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.
You don't want to think like just any old supervillain. Most of them have systematic flaws in their behavior too.
Sure, in the same way that if I wrote a post called "think like a scientist" about how you should test your hypotheses it would be reasonable to respond "you don't want to think like just any old scientist..."
See also: Everything I Needed To Know About Life, I Learned From Supervillains
-- Quirinus Quirrell
-- Quirinus_Quirrell
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.