My 2¢:<p>1. Life is about the continuous cycle of our human species development and where we fit in that as individuals.<p>2. A religion as a system of beliefs is not so much to be true as to fulfill a purpose. The purpose (and the religion) can and should be revised from time to time. (Religions can be replaced.)<p>3. Agreed.<p>4. Justice is grounded on power. It should be on reason.<p>5. We need adequate regulation. If what we have is adequate or not is a subjective and a political mater.<p>6. University education should not be a replacement for auto-didactic learning.<p>7. Agreed. Overspecialization is a weakness in itself.<p>8. Partially agreed. The package of ability and personality is both genetically inherited and later shaped.<p>9. If in doubt, improve your ability to make an educated guess by learning more about the mater. This is what humans (should) do, as a species.<p>10. Luck is both given (by arbitrary events) AND created (by how we react to arbitrary events).<p>11. "Risk-avoidance is the riskiest strategy." does not fully respect the logic.<p>12. Through "well-intended conservation" the good is at most just preserved (by definition), therefore the comparison is flawed. Also, it's worth noting that there is an effect called "absence blindness" that kicks in in such comparisons. <a href="http://joshkaufman.net/absence-blindness/" rel="nofollow">http://joshkaufman.net/absence-blindness/</a><p>13. Technological progress spawns a lot of things, including extinctions for many things that we come later to disregard.<p>14. Progress is not a mathematical function and any attempt to force it to look otherwise is an error-prone exercise.<p>15. The average is a more simplistic reduction than the power-laws, so agreed. A less simplistic representation than power-laws is also possible.<p>16. Agreed. (We would probably need a religion drive to achieve that.)<p>17. Agreed.<p>18. Aging is a natural biological process. Humans will step over their biological limits, but that will threaten our cohesion on a species level. One of my personal wishes is to leave behind the humanity in one piece...<p>19. Consciousness is a feedback loop. (The most simplistic reduction.)<p>20. Free will is an optimum seeking mechanism (made of deterministic components indeed).<p>In the end looks like for the most of the beliefs I'm too in those that the OP refers to as "many".
> Democracy is not the best form of government, meritocracy is.<p>The problem here is that what is valued as meritful is easily manipulated. If killing in war is proclaimed as meritful, then killers rule in such a meritocracy. Churchill said it best, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. <a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/364.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/364.html</a>