But narrative is our primary means for understanding; it's where we get the context for situating our ideas. Even the 'self' is a story we tell ourselves, to give narrative unity to the disparate actions we take.

While many philosophers have written about this in recent years, I shall point to the one most likely to be respected here. Dan Dennett: The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity

We seem to have a population here that already cares, and deeply, about rationality. I do trust them to upvote whatever has a lot to do with rationality and downvote whatever has too little to do with it. In fact, I'd go so far as to submit that we're doing something wrong if there aren't enough off-topic-ish, net-negative-karma posts; it would show that posters aren't taking quite enough risks as regards widening rationality's domain. I'm weary of the PUA and overly self-help-y talk, sure, but seeing nothing like it around here would be the dead canary in the coal mine.

The more time I spend thinking about it, the more I come to realize that Narrative Is the Enemy, at least where attempts to see and reason clearly are concerned. One heuristic has proven surprisingly useful time and time again, in efforts of rationality as well as creativity: don't try to deliberately tell a story.

I would submit that it's less an issue of the biologically-imposed limit to our life spans than the biologically-imposed limit to our predictive abilities, to the amount of "moving part" data our brains can work with simultaneously. Considering that we only seem to achieve anything like accuracy when predicting events on a very, very small scale of both time and complexity, one might argue that we actually plan in too long a term.

More expansion on the possibilities of such a solved computational might be in order here; even mathematicians will have to crank their imaginations a bit to think through the specific advantages afforded by the formalized-computer-mathematics future.

For rationalist polymaths out there, Isaac Asimov's The Roving Mind

Paul Graham's "Lies We Tell Kids"

I used to be a terrible hypochondriac when I was young and a great reader of medical dictionaries. One day I realised that I was not actually frightened of terminal illness but of not getting done the things I wanted to get done.

• A.C. Grayling, from a recent Guardian mini-interview

(My interpretation: remember that our various seemingly nonsensical personality tics can mask other, more addressable concerns.)

I like this idea. I have a hard time listening to political speakers because of all the obvious (to me...a student of such things) fallacies and methods of the Dark Arts.

A couple of suggestions:

1. Who are the target of these sorts of videos? If it's "fallacy noobs", I suggest shorter videos. You could cut the one up, present the question at hand as text, and then present just enough of the video clip to get the speakers context. Personally, I almost stopped watching before we got to your first noted example nearly 2 minutes in to the video.
2. If the target is "fallacy noobs", and you're going to use political sources, I'd probably mix up examples from different political parties. Too many people will just shut down if they think you're attacking their political party.