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.

In the end, everyone is the center of their own universe. We can mince words about it, but it's tough to care when you don't exist, and it's tough to exist when you let everyone and everything else go first.

This doesn't mean we must be egotistical. But we always feel through ourselves first. When we empathize enough, there's a suspension of disbelief, a virtual transmigration to another soul. Yet it's all read in through the screen of ourselves. Even when we forget who we are, and assume another's name and viewpoint, we feel through ourselves, and are ourselves.

The piece that's the same trick exactly

We all possess—or are possessed by—consciousness. There is physical matter—not exactly us, but temporarily in our system, temporarily ours. And (as I said) there is this odd informationally aware component—a component we all have, and I think it's even more the same stuff for all of us than the matter is. That is, we're made of mostly the same materials, but slightly different combinations. There are types of molecule or atom in you, no doubt, that are not in me, and vice versa. You or I might be taking a medication or have been exposed to an industrial pollutant, and so our matter is different enough. But our awareness I think arises from the same process. The contents of our awareness differ. But I think it's exactly the same principle that makes you and me aware. So in a strange way what we consider most different and unique—this feeling stuff—is on another level what's most identical.

Few things frustrate me more than reviews that take the attitude that everyone is stupid, or the person who made this is stupid, or both.

Get over yourself. God.

The smartest reviews almost always show an understanding of the intent, the craft, and the people who see something in it.

If you can't do that, you aren't reviewing, you're venting.