Think Like a Supervillain

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.

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 mentioned. He's totally ruthless, but for a just cause. And most importantly, he wins.

But don't try a plan that risky in real life. You're not a comic book villain and it probably won't work out.

Opportunities to kill a whole bunch of people, and actually accomplish more good than you could through alternative methods are rare. If you want to be awesome (virtue ethics), try to make yourself into the kind of badass consequentialist who could do that in the rare circumstance when it was a good idea. If you want good to win (genuine consequentialism) optimize your mind to correctly deal with the choices you encounter in real life, not the ones people deal with in cool stories.

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.

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.

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. Straczynski made a reboot Supreme Power starting 2003, which was reasonably fun but didn't end up going anywhere particularly status quo upending before petering out.

Warren Ellis has some stuff. His Stormwatch took a generic 90s comics superhero team in 1996 and turned them into a military unit filled with the standard issue Warren Ellis misanthrope characters, though they still stayed traditionally reactive. The spinoff Authority started in 1999 and upgraded the team into one that doesn't bat an eye at responding to a military dictatorship popping up somewhere by vaporizing the military dictator, and gave them some increasingly existential threat scale things to fight. Then other people continued the series and it got less interesting. Then the whole comic-book universe it was in had the world end or something and got eaten by DC Comics.

The Ultimates started in 2002 written by Mark Millar as a reboot of Marvel's Avengers for the Ultimate Marvel line. Millar had a cheerfully nihilistic view of the Avengers as basically a government unit used as big heavy stick of US foreign policy, and consisting of mentally ill superhumans who tend to cause massive collateral damage. Went very uneven after Millar's initial run.

Mark Waid's Incorruptible, started in 2009, has a supervillain have an existential crisis when his Superman analogue arch-enemy turns omnicidal maniac, and decide that he's going to become a hero to even things out. Mostly ends up a reasonably entertaining black comedy.

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.

There's a pen & paper roleplaying game being made about this.

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, and that idea occurred to me faster than I was able to read the next sentence in which you pointed it out. I just think of this as being an unconventional thinker.

On the other hand, "Think unconventionally" generally isn't a useful piece of advice for people who don't find themselves doing so already, whereas people may have better success modeling their behavior after the patterns of supervillains. It's unfortunate that we don't have a similarly handy pattern by which people can model unconventional thinkers who aren't known for being overwhelmingly destructive.

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 one with this strategy.

There are superheroes and supervillains who are filthy rich, but they always spend the money inefficiently on gadgets and stuff and do everything themselves. Delegate. The people who do it right aren't superheroes or supervillains. They're super philanthropists.

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.

Related: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=wisdom-from-psychopaths

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Psychopaths-Killers-Success/dp/0374291357

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 saying about superhero comics always preserving the status quo is true, although this also comes from their format - nothing FUNDAMENTAL ever changes in these comics, Aunt May will never die, Lex Luthor will never be killed or redeemed for good, characters age once they reach adulthood and so on. Marvel and DC are just locked into that kind of thinking where they constantly repeat and revamp the same stories.

On the other hand, we have our fair share of anti-heroes - guys who set themselves up as the villain to change the world (Lelouch), who put themselves to the frignes of society for just a small gain.

So don't be a supervillain. Be an anti hero.

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 saying about superhero comics always preserving the status quo is true, although this also comes from their format - nothing FUNDAMENTAL ever changes in these comics, Aunt May will never die, Lex Luthor will never be killed or redeemed for good, characters age once they reach adulthood and so on. Marvel and DC are just locked into that kind of thinking where they constantly repeat and revamp the same stories.

On the other hand, we have our fair share of anti-heroes - guys who set themselves up as the villain to change the world (Lelouch), who put themselves to the frignes of society for just a small gain.

So don't be a supervillain. Be an anti hero.

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.

Reminded me of this.

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 paragraph below was changed in order to avoid running afoul of the commenting policy.

The interesting thing about such villains is that their methods are often highly effective, and thus, potentially entirely justifiable. Let's imagine that, after careful reflection and lots of Bayesian updates, you became 99.999...% certain that you could usher the world into a peaceful and prosperous future simply by unilaterally killing off a few troublemakers (super-powered or just super-nasty) with your laser-eyes. Well, that, and installing a Panopticon-grade surveillance system to ensure that you don't miss any troublemakers by accident. And, naturally, instituting a massive awareness campaign to reduce the chances of troublemakers arising. Would you be able to convince yourself to not do all of that ?