Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

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

If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.

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.

There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.

There's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness.

World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.