This is not going to make too much sense to anyone, but one of the defining moments of my life (among many) arrived when playing Fable. I was on a tiny beach with a pier... looking out at the horizon: a pure, Platonic ideal of horizon, a line that transported me because it wasn't just a line. It must have been this serene power of one line and a few splashes of color to become a "real" place; I felt a moment of awe at nature. We can find nature and even Nature in math. I thought, "That means something. I have to remember it."

Why is chess still so much more popular among boys and men? It seems the most common thing girls and women say about chess is that they want to learn the rules, or the rules are complicated, or they think they remember the rules but want to brush up. Most boys and men seem to just know, and I actually can't remember struggling with the rules. That isn't an intelligence difference, but it's some sort of orientation difference. If I had only played 3 games of chess ever, then yes, my comment about the game might include the rules. But after a dozen games, I don't think anyone struggles with the rules at all, or very very little, and only some rare detail like "en passant" that frankly you could spend a lifetime of playing never thinking about and it would be fine (though I'd be extremely surprised if you never bumped into that rule in a lifetime of playing, now, thanks to the internet and so on).

I think most of us understand on an intuitive level that chess is more popular with boys/men because of its heads-up competitive nature. We can sense that it is a little bit like the bucks fighting over a doe. How much of this sense is literary metaphor, how much societal expectation, and how much evolved instinct - I'm not sure anyone can say or quantify precisely.

But here is a clue. Bobby Fischer was without a doubt one of the greatest, most ingenious, most accomplished players in chess history. What motivated him to play? His answer is famous: "I like the moment I crush a man's ego."

That isn't something I like. I've often suspected I'm not very good at chess partly because I'm just not that into beating people. Motivation is missing to get so good that I reliably crush egos. And I've heard many girls and women say similar things. (On psychology tests, I tend tend to come up as rather feminine and also as a bit less sadistic/psychopathic than average. I actually am just "nicer by nature," it seems, at least a little bit.)

Sadism is a normal component of human nature. We might want to deny this and claim we are not ourselves sadistic, not one little bit, but I guarantee you that you are at least one little bit. When people mock others, when they feel good because someone failed, when they tear down the rich and famous, when they feel satisfaction as the bad guy gets it at the end of the movie - these are all instances of normal levels of sadism. You are enjoying someone else's suffering. Maybe you feel that's good and justified or normal and ok - I didn't make a value judgment, but you are enjoying someone's suffering, and that capacity goes by the name of sadism. Even just insulting someone when you're angry with them is evidence of normal levels of sadism.

Men tend to be a little more sadistic on average - most people are willing to recognize that testosterone plays a role in this (as I suspect it does, but I freely admit there are many uncertainties and I defer to current and future science). And when you think about it, competition and sadism must be related. If you felt total empathy for your competitors, it wouldn't seem to matter who won or lost - you'd want them to win. Hell, you might even help them by giving up. If they want it so badly, sure, they can have it. Then you can appreciate that they are happy.

And that's why girls and women are not often as good at chess as boys and men are.

We aren't supposed to say, now, that girls and women "aren't competitive" - and after all, that isn't even true. But testosterone does drive (some of) competition and it does lower empathy and it probably contributes to sadism - to what Bobby Fischer craved as he studied and practiced so hard to beat everyone else at chess.

There's even another related angle, here. Women almost universally talk about how much they like a guy who can make them laugh. And indeed, surveys show most people, regardless of gender, rate humor highly in a romantic partner. But why do women talk about this so much, as if it mattered more than everything else?

Most things that women especially like in men, when you look at them, correlate with testosterone and resource provision.

Think about the funniest comedians. Many of them are men. Not all of them. That would be stereotyping. And saying women can't be great comedians - sexist and untrue. But there's an imbalance.

Think about what comedians say to make people laugh.

There's a correlation between funniness and meanness. And there's a correlation between meanness and testosterone. And there's a correlation between testosterone and gender.

Women seem to like funny guys so much not just because it makes them feel good to laugh (surely that is about equally true of everyone), but because people with more testosterone will be a bit meaner on average, and one fallout of that is that they will be a bit funnier on average. It's much the same with confidence. Higher testosterone tends to boost confidence. Women tend to suffer from lower confidence not just because the deck is stacked against them, which is true, but also because lower testosterone correlates with less confidence.

This is something we instinctively know. Confident people are "winners." They're confident because they can get away with being less careful, more carefree. Why can they get away with it? Because they are valued by others, perhaps even feared. Why valued and feared? Because they have won more battles, they have gained status, they have higher testosterone, which boosts their confidence and lowers their concern about what others think, because they can afford to not worry about it.

I think two reasons we let dark triad types assume leadership roles come down to the stresses of responsibility for others and anxiety about shame. We may see the flaws of a leader, may even think there's something quite wrong with them, but it's easy to let someone else have the responsibility and deal with the shame of mistakes.

Unfortunately, this leads to people who either feel no shame or are good at covering up their missteps - or both - taking on many of the leadership roles. We even have the feeling that they're especially good at leading and are "natural born leaders."

