By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.

Ukraine is doing both at an increasingly absurd scale, all the while people wave their flag-of-the-week in their social media profile, either aloof of what they support or seeing no problem with it.

The same was probably, more or less the same, during slavery. People adopting views based on tribe rather than any real thought or even knowledge of what they support. The overwhelming majority of everybody obviously never owned a slave and likely had an idealized view of the institution.

Your mind, body, and any skill will deteriorate over time if not regularly trained, so it must become a part of your life.

And because of this, the answer is easy - do what is permanently and realistically sustainable for yourself. It doesn't matter what's best when you're only going to really keep with things that are personally satisfying for yourself.

They are not a reliable source.

So we get entertainers and silver tongued devils for politicians whose primary skillset tends to overlap heavily with that of conmen.

Speaking of figures with no mainstream appeal, Plato wrote extensively, and utterly prophetically, about this phase of democracy in The Republic, and how it will inevitably lead to tyranny. It's playing out as if from a script.

But they don't come with the freedom that gig jobs do which is their primary appeal.

E.g. 'File not found' vs 'Sorry I could not find the file you were looking for.' Same stuff, but one just adds an artificial and unnecessary anthropomorphization.

He believes people would simply change their values, but I think this is an incorrect assumption, as the example should make obvious.

Obviously it's an extreme example but many of the norms of a Western mindset would be no less offensive to billions of people in this world.

What bias of moderation exists is that you probably wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already mostly ok with their values.

And if e.g. economic opportunity drove you there you'd probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would fundamentally change.

I will only add - I speak from experience here.

And essentially all of species related biology would be a 'social construct' by such logic. The difference between entire species is often poorly defined. Different species can even interbreed and produce fertile offspring such as a liger. Or take the Australian Dingo which is literally just a wild dog, but it's not classified as one for quite arbitrary reasons.

I think both genetics (personality, among endless other characteristics is significantly to majority heritable and going to have different distributions in different areas) and environment/culture play significant roles.

But an interesting thing is that by the time people are adults, perhaps even before, the environmental factors have irreversibly changed them so marginalising cultural factors as "just" environmental doesn't really paint a fair picture.

For a person who's happy to travel/live just about anywhere this makes having children doubly fun, because you basically get to decide the 'cultural mold' for your children, which is really neat!

We want religion, but we don't want it to be called religion. I'm not just mocking others either. I'm quite compelled by the simulation hypothesis, but have the self awareness to realize my personal biases are likely playing a huge role there.

A nice 'scientific hypothesis' that I can comfortably discuss or debate with the benefit that I can convince myself that when I close my eyes for the final time that's not necessarily the end of the journey. Ahhh feels good.

The reason the reflects on AAA games is because AAA in modern times is much more about budget than depth or quality. AAA games are dumping massive amounts of money on titles with the hope of a quick turn-around, but sales for these games are increasingly meh, because the games are increasingly meh.

Even the same studios do a poor job of rehashing stuff. There are currently something like 10x as many players playing Skyrim as Starfield. It's quite pathetic.

So it makes perfect sense that contemporary AAA devs would have no idea it even existed.

That itself is fairly damning but what puts it over the top is that there are wayyyy more gamers nowadays than there were 16 years ago.

Modern AAA stuff is just simply pretty bad. Games made on a conveyor belt just don't work, at least beyond a point - and that point, wherever it may be, is well behind us for just about all AAA studios.