Questions

https://youtu.be/7kIFegy4fII?t=1478

Killing someone to take their organs to save 5 lives is utilitarianism to only first order effects. We live in a world that does not terminate after one time step, so we have to consider Nth order effects to calculate utility.

For example, the second order effect is other humans' moral judgements. "How horrible, he murdered that man" is a valid moral reaction to have, and this is disutility that must be accounted for in a "pure utilitarian" world view. Third order effects may be the social disorder that results from allowing such ad hoc killings as means to an end, and so on.

The only thing preventing pure utilitarianism from being viable is a lack of compute power, and "rule utilitarianism" is a poor heuristic based approach for philosophers without patience ;)

> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? [...] How much of the cost growth is unmeasured improvement in quality and how much is growing inefficiency?

Are there other possible causes as well? If the cost growth were 100% due to improvements in quality, would it stop being a problem worth thinking about?

> How do we help more experimental cities get started? [...] Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and others, have improved the lives of millions of people and appear much more contingent than inevitable.

To my knowledge (I have no citations though), the improvement meant that millions of people were lifted from far-below-western to only-sligtly-below-western living standards. Impressive yes, but how well is that even applicable to societies at our living standard. Also, are things like workplace security or environmental effects factored into the "living standard" here?

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? [...] How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?)

Is this a thing we want? Would the benefits of this outweigh the costs of setting up the necessary tracking infrastructure?

> Being limited in our years on the earth, how can we incentivize brevity?

Is brevity a thing we should universally incentivize?

As a side note, what's with the humblebragging? If I get Wikipedia correctly, this guy is co-founder and current CEO of Stripe and has a billion in personal net-worth. His personal opinions and descisions influence the rules for a significant part of money transfers around the world.

Yet the website and bio read as if he were just a particularly engaged intern at Stripe.

If this is the meritocracy in action, I can see why so many people have problems with it.

The scenario is that (roughly) 90% of the hypergrowth-style startups which raise a first round will fail to achieve enough momentum to successfully raise a second. And due to the business model choices they've committed to, failing to raise at that point is equivalent to going out of business. A first raise is often too small to be able to do everything they'd like, so they suggest decide that it's in their best interest (long term) to forgo a salary where possible, in order to buy a few extra months of progress before you're forced to start shopping for investment again.

Of course, folks give advice based on their own experience, but it doesn't always generalise to folks in different situations, which is potentially why that would seem like silly advice in (what I assume is) your scenario.

(minor edits toward the end for clarification)