There's no reason to think pursuing GMOs will be dangerous,

The phrase "no reason to think" should raise alarm bells. It can mean we've looked and haven't found any, or that we haven't looked.

If it looks too different, we won't see them in space, though.

Our own intelligence is at the level where it's just barely sufficient to build a civilization when you got hands, fire, and so on. Note that orcas have much larger brains than humans, and had those larger brains for quite a long time, yet we're where we are, and they're where they are.

how to create the role of perfect agency?

It's someone who takes "heroic responsibility". Source:

"You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe," Harry Potter said. "Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it's always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she's not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn't an excuse, someone else being in charge isn't an excuse, even trying your best isn't an excuse. There just aren't any excuses, you've got to get the job done no matter what. That's why I say you're not thinking responsibly, Hermione. Thinking that your job is done when you tell Professor McGonagall - that isn't heroine thinking. Like (SPOILER) is okay then, because it isn't your fault anymore. Being a heroine means your job isn't finished until you've done whatever it takes to (SPOILER), permanently. You can't think as if just following the rules means you've done your duty."

So, I guess watching superhero movies, and imagining yourself being one, could be a good start. Preferably movies where the superhero is not defined primarily by their supernatural powers, but by taking action where others don't. In other words, less Superman, more Batman.

and I would never amuse myself at a cocktail party in ways that I thought had more than an infinitesimal chance of harming them.

Your ethical intent sounds fine but that is of limited use without competence. The sort of casual disclosure described in the ancestor anecdote would make me slightly downgrade my evaluation of the trustworthiness and social competence of any professional that works with sensitive information. Much like those observed casually gossiping about other people at inappropriate times will be silently downgraded as potential confidants.

If you prefer your advocates to go beyond a principle of 'do no harm'

The overwhelming majority of minor ethical transgressions that we make will "do no harm". Some do. If the consequences were that easy to predict we wouldn't need ethical inhibitions in the first place.

Replacing food with Soylent is weird. Perhaps in your social circle it's a plausible thing to do, but I'm pretty certain that most people would think it's a bizarre thing to do regardless of what certain geek social circles might think.

In fact, that's my impression of lots of LW-style ideas, such as cryonics and SI-style AI research.

Rationality always works when it is done perfectly. But it's incredibly easy to miss something and come to a weird conclusion by pure rationality. And being partly rational can be pretty bad when irrationality has evolved checks and balances and your rationality bypasses them but is not good enough to replace them. So I'm automatically very skeptical towards anything which is perfectly sensible--here--which people outside this circle of atypical minds would find ludicrous.

Not to mention the name. Yes, I know that in the book it was not made of people, but giving it a name that has negative connotations in the outside world suggests that the idea is insufficiently vetted by the outside world.

The FAQ addresses Crohn's Disease: "more data needed".

https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/articles/200838449-Will-Soylent-help-my-Crohns-or-IBS-

It also has a full list of ingredients.

https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/articles/200789315-Soylent-1-0-Nutrition

One thing from the link above that I didn't previously know: "The Soylent recipe is based on the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and is approved as a food by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)." (emphasis theirs)

Willpower and other putative psychological benefits of Christianity are nowhere in the top 100 reasons Taleb was born Christian.

If Christianity would lower the willpower of it's members then it would be at a disadvantage in memetic competition against other worldviews that increase willpower.

In Christianity's case the reasons seem obvious enough

Predicting complex systems like memetic competition over the span of centuries between different memes is very hard. In cognitive psychology experiments frequently invalidate basic intuitions about the human mind.

Trust bootstrapping is certainly one of the functions of religion but it's not clear that's bad. Bootstrapping trust is generally a hard problem. Trust makes people cooperate. If I remember right Taleb makes somewhere the point that the word believe derives from a word that means trust.

As far as "antiquity's incompetence at understanding the universe" goes, understanding the universe is very important to people like the New Atheists but it's for Taleb it's not the main thing religion is about. For him it's about practically following a bunch of rituals such as being at church every Sunday.

I might pose I similar thought experiment: if a scientist today, discovered he could raise the dead, restore anyone who had ever lived, what would we do with that power? Do we have a moral responsibility to "save" all humans ever? Even if resurrection were free, the earth couldn't (currently) support a population of every human (and perhaps some pets?) who's ever been. We'd have to decide who gets to live and who doesn't. Restoring past-people will almost certainly entail displacing some people who might otherwise have been born. Why do we privilege those that already got to live a "full" (typical human) life over the millions of potential humans that could populate the earth in our stead?

Furthermore, I don't see much of a distinction between deciding who gets revived and who doesn't, on the one hand, and killing the people we don't want around, on the other. Faced with a delemia of "who gets to live", unless we aim for a sort of "equality of time alive", out of a sense of fairness (in which case, most modern humans are running a deficit), it seems we would kill the ass-holes to make room for the cool people from history. Is that inhumane?

Or consider, maybe we'd stop giving birth entirely, so that all the existent people can take turns being the one's alive. Does a world where every person is old, where no one is falling in love for the first time, where children are absent, so that we can have more life, see like a good one?

I'm asking these questions sincerely. Maybe that is the world we want.

Airplanes may not work on fusion or weigh millions of tons, but still, substituting a few words in I could say similar things about airplanes. Or electrical grids. Or smallpox vaccination. But nobody does.

Are you sure? I looked for just a bit and found

There is no sport equal to that which aviators enjoy while being carried through the air on great white wings.

http://inventors.about.com/od/wstartinventors/a/Quotes-Wright-Brothers.htm

I imagine if inventors have bombastic things to say about the things they invent, then frequently keep those thoughts to oneself to avoid sounding arrogant (e.g. I don't think it would have gone over well if Edison had started referring to himself as "Edison, the man who lit the world of the night").

I feel it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles... this is what you might call ‘technical arrogance’ that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.

-- Freeman Dyson