Amateur philosopher. I enjoy building policies that I can thereafter follow to live a life of greater profit than my competitors, and share my findings with my friends so that they are free to do the same should they choose to. :3

Following are the finest points of wisdom I can think of, absolutist language aside this is a work in progress that I expect to refine over time so any feedback or questions would be appreciated. Thank you!

Courtesy opens many doors.

My perception of egalitarianism is that the variance between individual humans ordinarily outweighs the variance between their demographic groups. Policies which fail to take this into consideration are suboptimal.

"Identity" of entities are naught more than their identifying characteristics. Salient identifying characteristics of all animate objects lie with their desire to influence their environment. TL;DR: You are defined by what you desire, to every detail and degree.

You overlap identity with all who desire the same as you, the measure of overlap perfectly matching the magnitude of shared identity. Friends, family, political affiliation, neighbourhood, town, state, country, species, biosphere .. hands, head, feet, torso, nose. Every one of these is a part of you and is at least partly indistinguishable from who you are. Every one of these should be dear to you: you should be equally loathe to damage your own environment as you would be to cut off your own hand.

Act in your own self interest .. with "self" as defined above, and you have defined the root of perfect morality.

Honesty is the best policy. But only when the subject matter is more impactful to the listener than to the speaker (again, self as defined above.. the listener's family, the speaker's family, etc). When the opposite is true, fabrication is ALWAYS the best policy: this is the meaning of "dignity". This covers the moral imperative of informational fidelity for absolutely every edge and corner case.. from fessing up to wrongdoing, to modesty, to protecting the feelings of friends, to hostage negotiation, to guarding your bank pin number. Follow this code and you'll never have to second guess whether to tell the truth or fib again.

Good and evil are a continuum based upon capacity to reliably profit in one's efforts to influence one's environment, per above. The most common causes of evil are simply short sightedness and injury to oneself (again, self as described above) due to greedy or impulsive action that sacrifices what turns out to have been a higher value resource for cheaper, lower value resources. Selling out one's environment for narrow return, selling out one's future for short-term gain, etc.

Failure is absolutely the only teaching device that exists. Greater comprehension of the universe can never be gained without first honestly trying an influence at some scale or another and failing at it. Success without failure is always a direct result of mere fortune and never of one's own agency. This is why it is always inadvisable to allow fear of survivable failure to stifle any attempt one might desire.

It is also best practice to design all experiments such that even negative results will still yield maximal possible information about what went wrong. This leads to low or no risk experimentation and justifies your grant money.

Mah webbie [www.lightsecond.com]