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.