You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.

The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills.

If you've been cryocrastinating, putting off signing up for cryonics "until later", don't think that you've "gotten away with it so far". Many worlds, remember? There are branched versions of you that are dying of cancer, and not signed up for cryonics, and it's too late for them to get life insurance.

The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.

This is one of theprimary mechanisms whereby, if a fool says the sun is shining, we do notcorrectly discard this as irrelevant nonevidence, but rather find ourselvesimpelled to say that it must be dark outside.

Maybe you just can't protect people from certain specialized types of folly with any sane amount of regulation, and the correct response is to give up on the high social costs of inadequately protecting people from themselves under certain circumstances.

I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.