In my opinion, a good first step would be to try to stop identifying people as - stop tying their identity strictly to the categories of - "leaders" and "followers." Barack Obama is clearly a political leader, as a former president of the US. But there are many areas in which he is no leader at all - is he a leader as a surgeon, a submarine captain, an astronaut, a pastry chef? - and even in this preeminent sense he is no longer the leader, either. So is he "a leader" or "a follower"? Even in examples that should be as clear as day - the President of the United States of America (and in my opinion a very good one) - that isn't so cut and dry as we assume or pretend.

If we recognize that everyone encompasses "leader" and "follower," we put responsibility back where it belongs: in the hands of each individual, for themselves and how they affect others.

Maybe no one is listening to you; but if you're ahead of your time and you say it well, you're still a leader. Even if what you say is obvious and ancient, if others are ignoring it - and you know it's important - and you go on saying the truth, then things will come around, and you were in some sense a leader.

This is a way I operate and I see it as "leadership" but do not care about the word.

I do, however, perceive some blind spots and over-categorization going on.

Let's try to dissolve the leader/follower dogma a little.

We live in a democracy - that's what we like to believe, and we should cultivate even more of an advanced democracy emulation than we have by recognizing that everyone's got some leader and follower in them, and this is healthy and good for everyone. What's unhealthy is shoving people into one category or another and trying to keep them there all the time.

No one likes to talk about the fact we might all be predetermined in every single thing we do, or about how the concept of free will doesn't make a lot of sense at all.

It's pretty goddamn consequential, as far as ideas go. (That might be a slight pun. Sorry.)

I believe in free will, but I don't even know what that means!

The way I imagine it, roughly, is like a Choose Your Own Adventure. The universe is largely deterministic, but there are branchings. We don't know how they'll turn out. We have clues, sometimes. There's probably a hell of a lot of branching, once you include all your choices and mine and everyone else's and all the animals and so on.

There's a concept called "info scent." It's the impression you get about where a path will lead before you follow it.

I think that's essentially what consciousness is.

The purpose of consciousness is to supply a will with info scent.

The will is capable of branching the universe. The forks start small as little molecular jitters. A neuron fires or doesn't. A muscle twitches or doesn't. You get the general idea.

If there is a God, I think of God as a game designer. There wouldn't be much in terms of "what God wants" and "what God doesn't want." It's *all* part of the design, even though the design includes many choices for you to customize your path and experience.

This may sound silly or non-scientific, and maybe it's both, but I think it's a legitimate question science could try to answer. If we seriously believe this could all be a simulation, then we can just as seriously ask if a sentience put that simulation together with a design in mind.

I don't have an opinion. I don't know. But if there *is* a God, that's my opinion of what it would be like.

And maybe I do have an opinion. The fact we're already, not many years after the first computers, simulating universes in code strongly suggests to me that this is part of a reproductive capacity in the universe—for universes.

So that's the crazy way I see game design: as the forebear of something that might be greater than our wildest dreams.

It might take millions of years. And it might take traveling, say, to a black hole to seed a new universe with custom rules someone has chosen.

But I can imagine the possibility. Can't you?

When we try to explain the universe and its meaning, we're always talking about what came before. What was the intention. Who put this here. What's outside. Is there anything else.

The fact is we don't know. It's quite rational to be an atheist—to say "these religions with their gods do not add up, so I reject them"—and also an agnostic—to say "really I must admit that there's a lot I don't know, or only suspect or believe from limited experience."

What about what comes after? If we do not know who or what—if anything—prompted this bubble of spacetime with its specific code, we also don't know who or what might emerge from what we're seeing now.

I'm not convinced that this universe was *not* created, because we have empirical evidence of humans creating universe-like structures that could, in theory, run in any universe-stuff anywhere, or, in other words, on any substance with the properties of a Universal Turing Machine.

It's starting to look more believable that the universe was created by a supersentience somewhere, somewhen. If we can write code that blossoms into potential universes, then so can someone else. And if someone else can, then someone might have done so for us already, and put us here—intentionally or not. Most likely they wouldn't know exactly what would happen, but they might've had suspicions.

After all, isn't that one possible meaning of life? A growth toward recreating not just life but the conditions for life? And ultimately not just the conditions for life, but maybe even the parameters for a universe or universes?

It has not been mentioned much, because there's a stigma among science-educated people against intelligent design. But in the same breath that says "We could all be running in a simulation on some machine" we can also understand "These patterns or the conditions giving rise to this broad class of patterns might have been designed—selected from infinite possibility—by an external intelligence."

You can't really have it both ways. You can't say "this might be a simulation, and we wouldn't know the difference" and "intelligent design is a total intellectual abomination in every sense."

No, we don't need to posit a helicopter parent of a creator to explain the incredible diversity of lifeforms on Earth. That seems to come with evolution and time. So from that angle, intelligent design appears to be bunk. At the same time, I recognize I am simply giving an opinion, and largely parroting more expert opinion on biological evolution as is already known to occur.

But this thought was not about intelligent design or evolution, per se, but rather about the possibility that when we look for "meaning" in the universe, we are looking backwards. Teleology is a no-no in many scientific explanations, but if a thing leads to another thing—especially if the reaction could be reversible—then can you really disconnect the two in meaning? That is, if I hit a drum and the drum sounds, can I say the sound of the drum has no bearing on the meaning of hitting the drum? It seems to me that when I hit the drum, I sound out its meaning. What follows—not what precedes—most determines the meaning of the moment.