the motive that best explains the villains' behavior is not really to succeed but the one the author has for them, which is to put up a good fight and be awesome, but lose. If you try to be like them, you might end up just trying to try. Your mind will censor out the non-grandiose but effective plans. You do not want to be about demonstrating a good effort. You want to be a winner.
Edit: the next paragraph has spoilers in it for Watchmen. So does the single line after it.
If there's one supervillain people should maybe try to emulate, it's this guy). He defeats an invincible character, stronger than Superman in a world where no one else has significant super powers, with nothing but mind games, (and in the movie at least), nukes several cities and blames it on said godlike character (the comic book ending has him blaming it on aliens, I like the movie ending better), tricks the US and USSR into thinking they have a common enemy, and prevents a larger nuclear war. He exemplifies the utilitarian answer to the trolley problem you ment...
This post is in Main and not Discussion so I can get some clarification on what belongs in Main and what belongs in Discussion, and also because of what looks like a demand for more non-meta posts in Main. I'd be happy to move it to Discussion if people think this is too short or doesn't have enough citations or something to be in Main.
I would expect some more "meat" from a Main post; for example, some hard empirical data that points to the effectiveness of thinking without internal censors -- assuming that anyone had ever studied this issue, of course.
Fair. Ordinarily I would've given examples, but given the nature of the subject...
Edit: I think this point is more important than I originally thought and have moved the post to Discussion accordingly.
I approve of this post being in Main and I approve of your accommodation to the appearance of that demand and I approve of your testing what might be but I hope are not the boundaries of what people want to see in Main.
If your point is that the best way to achieve the terminal values of a superhero is to have instrumental values of a supervillain, then you better offer a way to cope with the unreliable wetware your utility computation runs on.
I am not saying it's not fun. Note, however, that it is reasonably easy to let go of your morals once in a controlled way, just to see what other options are available, and then return to your moral ways if you find nothing acceptable. It's much harder to do it repeatedly. It's harder yet to go back to the status quo if you actually took one of the darker paths for the greater good, "just this once".
Thinking like a super-villain is the wrong advice to give to this demographic since it will prime them for counter-productive patterns of behaviour that work in fiction.
I think this is just a limitation of comic book superheroes. They desire public recognition. In other traditions with analogous figures, particularly religion, being reviled is just another burden to be taken on by the hero. (Although this sometimes happens in comic books too. See the recent Batman movies.) I especially like the Tibetan Buddhist concept of "crazy wisdom." Tibetan folk heroes spend a lot of time shocking people out of their complacency and generally acting like supervillains. But it's all in the name of universal compassion. (Google "Drukpa Kunley" for a particularly entertaining example.)
I was once asked whether I would rather be a superhero or a supervillain, and I probably shouldn't tell you how little time it took for me to answer "supervillain."
One of the defining psychological characteristics of supervillains is the desire to defeat death. Count me in.
So are there good comics that have the protagonists thinking like supervillains and pull off something interesting? There's a bunch of supervillains-as-antiheroes stuff of course, but that doesn't seem to stretch that hard against story conventions. The interesting stuff has the protagonists actually successfully carry out good intentions using supervillain style problem solving. Unfortunately, it's hard to serialize a comic where problems actually get properly solved very far, and pathologically serializable comics rule the market.
Alan Moore's Miracleman, started in 1982, is probably the archetypal example of completely ignoring the concern of being able to write and sell the book five years from now when writing the plot. The superman will fix your planet and your children and you and he knows he knows better than you. And it ends up mostly working out okay. Neil Gaiman actually started an interesting looking arc from where Moore left off, with earth having become weird, but the series got cancelled before it got completed.
Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme miniseries for Marvel in 1985 had a superhero group start fixing things and ended up making everything dystopic. J. M. Stracz...
If this gets upvoted highly, I will update in favor of LessWrong continuing to become more in-group-y, more cutesy, and less attached-to-actual-change-y. It's becoming so much delicious candy!
This is a persuasive argument that thinking like a superhero is bad. I notice that you haven't said anything about how supervillains think, much less argued that we should emulate them. Consider changing the title, maybe? The current one is eye-catching but inaccurate.
For example, on Facebook, Eliezer recently mentioned a thread where people were posting examples of things that they valued at a billion dollars or more, such as their cats. With a supervillain module running in the background, I noticed and pointed out that this constituted a thread where people publicly described how they could be ransomed. I can't exactly test this, but I don't think this kind of idea would have occurred to me before I installed the supervillain module.
I don't generally think of any of my thought processes in terms of supervillainy, ...
Large part of this comes from the fact that superheros rely on their special power whilst super-villains have to make do with more conventional means (intelligence), so this is largely fictional evidence.
In the real world I would not bet on Hitler/Stalin/Mao against Churchill, given the same resources. But to your point part of Churchill's power was understanding people (at least certain kind of people) - he called Hitler's end-game very early and against the prevailing political opinion at the time.
A supervillian who is trying to help is an anti-hero or anti-villain. That's not what I normally think of when I think of a "supervillain".
And if people are going to turn against you once you start actually optimizing, you might as well just be a supervillain to begin with.
Why? You might be able to build a better power base by acting as a hero.
I think you'd build the best power base by acting as a capitalist. Superpowers work for one thing, but you can buy anything with money. That includes other superpowers, so long as you're not the only on...
