I talk, or think, often about "epistemic democracy". and I truly believe it's important to get a lot of overlapping advice. but you have to be psychologically prepared for the fact that there is going to be a huge amount of extremely bad advice that you're going to have to ignore. many of this advice will come from otherwise wise individuals. Or at least people who are getting by. but they don't really know how to do a lot of things, including live. and you are going to have to ignore their advice, including their advice that is sort of just implicit in the example of how they live their lives. and the things they vaguely recommend to you as ideas of things to do.

That is, if you want to be the best that you can be.

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That was the main point of the post. here are some related thoughts:

first of all, in a large class of situations, it is absolutely necessary for you to disregard bad advice without the following (in increasing order of difficulty):
1. an argument against the advice that would persuade the person giving the advice.
2. an argument against the advice that would persuade a neutral third party (either one with relevant life experience or without).
3. a good argument against the advice.
It is, perhaps luckily (perhaps unluckily), easier in many cases to determine that advice is bad and disregard it than to come up with a good argument against it. If you want to take some liberties with your interpretation of the world, I think this is even provable in complexity theory. NP-completeness and all that.

To be absolutely fair and brutally honest (which is my default state of being, many are saying this), you are going to have to take this step even with advice given to you by yourself. 

I said "Even people who are wise" above, and that's true, but of course I'm given more pause when a genius advises me than the town fool. (although, again, unless I'm strapped for time, I do award a non-zero amount of thought to each of them)

This blog post was largely spurred by people giving me advice about seeking a job, which is one of the most disheartening things to receive advice about because uh various factors but basically it's one of those topics where nobody knows anything but everyone has opinions unfortunately. they don't even have the benefit of practical knowledge in a relevant pursuit, which usually tempers the folly in a field where everybody has opinions. My mom has been self-employed for 30 years. What does she know about writing my resumé? (for an industry she has never worked in)

I have recently become more and more "black-pilled" about the intellectual capabilities of the mass of humanity. luckily, I still like you. You should just give me money and I should be in charge of things. (This is literally in everyone's best interests, although it will be difficult to convince everyone of this.)

I'm not really sure why I'm writing a blog anymore, nor who my intended audience is, because it has struck me that it is difficult for people to understand my good advice, difficult for people to find and also verify that my advice is good. also most people should just receive the advice of don't do drugs and stay in school, even though those are both usually scams on some level. but I suppose I write this blog in case some people who could use it come along and bother to figure out what it means and it helps them. on that off-chance. also, some of the posts are actually about computing also some of my posts are written for a comically broad audience like I'm explaining some sort of basic concept to a child? That's weird. One day I'd like to meet the impossible princely person who apparently is the intended audience of this blog.

(after reflecting upon this:) I might change up my whole life. change my whole personality. escape the written word, the moving image, and the devil's box. some of you will never hear from me again. finally paying off some of the loans I took from myself the day I was born.

(I feel the perverse need to clarify two things: first of all it's only figuratively the day I was born because nobody on the day I was born told me that I should get into watching movies and even if they had I wouldn't have understood any of those words because I was a baby. I wouldn't even have been listening; I was that impolite. secondly, and I cannot stress this enough, in case you were jumping to this conclusion: I will never kill myself.)

I hate how bad speech to text is at transcribing what I say, and I hate how bad the github text editor is. 

"I wish video games was a building so I could lock you all inside and burn it down" —Phil Fish, approximately.