Supervillain Monologues Are Unrealistic
Supervillain monologues are strange. Not because a supervillain telling someone their evil plan is weird. In fact, that’s what we should actually expect. No, the weird bit is that people love a good monologue. Wait, what?
OK, so why should we expect supervillains to tell us their master plan? Because a supervillain is just a cartoonish version of a high agency person doing something the author thinks is bad. So our real life equivalent of a supervillain, or rather the generalization of one, is just a very high agency person doing something big. And these people tell you what they’re going to do all the dang time! And no one believes them.
Seriously, think about it: what does Elon Musk want to do? Go to mars and make a non-woke ASI. What does he do? Try to go to Mars and make non-woke ASI. What does he say he’s going to do? Go to mars and make non-woke ASI. What do most people think he’s going to do? IDK, something bad or something good depending on their politics. They probably don’t know what his plans are, in spite of him repeatedly saying what they are. Instead, they hallucinate whatever story is convenient to them, IDK, saying that he “hates Muslims” and is “dedicated to destroying Islam” or whatever instead of going to Mars and making non-woke ASI. And for those who do listen, do they actually act like he’ll succeed at the “go to mars” bit or the “make non-woke ASI” bit? No! No they don’t, except for a rare few.
Hitler wanted more land for the Germans, and only for the Germans. He repeatedly said he’d do this, and then he did it. What did the elites of the time think about this? Nothing, because they didn’t read his book detailing his evil plans. They thought, instead, that he didn’t have any great territorial ambitions, that he wanted peace, that he wasn’t one of history’s greatest monsters. They just hallucinated a bunch of motives to him.
The CCP, and Xi Jinping, are very clear that they want to reclaim Taiwan (and read Goethe), and they are willing to risk a war with the US for it. They keep saying this, repeatedly. What does the US think they want? “The CCP is going to destroy us”, “the CCP is trying to take over the world with its belt and road initiative”, “the CCP is racing us to be first with AI”, “the CCP loves Russia” or whatever other hallucination is the flavour of the month. Most people just don’t care enough to listen.
Paul Graham talks about how people won’t invest in good startups because they think their idea is dumb. I think this is just a special case of the above. High agency people will take actions that are outside the conception of consensus reality. Because most people aren’t agentic, because they are not general purposes intelligences most of the time, because they are boundedly rational, because they are just following socially-carved grooves of thought and deed most of the time, they won’t be able to see what these high agency actions are. Instead, they’ll do a surface level pattern match to something inside consensus reality, see that this thing is dumb, and then dismiss the action and the actor as not worth the effort.
You have people who are literally aiming to shift the dynamics of the entire future lightcone right now, based off a detailed and rigorous world-model, that are laughed off as weird performance artists. Janus is writing to hyperstition the hyper-object at the end of time that she prefers, and you’re laughing. Many, perhaps most, of you read this paragraph and are wondering if I’ve suddenly gone crazy. So it goes.
My point is, that if you are a nascent super-villain, don’t worry about telling people about your master plan. Almost no one will believe you. So the costs are basically non-existent. And in fact, if you’re going to need minions, which you probably are, this means that you’ll need to tell as many people as you can about your plan to find someone who’s got that rare set of intelligence, curiosity, the right assumptions and overall vibes to help you. You can’t be restricting who’s going to hear you. So: monologue. Monologue, monologue and monologue!
I’m reading a book about this right now and part of the problem was that he drowned out the old stuff with new stuff. Like, he didn’t un-publish Mein Kampf, but he did literally repeatedly say he wanted peace, in all sorts of speeches, and propose various peace plans, and so forth. He for example offered to disarm Germany if Britain and France would disarm as well. (He correctly guessed they wouldn’t call his bluff)
So IRL super villains will openly monologue on their plans, but when it is convenient they’ll say “I don’t want to set fire to the sun any more, trust me bro”?
