Many Christians who’ve stopped really believing now insist that they revere the Bible as a source of ethical advice. The standard atheist reply is given by Sam Harris: “You and I both know that it would take us five minutes to produce a book that offers a more coherent and compassionate morality than the Bible does.”

Which makes the lottery another kind of sink: a sink of emotional energy.

If you get rid of the old outliers, the group position will shift, and someone else will become the oddball. If you eject them too, you’re well on the way to becoming a Bose-Einstein condensate and, er, exploding.

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change.

If you can find within yourself the slightest shred of true uncertainty, then guard it like a forester nursing a campfire. If you can make it blaze up into a flame of curiosity, it will make you light and eager, and give purpose to your questioning and direction to your skills.

But in probability theory, absence of evidence is always evidence of absence.

The bias I wish to point out is that Gandhi’s fame score seems to get perceptually added to his justly accumulated altruism score. When you think about nonviolence, you think of Gandhi—not an anonymous protestor in one of Gandhi’s marches who faced down riot clubs and guns, and got beaten, and had to be taken to the hospital, and walked with a limp

It is said that Price became so disturbed with the implications of his equation for altruism that he committed suicide, though he may have had other issues.

When it rains, and you don’t know why, you have several options. First, you could simply not ask why—not follow up on the question, or never think of the question in the first place. This is the Ignore command, which the bearded wise man originally selected. Second, you could try to devise some sort of explanation, the Explain command, as the beard