Cyan: I cannot think of any strategy game where fog of war was a good idea. The surprise works well enough in FPS where people are actively trying to use that to outsmart each other, but in strategy games it's just stupid, and reduces fun of gaming. AI in strategy games universally ignores fog of war, so there's not even fun of using that as a cover.

I have no idea why you'd prefer not to know. Fun theory is mostly intuition, and my intuition says I really hate the feeling of loss of control that comes from not knowing important stuff, both in real life and while playing.

Another intuition is that irreversible decisions based on incomplete data feel horrible, in real life and while playing. Like deciding what temple to build in a city in Rome Total War without having any idea which one will be useful 30 turns from now when it starts to matter.

Economic Weirdtopia: Market is so efficient that nobody has to work, and everybody's basic needs can be sustained by just asking any charity. This prosperity hyperactivates everybody's social status chasing instincts, so people work harder and longer than ever, feeling inadequate if they don't earn more than their peers, and spending most of what they earn on making their 3d virtual avatars look better than other people's 3d virtual avatars.

Sexual Weirdtopia: Reproduction is completely separated from sex, children are taken care of by free market and government services with just token parental involvement, and all STDs all eliminated. This first leads to everybody having sex with everybody else, but people got bored with vanilla sex soon and many sexual identification based on shared sexual fetishes emerge. They replace religions, languages, citizenships and ethnicities as leading in/out-group indicators, and somehow Middle East is still in endemic state of war, now between guro and furry.

Governmental Weirdtopia: Government knows everything about everybody, but doesn't abuse it because everybody knows about everything it does. Universal transparency makes corruption impossible, so people are no longer interested in governing or lobbying and governments atrophy with time.

Cognitive Weirdtopia: Combination of efficient search and prediction markets made all knowledge easily available, so all schools shut down. People don't even learn basic mathematics any more, as easily available mathematical coprocessors for brains do that more efficiently and without prevalent human biases. People find themselves a niche hobby that wasn't explored yet and learn everything about that yet. If they're lucky it might get popular later and they'll make decent money in prediction market out of it.

Evolutionary argument against human enhancements is at the same time completely true and really really weak when you look closer at it.

In the most explicit form it would go something like "there are no easy ways without significant side effects to change a human being in a way that would make him produce more children while raised in a hunter-gatherer tribe in a Pleistocene savanna". Making kids in hunter-gatherer environment is what evolution optimized for, it didn't care about intelligence, health or anything unless it significantly contributed to making more kids in this particular environment.

Now we have different environment, different goals, different costs, and different materials to work with. Humans are not even close to being optimized to this environment. Evolution barely did a few quick patches (like lactose tolerance) to make humans good at making kids in primitive agricultural villages, not only did it not adapt humans to current environment, it never adapted anything to a goal other than "making as many kids as possible in a resource-constrained environment", hardly what we're trying to do.

For example using any improvement whatsoever is a possible without breaking this argument if it uses more resources, according to their availability in stone age. What happens to be the case with pretty much every single proposed enhancement.

Can we have links to research on impact of television, Internet etc. on happiness etc.? This sounds interesting.

There's nothing wrong with going slow. OB generates valuable blog posts at a rate faster than any blog I know, even if it slowed down considerably it would still be a very good blog.

Speed doesn't matter that much on the Internet - you're not writing about politics or the latest Apple gadgets, so value of your blog posts lasts a very long time.

I think Star Trek TNG did a really good job at presenting alien protagonist culture. While most aliens were flanderized, Federation had a rich culture that was quite unlike modern human culture, with post-scarcity economy, Prime Directive and happy exploration as the main goal.

It probably didn't make a very good story, as DS9 make Federation a lot more human. It improved storytelling, but I still miss TNG Federation and its alien ways.