I belong to the We-Have-to-Get-Off-Butts-And-Make-Cryonics-Work School, which makes the usual probability approach pretty useless. Thomas Donaldson wrote that if treat our current choices as the "seeds" of future events, then probability becomes something which we can start to control in our favor.
http://www.alcor.org/printable.cgi?fname=Library%2Fhtml%2Fprobability.html
Having been diagnosed with cancer last year, writer Christopher Hitchens has died. He was known as as an outspoken atheist, which is not, in itself, identical to being a committed rationalist in any systematic way. Even so, he seemed to have the virtue of moral courage, the willingness to speak the truth as he saw it, without fear.