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.

Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can't do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY, you've got to let yourself do better than other people!

If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.

Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.

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

Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.

There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.