It's a bad analogy because there are different kinds of games, but only one kind of small talk? If you don't think pub talk is a different game than a black tie dinner, well, you've obviously never played. Why do people do it? Well, when you beat a video game, you've beat a video game. When you win at social interaction, you're winning at life - social dominance improves your chances of reproducing.

As for rule books: the fact that the 'real' rules are unwritten is part of the fun. Of course, that's true for most video games. Pretty much any modern game's real tactics come from players, not developers. You think you can win a single StarCraft match by reading the manual? Please.

do you personally find these status and alliance games interesting? Why?

They're way more interesting than video games, for example. Or watching television. Or numerous other activities people find fun and engaging. Of course, if you're bad at them you aren't going to enjoy them; the same goes for people who can't get past the first stage of Pac-Man.

I'm several days late answering, but FWIW, I scored a 30 but only checked off one of the five diagnostic questions. I've never had my IQ tested as an adult.

I do obsessively pursue my chosen interests but given that one of those is language, I don't have the social / verbal awkwardness. I don't -like- social situations but I can function just fine in them.

I have no such knowledge, but allow me to add "better recording and rewatching options" to the list of candidates. Ready access to the backlog is certainly a factor in the success of serials in webcomics over newspaper comics, for example. (Yes, there are serials in both, but they are the norm in webcomics and the exception in print.)

I have always been curious about the effects of mass-death on human genetics. Is large scale death from plague, war, or natural-disaster likely to have much effect on the genetics of cognitive architecture, or are outcomes generally too random? Is there evidence for what traits are selected for by these events?

Yay! Congrats!

Not sure about "tl;dr", though!

Isn't that what I say when I skip your non-abstracted article...? ;-)

I don't know much about computers but it makes sense that spam is easily confused with legitimate information. I myself have noticed that over the years there has been a vast increase of the link farm sites and find it equally increasingly annoying.

Thanks for the info.

The relevant uses on LW of the "psychological unity of humankind" concept were:

1. As evidence of common human axiology, i.e. that there are few truly persistent moral disagreements once some kind of "idealization" like volition extrapolation is applied

2. As the explanation for why it is hard for us to imagine non-human minds, since all human minds are so similar

As for (1), I think that it is refuted by an argument of Greene and Haidt: human moral architecture is universal in form, but its function is to absorb the local morality in youth, i.e. morality is universal in form but local in content.

As for (2), the cognitive differences that we do in fact see in people around the world are clearly not big enough to make a well-traveled person unsurprised by the concept of a paperclip maximizer.

Autism in general affects four times as many men than women in the general population; but I've noticed that a surprisingly high proportion of the autistic "public figures" - given that ratio - are women. Temple Grandin, for instance, may be the most famous person with autism around; and a majority of the autism bloggers I've run across are female. I don't know why this is.

Wow! I haven't got any questions (yet) but I am very eager to dive into this Q&A. Thanks to everyone involved in organizing this.

By the way, you spelled Steve SailEr's name wrong.