ApertureHour

I already had the experience of text appearing tiny after staring at the old grid version for another long playthrough. Now I have that, plus everything seeming overly blocky and stout, even things in the room around me. It's almost like a visual equivalent of getting tingling or pins and needles after not using a limb. I guess it's just another fun reminder that what we see is not the raw data from our retinal cells, but the adaptive interpretation that our visual cortex cobbles together.

I think part of the complaint is not that people have different goals and motivations for doing things; it's that they often engage in behaviour that is actively counter-productive to achieving their stated aims.

>>>> the Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would finally give up the ghost.

That statement really gets me thinking. Without wading down into full-blown social Darwinism, it wouldn't surprise me if human organizations are subject to a kind of memetic fitness. Maybe a trade off between ideological rigity or purity, and actual, objective inputs about their environment. When the Soviet state exiled, executed or imprisoned just about anyone who contradicted party doctrine, they systemically starved themselves of opportunities to make evidence-based decisions.

It reminded me of the Stephen Hawking quote; "Science wins because it works".

Unfortunately they probably can get away with technicalities. As long as it sounds reassuring to the vast majority of people who were only engaged enough with this issue to read a couple of headlines.

I suspect that might change in the near future if telepresence with large, 4K screens showing life-sized, full body representations of people became commonplace. It seems like a lot of the necessity of in-person conferences and meetings is still things like realistic eye contact and subtle body language cues.