SEBASTIAN MARSHALL

Strategy Philosophy Self-Discipline Science Victory

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How do you determine which values to live by?

Hi Sebastian,

Found your blog a while ago via HN; you seem like someone who has either though these questions through carefully, or would like to.

You mention "good" a lot in your writing, and allude to values which you ostensibly find good. How do you determine which values are the ones to live your life by, and having determined them, at least in part, are they set for life? If not, does changing them devalue them?

Unless you base your values on those of some specific culture or society, you are picking and choosing anyway. Why not just become a complete hedonist? Even if you delay gratification, you are still a hedonist if what you do is for yourself. And if not for yourself, for whom?

Staying consistent and meaningful in any sort of value system other than hedonism seems impossible. The sole value you might take could be happiness–"whatever makes me happy is good"–and the only problems you might have would be balancing short-term satisfaction and long-term satisfaction. That is unsatisfying to me from a philosophical angle, and a pragmatic one: because it's not how society likes us to think, it is harder to get along with the rest of the tribe.

Should non-professionals research their own investments?

Patri Friedman left this very smart comment on the convincing arguments post -

I’m pretty skeptical of whether researching investments is a good idea for non-professionals. Financial speculation is fun, but you are competing against specialists who have spent their whole lives studying the subject, have teams of researchers, and are betting so much that they can afford to buy the best computers, data, etc. I think almost everyone should just buy the Vanguard Target Retirement 20X0 fund.

The exception is if you’re in the startup world & you know people who you trust & respect who are doing startups, angel investing in them w/ 10%-20% of your income makes sense to me. At worst you’ll lose a little money & learn a lot about who to trust & how startups work. Another is if you know a city/region/country very well and want to own property there – ownership has advantages (ie we have done extensive customization of our cohousing community here in Mountain View) and since it’s such a big asset it’s definitely worth researching.

This is a great point.

I've been studying a lot of finance lately. One that I've really enjoyed is "The Intelligent Investor" by Ben Graham.

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