This is a really good post and (not but) it was smart to put it in Discussion. That said I think "thinking like a supervillain" also limits what you can and can't think and thinking like neither is likely to be more optimal.
But that's not being a supervillain, is it? That's being an ANTI-HERO.
I get what the article is saying (don't let your thinking become lazy by not going where conventional morality doesn't allow, even if that's what puts other people at ease and makes you accepted), but you're not advocating becoming a supervillain - abandoning all morality for selfish gain.
What you are saying that being an anti hero is better than a regular hero, ie. it is better to face possible orchestration for the sake of doing the truly right things and getting results.
What your say...
The most limiting thing that you have not pointed out is that as a Superhero, you want to save the world. Saving the world [from supervillains] is by definition reactive. A Supervillain's goals have much more room for variation, and one could argue that Supervillains actually are optimizing the world, it just happens to be sub-optimal for everyone else.
But that's not being a supervillain, is it? That's being an ANTI-HERO.
I get what the article is saying (don't let your thinking become lazy by not going where conventional morality doesn't allow, even if that's what puts other people at ease and makes you accepted), but you're not advocating becoming a supervillain - abandoning all morality for selfish gain.
What you are saying that being an anti hero is better than a regular hero, ie. it is better to face possible orchestration for the sake of doing the truly right things and getting results.
What your say...
Some of the more sophisticated supervillains do have noble goals, but suffer from nothing more than an imbalance of coefficients in their utility function. For example, a non-supervillain who wants to prevent nuclear war might undertake public awareness campaigns, invent anti-ICBM defence technologies, run for office in order to implement disarmament policies, etc. A supervillain would enslave humanity instead, then rule with a titanium fist, ruthlessly eradicating any humans whose actions could conceivably increase the probability of nuclear war.
EDIT: the...
I rewrote my comment to more closely comply with the policy; if you still feel it is in violation, go ahead and delete it (not that I need to tell you that, of course).
This said, I disagree that my original comment listed any "identifiable targets". The comment policy brings up "people with purple eye color" as an example of potentially acceptable fictional targets; IMO, the targets I listed are no more specific than that.
See also: Everything I Needed To Know About Life, I Learned From Supervillains
Mr. Malfoy would hardly shrink from talk of ordinary murder, but even he was shocked - yes you were Mr. Malfoy, I was watching your face - when Mr. Potter described how to use his classmates' bodies as raw material. There are censors inside your mind which make you flinch away from thoughts like that. Mr. Potter thinks purely of killing the enemy, he will grasp at any means to do so, he does not flinch, his censors are off.
A while back, I claimed the Less Wrong username Quirinus Quirrell, and started hosting a long-running, approximate simulation of him in my brain. I have mostly used the account trivially - to play around with crypto-novelties, say mildly offensive things I wouldn't otherwise, and poke fun at Clippy. Several times I have doubted the wisdom of hosting such a simulation. Quirrell's values are not my own, and the plans that he generates (which I have never followed) are mostly bad when viewed in terms of my values. However, I have chosen to keep this occasional alter-identity, because he sees things that would otherwise be invisible to me.
I was once asked whether I would rather be a superhero or a supervillain, and I probably shouldn't tell you how little time it took for me to answer "supervillain."
Being a superhero sounds awful, at least if you intend to keep being recognized as a superhero. Superheroes are bound by the chains of public opinion. A superhero can only do what people generally agree is good for superheroes to do. If you stray too far off the beaten path in search of how best to use your superpowers to actually save the world, you could easily end up doing things that look, at first glance, somewhat to incredibly evil. And if people are going to turn against you once you start actually optimizing, you might as well just be a supervillain to begin with. They look like they're having more fun anyway.
You probably won't get the chance to decide between being a superhero or a supervillain, but you do get the chance to decide what kind of person you think of yourself as, and I think you should think of yourself more as a supervillain than as a superhero. Why?
In the same way that being a superhero limits what you can do, thinking of yourself as a superhero limits what you can think. And if you want to save the world, you can't afford to limit what you can think. Humanity faces many difficult problems, and the space of possible solutions to any one of these problems is large. If you have censors in your mind that are preventing you from looking at parts of this space because some of your moral intuitions don't like them ("that's not the kind of thing a superhero would do!"), you're crippling your ability to search for solutions to problems. For example, your moral intuitions are likely to flinch away from solutions to problems that involve you causing bad things to happen but be okay with solutions to problems that involve you failing to prevent bad things from happening (think of the trolley problem, or Batman's policy of not killing his enemies).
Edit (2/19): But thinking of yourself as a supervillain has the opposite effect. It's easier not to flinch at certain kinds of ideas, which now come more easily to mind and may not have otherwise occurred to you. For example, on Facebook, Eliezer recently mentioned a thread where people were posting examples of things that they valued at a billion dollars or more, such as their cats. With a supervillain module running in the background, I noticed and pointed out that this constituted a thread where people publicly described how they could be ransomed. I can't exactly test this, but I don't think this kind of idea would have occurred to me before I installed the supervillain module. (This is a tame example. I won't give less tame examples for obvious reasons.)
There are many things you can't say, but you don't have to say everything you think. Until someone discovers a technique for reliably reading human minds, think whatever thoughts best help you accomplish your goals without worrying about any moral labels they may or may not, upon reflection, ultimately warrant. Moral labels are for a later step in the decision process than the part where you generate ideas.