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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Think Like a Supervillain - Less Wrong
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Comments (111)
Discussing this example in public constitutes failing at supervillainy forever.
Encouraging others to be villains is a classic supervillain move.
Unfortunately, this is a recurring theme on LessWrong.
My point is that committing yourself to thinking "like a supervillain" is almost as inefficient as committing yourself to thinking "like a superhero". It's better to think like "a well-informed agent who makes optimal decisions".
Who do you think of when you think of well-informed agents who make optimal decisions?
Is this why people cheer for the thieves in heist movies?
As jooyous points out in a sibling comment, thieves in (some) heist movies come to mind. They don't steal things because that's what thieves are supposed to do, or because they set out to do the sneakiest thing possible, or whatever. Instead, they steal because they have done the research, and they believe that theft is the best way to acquire the wealth that they need in order to accomplish some other task (even after accounting for risk). They could of course be wrong about that, and, in movies, they often are; but they still make the best decision possible given the information available to them.
Other people either already possess the wealth, or can acquire it through other means; if these heist movie protagonists were all CEOs of Stark Industries, they wouldn't steal. They are thinking like optimizing agents, as opposed to thinking like thieves.
Another example is scientists and engineers like Sebastian Thrun (just to name a recent example). His goal is to reduce automotive fatalities. If he was thinking like a villain, he could've set out to ban cars, or shoot drunk drivers in the head, or whatever; instead, he created the self-driving car.
How well do you know Sebastian Thrun? Can you pretend to be him easily enough for your brain to start generating different kinds of ideas than it normally generates?
I don't know him personally at all, but the bit about his reasons for creating a self-driving car comes from one of the interviews he gave -- I'm not putting words in his mouth, or anything. He did say something to the extent of, "I wanted to save lives, so I embarked on this project".
Granted, he did not say, "I thought about shooting drunk drivers in the head, but, on reflection, this other way is more efficient". My point, though, is that (IMO) inventing a self-driving car is a very superhero-ish thing to do; in fact, Tony Stark does things like that every day (which is easy for him, what with being fictional and all). In this case, it happens to be an efficient solution to the problem, despite the fact that it aligns quite well with social mores.
Sorry, that comment didn't seem to have the desired effect. There is a paragraph that does not exist in the OP that I am pretending exists, and I should probably fix that. (Edit: Fixed.) My point is that the technique I'm suggesting is for you to pretend to be supervillains you like in order to come up with interesting ideas. You probably know the supervillains you like better than you know Sebastian Thrun, so I expect using supervillains to be more effective at generating interesting ideas than using Sebastian Thrun.
Yes, that sounds like a good idea :-)
I think I'll need to read that missing paragraph before I can properly respond.
I like quite a few supervillains, but I don't necessarily want to think like them. For example, I like Lex Luthor as he is presented in DCUO, but his thinking is demonstrably flawed and inefficient, due to some glaring mental biases and the aforementioned secrecy-induced positive feedback loops. I like him, but I want to think better than he does.
But it is quite likely that you were thinking of something else when you typed your comment...
I like MoR!Quirrell. (His superpower is his intelligence.)
Nobody. I'm not going to intentionally limit myself to imitating people that actually exist. And that I've heard of, no less.
I'm definitely not going to imitate fictional characters who bias their decision to whatever makes the story most interesting.
It's not as if you can choose not to imitate anybody. By default, you're imitating yourself. I've found imitating people other than myself to be a useful technique for generating ideas I wouldn't normally have thought of (which maybe I should have explicitly mentioned in the OP). What are your experiences with this technique?
By definition, either you trivially are imitating yourself or it is impossible to imitate yourself (if being yourself is mutually exclusive with imitating yourself).
If you imitate others, then by imitating others you are doing exactly what you do.
From this I take it that "let's shoot all these scientists in the head" is, by your reckoning, the most optimal solution under this scenario ? I personally don't believe so, but I could, of course, be wrong. Also, I realize full well that if you are truly committed to thinking like a supervillain, you will attempt to deceive me in your reply (should you choose to reply at all). But this exposes another problem with supervillainous thinking: it sets up a positive feedback loop in your own mind, which is rather difficult to break out of. This is part of the reason why Lex Luthor keeps trying to kill Superman instead of doing something (indeed, anything) more productive.
What he said sounds a lot more like "whether or not you plan to implement that idea, you shouldn't discuss it in public" than "that is a good idea that should be implemented, but we shouldn't discuss it in public."
That's a good point; I agree that I interpreted Qiaochu_Yuan's words somewhat uncharitably. That wasn't my intention.
On the other hand, as per my comment above, one problem with thinking like a proper supervillain is that you can't share your plans with anyone -- as you have pointed out. This makes it a lot more likely (though, of course, by no means certain) that you'd end up falling prey to your own mental biases, thus embarking on some highly inefficient and/or disastrous path by mistake.
Supervillainy seems perfectly compatible with having some plans that you can share on the internet where everyone can see them, and some plans that you can share with a few other particular people but not everyone, as well as plans that you can share with no one. Your point about the last category of plans is a very good one.