I would add artificially extending the wait time to purchase. Some time ago I read a study (that I can no longer find) that correlated a decline in consumer satisfaction with an increase in credit based purchases. We no longer pine at the store window for months saving up to buy X. Which probably has two effects: when you finally get it, it feels much more satisfying (like the first meal after starving for a week is probably the best meal you have ever had), also, in the three months it takes you to save up to buy a super-left-handed-water-redehydrator, you might have the chance to use one at a friend's house and realize you don't really like it.

My top three satisfying purchases (which happen to all be vehicles) were all acquired after protracted waiting periods, one of which was nearly three years.

I think the intermediate value theorem covers this. Meaning if a function has positive and negative values (good and evil) and it is continuous (I would assume a "vague boundary" or "grey area" or "goodness spectrum" to be continuous) then there must be at least one zero value. That zero value is the boundary.

If the other pirates were truly rational then they would never have boarded a pirate ship with a pirate who is better at an up-to-5-way fight than them.

When someone asks me how I would get out of a particularly sticky situation, I often fight the urge to glibly respond, by not getting it to said situation.

I digress, if the other pirates were truly rational then they would never let anyone know how good they were at an up-to-X-way fight.

Welcome to the Earth where ethanol is made from corn and environmentalists oppose nuclear power.

I find this to be a very attention grabbing comparison, so much so that I had to re-read this post 5+ times before I could see the forest through the trees (or tree as the case may be).

The reason these two examples strike me so is that I once held both of the underlying beliefs (ie that corn ethanol is bad and so is nuclear power). While I reversed both of these beliefs many years ago (prior to discovering HPMOR and lesswrong) I now see them as "belief as attire" (tree huggers think nuclear is bad, I'm a tree hugger, therefore I think nuclear is bad) and "password guessing" (why is corn ethanol a bad idea?... thermodynamics....Gold Star!)

After gathering more information about these two "controversies" than can be gathered from Mother Jones or Popular Mechanics, I firmly support nuclear power expansion and think it is quite insane that we don't make more ethanol from corn. I would be happy to support my positions, the former would be rather concise, the later would be considerably longer, so I'll save it until asked.

Perhaps this would have been less distracting:

Welcome to the Earth where 46% of Americans believe in creationist origins of humans and only 15% believe in evolutionary origins of humans.

This is entirely anecdotal, however I once was entirely against the idea of having children. I had many justifications; personal, selfish, environmental, social, etc. Though, in hindsight, I probably just didn't want kids.

Right now all I want to do is go home and lay on the floor with my babbling, drooling, high maintenance alarm clock/poop machine. I can't say that meeting my wife made me instantly want kids because we knew each other for a few years before dating, but at some point in time I went from not wanting kids to wanting kids. The conscious choice to have children happened slightly more than 18 months ago, our daughter in now 9 months old. And I should emphasis it was a conscious choice.

I would strongly discourage having children unless you really want them, the negatives will be magnified and the positives will be reduced. For example, going to work after a week of only sleeping 2 hours a night is a lot easier if you can look forward to a happy, two-toothed smile when you get home. If the presence of said smile holds no intrinsic value, then you are in for a long day at work. Likewise, the shear enjoyment of seeing your baby crawl for the first time is soiled if it is accompanied by, "Oh great now we have to baby-proof the lower 3' of the house".

I will grant that I have an incredibly small about of data from a very narrow range of the existence that is parenthood.

I was attempting to find an example of a generally accepted case of "too risky". My baby just had some shots, so vaccines were on my mind. I utterly failed to to come up with a number for the probability of contracting polio if you live in the US and have not been immunized against it. There hasn't been a case of someone in the US getting polio naturally in 30 years, the hundred or so cases (according to the CDC) in the last 30 years have all been from the live vaccine (which isn't given anymore in the US) or from contact with someone that had been given the live vaccine in another country recently. All that being said, it is generally considered a very poor decision to not give a child a vaccine for a disease that hasn't happened in thirty years, only shows symptoms in 5% of the cases and only has permanent damage in 1% of cases. This incredibly small risk is too high, a consensus with which I agree.

Why is one immeasurably small risk too high, but one as of yet to be determine risk not? I view the safety of GMO food similar to a drug in the second stage of human trials, as mentioned, my choice is to opt out of that trial.

The OP asked should they be afraid. Probably not, but like wise, they should not be 100% comforted. As much as I love science and new technology, my error-on-the-side-of-caution anchor beats my yeah-science! anchor.

The factory radio in my vehicle (which is almost as old as me) does not have the capacity to play a podcast and I do not own an mp3 player. Also, the public radio station plays programming which is produced by National Public Radio during my commute (I'm not listening to Wayne's World Radio or the like). This programming is, in my experience, fairly neutral news, which varies from super serious, important news to fascinating fluff pieces.
I find that when left to my own devices for news, I have something akin to confirmation bias, where I only pick news that is really important and interesting to me, which tends to be a fairly narrow picture of the world (mostly science and tech news). NPR's news tends to push my boundaries enough that I get a better picture of what is happening in the world. So if I were to download podcasts of NPR news programming, I would the be getting the same service also without paying. I guess I could contribute directly to NPR instead of local station (which in turn pays NPR for the programming) but if everyone did that, there would be not local stations, which would possibly mean less funding for NPR, which would negatively impact their programming, which I find valuable. It is really the same scenario on a bigger scale.

I felt a certain level of guilt for not donating to public radio, which was alleviated by donating. The level of guilt is somewhere between what I imagine is the guilt for shoplifting and the guilt for not holding a door open for an elderly lady carrying a lot of packages.

I would define right in this instance as what is required by moral/ethical/etiquette standards. However what is rational is the correct thing to do (assuming we are all on the same page that the rational choice is the correct choice).

It is more like a very poorly worded version of the question, "What have I missed?", that manifested as me attempting to sound wise while in reality sounding foolish.