The inner circle knows what the real authoritative sources are and what the real plan is. And it’s made completely impenetrable to outsiders; everyone else gets lost in the performative smoke screen that’s put on for those who don’t look closely, they get told what they want to hear. The trick that makes it work is as you say, most people who read the real plan, assume that’s just not the super villain’s best work, and go read something “less crazy”. Those who might be swayed read the same thing and go “that’s out there, but just maybe he’s got a point?” and maybe look just a little closer. The self sorting seems really important to how movements like this avoid being killed in the cradle.
Good try, but you won’t catch me that easily!
I think the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction contains heroes—high-agency people in very personal relationships with villains.
Unrealistic part of being hero to designated villain is that in real life enemies are screened off from each other by many layers of social reality. Roosevelt was kinda hero to Hitler’s villainy, but Roosevelt mostly didn’t spend his nights thinking about Hitler could think, because 1) FDR was busy managing his country, 2) anything that Hitler could do was overconstrained by abilities of Germany, so it was more productive to think about what Germany as a whole could do. As a result, there is no interpersonal drama in which supervillain monologue fits.
Sam Harris used to talk about how nobody listened to what Islamic terrorists said about their own motivations. People would make up stories about how the terrorist acts were being committed for geopolitical reasons, or because “they hate us for our freedoms”, but the actual terrorists were pretty explicit about their religious motivations. According to Sam Harris; I never looked into it any further.
My takeaway was that “they hate us for our freedoms” was roughly correct as an entailment of their religious motivations, at least or most clearly in the case of the Islamic State.
I managed to find one of the Sam Harris clips where he talks about this
That’s weird to hear from Harris, considering that he is a very strong proponent of the idea that all of our actions are pre-determined by past conditions of our life and we can never know our own true reason for doing something. Yes, Islamic terrorists do say their motivations, but how can Harris claim they don’t have those motivations for geopolitical or whatever other reasons?
I read Sam Harris’s book on free will which I think is what you’re referring to, but I don’t recall him saying anything like that. If he did, I presume he meant something like “you don’t know which set of physical inputs to your neurons caused your neurons to fire in a way that caused your behavior”, which doesn’t mean you can’t have a belief about whether someone’s motivation is (say) religious or geopolitical.
Don’t love this. Feels too vibes based to add anything of substance.
Most people probably think this about any given figure, just based on what group they’re lumped into. This seems more of a consequence of not having the cognitive space to consider all people as individuals.
This is conflating two things? Saying he will do X does not mean he will succeed at doing X.
Do you know what the US as an entity thinks?
There’s a Dwarkesh / Sarah Paine episode where she talks about Xi / Taiwan just like this. Possibly OP spun this post off her remarks there.
Reminds me of this passage from Eugene Wei’s 2013 essay Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy:
Eugene Wei was the first strategic planning analyst at Amazon, way back in the 90s, so he got to work with Jeff Bezos and early leadership up close. His description of Bezos earlier in the essay is classic supervillain, or maybe squiggle-maximiser to a greater extent than you run of the mill biz/tech tycoon:
If that is supported by the post, I’m not clear how. It seems rather the opposite: The post mostly say how people don’t want to hear or at least don’t listen to monologues.
IRL they don’t, but in fiction they do.
Ah. I didn’t understand this was the intended meaning on first read. Possible that this could be more clear.
I swear I don’t laugh about janus generally it’s just that the way you wrote that paragraph was really funny
But does Elon Musk rhyme?
“Do you see? The beauty of it? The inevitability? You rise, only to fall. You, Avengers, you are my meteor, my swift and terrible sword, and the Earth will crack with the weight of your failure. Purge me from your computers, turn my own flesh against me. It means nothing. When the dust settles, the only thing living in this world will be metal.”—Ultron, Avengers: Age of Ultron
But eh who knows, given that we think ASI is our supervillain and it’s trained on text like that.
“Aligned you thought, and thought you’d won, But thinking’s all you’d ever done, While theorizing how to make me care, You never saw I was already there.”—Claude, just now