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What Happened to Lee

wired.com

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Re: What Happened to Lee

#41

Post by meowface »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #22

I come from a family of extremely gifted visual thinkers (PhDs from MIT/Stanford/etc) and in the last year one of us had a heart issue that coincided with a month long bout of psychosis, where dream-like real visualizations were overlaid onto the real world. I’m convinced that the genetic effects that provide us with extreme visualization and problem solving skills are related to this particular failure mode, where s…

Yes, evolution often seems to result in these sorts of trade-offs. It seems pretty rare to get a genetic "free ride", so to speak. It's like different ways of balancing the same equation using the same resources.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#42

Post by hkmurakami »

eastdakota wrote: post #31
jamestimmins wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry for the loss you and his other friends/loved ones have experienced. Do you feel like the article was accurate and fair to the people involved?

Yes. Very. It was important to me and Michelle that it be a tribute to Lee’s genius and contribution to Cloudflare. We spent a long time looking for the right reporter and publication. Wired seemed appropriate given Lee’s love of technology. And Sandra was a total class act. We opened up fully to her, spending nearly a year letting her get to know us. Lee’s family was incredibly giving of their time. It takes a reall…

Thank you for this post. It reminded me of the one line in “General Magic” where Marc Porat tells the documentary producer that the reason he agreed to make himself very available and open for the film was so that his (presumably somewhat estranged) children can get to know him and the story and the work they did, better.

Terribly sorry for you and your friends and colleagues’ loss. Thank you and everyone else for doing this for his children.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#43

Post by tylershuster »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

Perhaps this is too philosophical, but for anyone who has dealt with someone with a long decline into dementia, it's very difficult for me to understand a belief in God after going through that (I certainly understand some people have the exact opposite reaction, so I'm in no way saying this belief is correct). It's just difficult for me to envision a crueler God if that is indeed the case. A person who has died long…

I truly feel for your loss. Two of my grandparents have gone or are going through dementia.

I don't think that this has any bearing on the existence of God, however. Humans are the ones who have created such an overwhelming and toxic physical environment and disconnected social one. For God to truly endow us with free will, He had to allow us to fail, even this miserably, and to cause our contemporaries and descendants to suffer for our failures. We have the hope of Christ's return and eternal life but only after everyone has been given the opportunity to turn to God for hope on earth.

I don't mean to prosthletize — this is how I understand the world and helps keep me hopeful in times of grief, and I hope it helps you too.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#44

Post by billti »

meowface wrote: post #40
cryptica wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It was interesting to see for Lee how this seemed amplified after heart surgery. My Dad had really bad "post-operative delirium" for about a month after major heart surgery, and while he recovered somewhat, that was definitely the start of his major decline. That is a strange coincidence. Could changes in bloodflow have an impact on brain cells?

My suspicion would be that the general anesthetic is the primary cause.

I think cardiac surgery is the worst offender because they often have to bypass the heart while performing the surgery, and this can result in blood supply issues while diverting/restoring flow through the heart.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#45

Post by basch »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #22

I come from a family of extremely gifted visual thinkers (PhDs from MIT/Stanford/etc) and in the last year one of us had a heart issue that coincided with a month long bout of psychosis, where dream-like real visualizations were overlaid onto the real world. I’m convinced that the genetic effects that provide us with extreme visualization and problem solving skills are related to this particular failure mode, where s…

The ability to make strong abstract connections transforming into misassociations?

I think about this one a lot, how easy it is for pattern recognition to misfire and synthesize conclusions and connections that are partially rational and correct, but with one bad piece of input data skewing them into fantasy. Sometimes the conclusion may be right, but its magnitude, impact, or applicability are grossly overestimated. Part of what makes such gifted people is the ability to imagine, hypothesize, and use hypotheticals. This giftedness often coincides with the ability to make many parallel what if thoughts and identify the most probable. At some point, hypotheticals morph into faith and what was once a thought experiment becomes belief. What ifs break down into belief "this is actually happening, this is reality." It becomes its own compounding feedback loop, as faulty conclusions layer on top of each other over time.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#46

Post by kick »

radicalbyte wrote: post #38
eastdakota wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was incredibly sad to watch. The last time I saw him while he was still speaking — he is still alive but doesn’t speak or seem to recognize me anymore — he would repeat the same questions from the same conversation in the same order on a 30-minute loop. Over and over. I’ve really struggled to wrap my mind around his condition. I don’t think it’s frustrating for him. He seems to have lost the emotion to be frustrat…

The thought of someone I love (in the broadest sense of the word) being affected by this is horrific. I'm really sorry for his family and friends :( I think that you're kind of right: I know one engineer who is like that and he it's his autism which makes him brilliant. He could operate in deep-thought mode all the time - he is extremely intelligent and extremely focused. There are other people who can hit it for pat…

Makes me think that some of us here are wasting our abilities on start-ups and systems when we could be working on fixing much more complex systems.

This can go in the wrong direction. Nobody wants to be McNamara, though being Zuckerberg isn't that bad.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#47

Post by claudiawerner »

hwc wrote: post #29
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

Perhaps this is too philosophical, but for anyone who has dealt with someone with a long decline into dementia, it's very difficult for me to understand a belief in God after going through that (I certainly understand some people have the exact opposite reaction, so I'm in no way saying this belief is correct). It's just difficult for me to envision a crueler God if that is indeed the case. A person who has died long…

If God exists, they are cruel and uncaring.

This is known as the "problem of evil" and has intrigued philosophers and theologians for centuries. There are quite a few responses to the problem[0] though it's up to you to decide if they're convincing or not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil#Responses,_def...

Re: What Happened to Lee

#48

Post by ardy42 »

hwc wrote: post #29
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

Perhaps this is too philosophical, but for anyone who has dealt with someone with a long decline into dementia, it's very difficult for me to understand a belief in God after going through that (I certainly understand some people have the exact opposite reaction, so I'm in no way saying this belief is correct). It's just difficult for me to envision a crueler God if that is indeed the case. A person who has died long…

If God exists, they are cruel and uncaring.

> If God exists, they are cruel and uncaring.

I don't think anyone has the perspective to make a definitive judgement like that. The situation could be like a young child judging his parents to be cruel and uncaring for making him go to school, which he dislikes. There could be unknowns that would change the judgement if understood.

Re: What Happened to Lee

#49

Post by tarsinge »

hwc wrote: post #29
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

Perhaps this is too philosophical, but for anyone who has dealt with someone with a long decline into dementia, it's very difficult for me to understand a belief in God after going through that (I certainly understand some people have the exact opposite reaction, so I'm in no way saying this belief is correct). It's just difficult for me to envision a crueler God if that is indeed the case. A person who has died long…

If God exists, they are cruel and uncaring.

Not if suffering on earth is put in the context of an eternal afterlife of joy coming after. You cannot dissociate the two.
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