Sunrise is a symbol of optimism and hope for the future. I consider myself an altruist, and I edit Wikipedia to contribute to public education.
I strongly recommend that everybody read LessWrong (about), a website that teaches you how to improve your reasoning. There is a lot of content, but even small parts are worth it: humans are prone to a lot of biases and fallacies, and your thought processes make many more errors than you think, but in many cases you can learn to minimize or avoid them.
A few specific recommendations
The "highlights" are some of my favorites. I've selected ones that are understandable without too many concepts described on other pages, but you can follow the links to explanations if necessary.
It is all too easy to meet every counterargument by saying, "Well, of course I could be wrong." Then, having dutifully genuflected in the direction of Modesty, having made the required obeisance, you can go on about your way without changing a thing. [1]
If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon. [2]
...again and again in humanity's history, people are shocked to discover that an incredibly mysterious question has a non-mysterious answer. Mystery is a property of questions, not answers. [3]
- as if stars and matter and life had not been mysteries for hundreds of years and thousands of years, from the dawn of human thought right up until science finally solved them -
We learn about astronomy and chemistry and biology in school, and it seems to us that these matters have always been the proper realm of science, that they have never been mysterious. When science dares to challenge a new Great Puzzle, the children of that generation are skeptical, for they have never seen science explain something that feels mysterious to them. Science is only good for explaining scientific subjects, like stars and matter and life...
We read history but we don't live it, we don't experience it. If only I had personally postulated astrological mysteries and then discovered Newtonian mechanics, postulated alchemical mysteries and then discovered chemistry, postulated vitalistic mysteries and then discovered biology. I would have thought of [human consciousness] and said to myself: No way am I falling for that again.[4]
Quotes part 2
...there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you. [5]
I see this a lot in medicine. Someone jumps on a new study showing the selenium or chromium or plutonium or whatever cures cancer. It is brought up that no, really, the medical community has investigated this sort of thing before, and it has always been found that it doesn’t.
'Well, maybe the medical community wasn’t investigating it the right way! Maybe the investigators were biased! Maybe they didn’t randomize right! Maybe they used a population unusually susceptible to cancer-getting! Ninety percent of medical studies are wrong! Those twenty experiments showing a lack of effect could be total bunk!'
Yes, maybe these things happened in each of the twenty studies that disagree with you.
Or maybe they happened in the one contrarian study you are getting so excited about. [6]
[But] even if someone gives you what seems like overwhelming evidence in favor of a certain point of view, don’t trust it until you’ve done a simple Google search to see if the opposite side has equally overwhelming evidence. [7]
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