To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.

When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.

I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone’s reckless youth against them – just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn’t mean you should be permanently disqualified.

If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo - but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical - then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. Which is rather setting ourselves up for eternal disappointment, eh? If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed.

By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions - some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization - simply fail to exist in the first place.

Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.