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.
Finally, this dire warning: Concretely imagining worlds much better than your present-day real life, may suck out your soul like an emotional vacuum cleaner. (See Seduced by Imagination.) Fun Theory is dangerous, use it with caution, you have been warned.
An obvious application of Fun Theory is its use in designing virtual worlds that suck out other people's souls for fun and profit! Then donating that to optimal charity to make up for disutility. Enslave the irrational for the greater good!
How do you manage to make being a good author or game designer interested in philanthropy sound so ... evil?
(playing a simple caricature is much easier, but Voldemort does not strike me as such)
Why thank you, I do try.
One of the things I've noticed is that, for the most part, people play characters that think like they do.
Except for stealing everything that isn't nailed down you mean?
To step out of character, my regular account has 2000+ karma on LW and I don't think I've been acused of sociopathy before. I guess I'm just that good at hiding it.
(Older well known RP accounts (ala Clippy) don't really seem to be attracting much attention from them though. Perhaps I should get myself a regular account?)
It seems Lucid fox has a point. LW isn't that heavily dominated by US based users, also dosen't it seem wise for LW users to try and avoid such uses when thinking of difficult problems of ethics or instrumental rationality?
Correct, though I prefer to think of it as using another man's head to run a viable enough version of me so that I may participate in the rationalist discourse here.
I hate to repeat myself but let me ease your mind.
Ha ha ha. I find it amusing that you should ask me of all people about this.
Only I can live forever. - is a powerful ethical argument if there is a slim but realistic chance of you actually achieving this.
...or perhaps just the raw materials for another horcrux.
Despite the risk of cluttering I even made a posts who's only function was to clear up ambiguity:
Ah, even muggles can be sensible occasionally.
I thought it was more than probable the vast majority of readers here would be familiar with me. Pe...
I'm just not sure if you really mean it when you say you'd trade 28 mortal lives for a single immortal one.
Ha ha ha. I find it amusing that you should ask me of all people about this. I'd push a big red button killing through neglect 28 cute Romanian orphans if it meant a 1% or 0.5% or even 0.3% chance of revival in an age that has defeated ageing. It would free up my funds to either fund more research, or offer to donate the money to cryopreserve a famous individual (offering it to lots of them, one is bound to accept, and him accepting would be a publ...
Taken at face value, the comments above are those of a sociopath. This is so not because this individual is willing to sacrifice others in exchange for improved odds of his own survival (all of us do that every day, just by living as well as we do in the Developed World), but because he revels in it. It is even more ominous that he sees such choices as being inevitable, presumably enduring, and worst of all, desirable or just. Just as worrisome is the lack of response to this pathology on this forum, so far.
The death and destruction of other human beings i...
There are more malnourished people in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa
At least in the IT and call centre industries in the United States, "India" is synonymous with "cheap outsourcing bastards who are stealing our jobs." Quite a few customers are actively hostile towards India because they "don't speak English", "don't understand anything", and are "cheap outsourcing bastards who are stealing proper American jobs".
I absolutely hate this idiocy, but it's a pretty compelling case not to try and use ...
Ah, even muggles can be sensible occasionally.
Unfortunately, I came installed with a fairly broken evaluator of chances, which tends to consistently evaluate the probability of X happening to person P differently if P = me than if it isn't, all else being equal... and it's frequently true that my evaluations with respect to other people are more accurate than those with respect to me.
Then work towards the immortality of another. Dedicate your life to it.
You have not considered this thoroughly.
What are 28 mortal lives for one that is immortal? If I was asked to choose between the life of some being that shall live for thousands of years or the lives of thirty something people who shall live perhaps 60 or 70 years, counting the happy productive hours of life seems to favour the long lived. Of course they technically also have a tiny chance of living that long, but honestly what are the odds that absent any additional investment (which will have the opportunity cost of other short lived people), they have ...
They eventually do. But they often start with an origin story that makes little sense and during the story they often end up becoming stronger and stronger right up until the end.