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.
Finally, this dire warning: Concretely imagining worlds much better than your present-day real life, may suck out your soul like an emotional vacuum cleaner. (See Seduced by Imagination.) Fun Theory is dangerous, use it with caution, you have been warned.
An obvious application of Fun Theory is its use in designing virtual worlds that suck out other people's souls for fun and profit! Then donating that to optimal charity to make up for disutility. Enslave the irrational for the greater good!
(playing a simple caricature is much easier, but Voldemort does not strike me as such)
Why thank you, I do try.
One of the things I've noticed is that, for the most part, people play characters that think like they do.
Except for stealing everything that isn't nailed down you mean?
To step out of character, my regular account has 2000+ karma on LW and I don't think I've been acused of sociopathy before. I guess I'm just that good at hiding it.
(Older well known RP accounts (ala Clippy) don't really seem to be attracting much attention from them though. Perhaps I should get myself a regular account?)
It seems Lucid fox has a point. LW isn't that heavily dominated by US based users, also dosen't it seem wise for LW users to try and avoid such uses when thinking of difficult problems of ethics or instrumental rationality?
Correct, though I prefer to think of it as using another man's head to run a viable enough version of me so that I may participate in the rationalist discourse here.
I hate to repeat myself but let me ease your mind.
Ha ha ha. I find it amusing that you should ask me of all people about this.
Only I can live forever. - is a powerful ethical argument if there is a slim but realistic chance of you actually achieving this.
...or perhaps just the raw materials for another horcrux.
Despite the risk of cluttering I even made a posts who's only function was to clear up ambiguity:
Ah, even muggles can be sensible occasionally.
I thought it was more than probable the vast majority of readers here would be familiar with me. Perhaps I expect too much of them. I do that sometimes expect too much of people, it is arguably one of my great flaws.
I'm just not sure if you really mean it when you say you'd trade 28 mortal lives for a single immortal one.
Ha ha ha. I find it amusing that you should ask me of all people about this. I'd push a big red button killing through neglect 28 cute Romanian orphans if it meant a 1% or 0.5% or even 0.3% chance of revival in an age that has defeated ageing. It would free up my funds to either fund more research, or offer to donate the money to cryopreserve a famous individual (offering it to lots of them, one is bound to accept, and him accepting would be a publicity boost) or perhaps just the raw materials for another horcrux.
Also why employ children in the example? Speaking of adults the idea seemed fine, children should probably be less of a problem since they aren't fully persons in exactly the same measure adults are no? It seems so attractive to argue to argue that killing a child costs the world more potential happy productive man years, yet have you noted that in many societies the average expected life span is so very low mostly because of the high child mortality? A 20 year old man in such a society has already passed a "great filter" so to speak. This is probably true in many states in Africa. And since we are on the subject...
There are more malnourished people in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa, yet people always invoke an African example when wishing to "fight hunger". This is true of say efforts to eradicate malaria or making AIDS drugs affordable or "fighting poverty" or education intiatives, ect. I wonder why? Are they more photogenic?Does helping Africans somehow signal more altruism than helping say Cambodians? I wonder.
They eventually do. But they often start with an origin story that makes little sense and during the story they often end up becoming stronger and stronger right up until the end.