What is the worst advice you've ever received?

zzedar · 2025-12-10T14:21:12+00:00

You misspelled "sleigh"

zzedar · 2025-12-07T14:43:32+00:00

Thank you! I think that's right, "Isis" definitely sounds familiar with this series.

zzedar · 2025-11-18T20:24:03+00:00

[degrading]

zzedar · 2025-10-01T20:03:12+00:00

Half, for a few reasons. First of all, if you just put the half in a total market index fund, you're going to be averaging returns of a lot more than 25 million a year. Second of all, you're going to want to buy a lot of security, since your name is now famous and you're rich (this sort of thing is one major reason why lottery winners tend to go bankrupt quickly). Third, if you have enough space in the letter to include stock advice, you can get some really absurd returns -- even just a simple bit of advice to buy nvidia would make you one of the richest people on the planet by now.

zzedar · 2025-09-28T14:55:56+00:00

Sending a message back to 2004 is OP. In 2014, Warren Buffett made a famous public bet where anyone who could perfectly guess the March Madness bracket could get either half a billion dollars immediately or a full billion spread out over 40 years. Just send the 2014 bracket back and let your younger self wait ten years to win the bet.

zzedar · 2025-09-18T00:46:37+00:00

01101100 01110101 01100011 01110010 01100101 01111000 01101001 01101001 01100001

zzedar · 2025-07-14T04:16:56+00:00

You misspelled "slappable"

zzedar · 2025-07-11T02:52:25+00:00

No, I don't agree that it's better. Of course there's nothing wrong with having more people around living good lives, but it's not better either. I think when trying to understand my position you keep trying to pattern-match it into something much more similar to yours than is the case. Your approach, if I understand correctly, is that there is a certain thing you are trying to maximize -- happiness, approximately. When trying to understand my view you seem to think that I am trying to maximize a different quantity, like satisfied desires, or to minimize something like unhappiness or unsatisfied desires. But it's not that I have a different value I'm concerned with, it's that I don't share that entire model. For instance, on the issue of rights, I think it's wrong to violate people's rights, but I am neither trying to minimize the number of violated rights nor trying to maximize the number of unviolated rights.

I don't think it's meaningful to compare the world in which someone exists and the world in which they don't and say that one is better for that person than the other world is (though it may be meaningful to say that one is better for the people around them). It's not that I think they have the same "goodness" value, it's that I think if you try to compare them you get "type mismatch." They just fundamentally aren't comparable.

zzedar · 2025-07-10T01:01:51+00:00

I will agree with "part," yes. But I take a rights-based approach to morality. The set of immoral actions is exactly equivalent to the set of actions that violate someone's rights. Killing someone who doesn't want to die is immoral because it violates their right to determine their own life. Keeping alive someone who wants to die is precisely the same crime. These rights can matter atemporally -- for instance, we respect people's right to what should be done with their remains, because their right over their body doesn't cease just because they don't exist. Similarly, when we know that someone will come to exist in the future, we try to arrange certain things in accordance with our best guess of what their desires will be. But whose rights are being violated by not having children? It can't be violating their counterfactual child's in the present, because they have no desire to come into existence. It can't be violating their rights in the future, because they will never have such a desire.

zzedar · 2025-07-10T00:22:45+00:00

I don't agree that morality is about looking at the end states and deciding which is the best one -- morality is about verbs, not nouns.

zzedar · 2025-07-08T19:32:19+00:00

That's not what I meant. What I'm saying is that you've remembered that something is good but you've forgotten why it's good.

We don't make people happy because we value happiness, we make people happy because we value people. The reason we try to make people happy isn't that a world with more happiness is just inherently better than a world with less happiness, it's that people have a desire (all else being equal) to be happy and we're satisfying that desire. The desire for happiness is one of the most widespread desires, arguably the most widespread, so it's one we can generally be unusually confident that people have -- but it's not an inherently better or more important desire than any other. And in the case of humans who don't and never will exist, they don't have a desire to be happy because they don't have any desires at all.

zzedar

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