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Bugmaster comments on Think Like a Supervillain - Less Wrong
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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.)
I don't know enough about him yet to like or dislike him. His actions seem like they're smart and efficient, but it's hard to tell whether they truly are, since we don't know much about his true goals. Due to all the mystery about him, he feels less like a character and more like a plot device -- though I fully expect that to change in the chapters to come.
That said, intelligence is not MoR!Quirrel's only superpower. He is also an incredibly powerful wizard (at least, on his good days) in terms of sheer energy output (metaphorically speaking).