Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Pinker calls it "curse of knowledge".
Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
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Re: Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this What financial incentives are there in killing someone?
Inheritance.
So... something you're entitled to regardless of how they die? I don't see why, in this hypothetical, a person would spend energy encouraging assisted suicide when they'll get inheritance eventually anyway. Am I missing something?
Re: Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I disagree about "next". I wasn't confused by the original usage. "Next" is more associated with "subsequent" than "upcoming". The "future" component is contextually inferred. Probably nobody at all got confused by that word choice.
It didn’t take me long to parse out the meaning but the phrasing was confusing.
“The next book he wrote, Noise, ….” Would have been better or “After that book he wrote Noise….”.
I absolutely was confused for a second or two and thought “wait, are we talking about a different person? He isn’t going to have a ‘next’ book unless he had one queued up?”.
Did I need the explanation above? Not really, I’d come to the right conclusion on my own but I can imagine someone who isn’t a native speaker (reader?) might stumble on that more and I enjoyed the confirmation.
Re: Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
#74So he was very old without any significant problems, but he wanted to avoid the inevitable problems? If you’ve already made it to 90 with no major issues, you’re expected to make it to 95 and you could make easily live to 100. My wife’s grandad is 90 and he still lives alone, drives, plays golf nearly everyday, and regularly sees his 12 grandchildren and many great grandchildren. He even made the 9 hour trip to come…
I agree with your legal assessment and still think of the case as very interesting. The article explicitly talks about how any such decision could have only been premature, for the slow cognitive decline is typically only noticed when it is too late, and because the change is continuous, there can be no good commitment to "I no longer consider this life worthwhile once condition X is no longer satisfied".
Re: Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
#75So he was very old without any significant problems, but he wanted to avoid the inevitable problems? If you’ve already made it to 90 with no major issues, you’re expected to make it to 95 and you could make easily live to 100. My wife’s grandad is 90 and he still lives alone, drives, plays golf nearly everyday, and regularly sees his 12 grandchildren and many great grandchildren. He even made the 9 hour trip to come…
> If you’ve already made it to 90 with no major issues, you’re expected to make it to 95 and you could make easily live to 100. My wife’s grandad is 90 and he still lives alone, drives, plays golf nearly everyday, and regularly sees his 12 grandchildren and many great grandchildren.
Counter-anecdote, my partners Granddad is 93. Age 90, we said the same as you. Now he's an old, rude, obnoxious liability - he's still great, and I don't hold it against him, he's earned the right. But I've never known anyone naturally age and die without losing their ability to be civil in some way towards the end.
From the article:
> Kahneman knew that many would see his decision as premature. But that was exactly what he intended, he wrote: If you wait until a life is "obviously no longer worth living", it is already too late.
I personally wish my partners final memories of her Granddad were him at 90, and not at 93. I've known for a good 5 - 10 years I will take the same route as Kahneman. I feel the desire to stay alive long enough to be a liability for yourself and those around you is a decision motivated by ego and fear, rather than compassion or logic.
Re: Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have (grand)children, an important reason to wanting to stay alive is often not the fear of dying, but wanting to be there for them and fearing the grief they will endure if you are gone.
My grandparents stuck around too long, so I have the opposite fear of burdening my descendants with having to (if not legally, then via social pressure) spend too much time, money, and energy caring for me.
There’s a solution to this you can start on right now: structure your life and experiences such that you become an awesome grandparent with hilarious stories, humility and appeal to your grandchildren.
I probably won’t ever meet my grandchildren if there are any, because I am over fifty and single; I probably will never be a parent. So I will have to go a lot sooner if I am not to be a burden on society. But if you think you are going to be a grandparent, you can work on being an irreplaceable and useful one.
Re: Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Probably nobody at all got confused by that word choice. This is overconfidence; e.g. it "it is clear to me, so it must have been clear to everyone else." Indeed, there is a person in this overall thread [1] saying the use of "next" was ambiguous: > I literally thought some unpublished book. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45548294
Ok, fine, probably someone will get confused about anything. It was made clear to everyone because of the word choice in context. If someone didn't get it then they didn't put two and two together. I looked up the word in a few different dictionaries and the top entry aligns more with "subsequent" in every one. You are wrong on this.
You seem quite interested in right versus wrong. I wonder if you will be intellectually honest if/when I reveal errors, mistakes, oversimplifications, and so on?
> I looked up the word in a few different dictionaries and the top entry aligns more with "subsequent" in every one.
Even if you had looked at every dictionary, would you claim such a process resolves ambiguity in general? I hope not.
As you know, there are other entries other than the first in a dictionary. Multiple entries means there are multiple usages: there can be ambiguity. Sometimes usage diminishes or eliminates ambiguity, but not always.
> I looked up the word in a few different dictionaries...
You only took a small sample. How can you offer this as definitive evidence? You can't.
In case you didn't check it or overlooked it, here is the first entry from the Apple Dictionary:
> 1 (of a time or season) coming immediately after the time of writing or speaking: we'll go next year | next week's parade.
Anyhow, my argument does not rely on pointing to a dictionary and saying "I'm right" and "you are wrong". I am saying:
1. Reasonable people see ambiguity (in this specific case and in general)
2. No one person is the arbiter of what is ambiguous for others.
3. Claiming there is a definitive process to resolve ambiguity for everyone is naive.
Re: Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
#78Re: Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
#79The sad demise of Robin Williams made me a believer of assisted suicide. The option to go out with dignity should be available to everyone. That said, there is a problem in at least some places where assisted suicide is available where it keeps getting recommended to disabled people who don't want to die. That needs to be solved. Seems like an easy solve. Just don't do it. There is a cost reduction incentive, though,…
> That said, there is a problem in at least some places where assisted suicide is available where it keeps getting recommended to disabled people who don't want to die. Where? This is a thing which always pops up in these debates because it is a deep-rooted fear, but are there countries where this is a thing?
MAID being inappropriately offered to people who haven't expressed interest in it, and also being extended widely to people without terminal illness, has certainly become a controversy in Canada.
https://thewalrus.ca/assisted-dying/
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/doesnt-line-up-mps-c...
Re: Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland
#80I had an old teacher who died almost a year ago. Great guy, very sociable, knew everyone in the little town he lived in. Kept in touch with a lot of students. Good neighbour, friendly guy who'd talk to everyone. He got Alzheimers. He started forgetting stuff, and it frustrated him. He got caught driving dangerously, and cursed the doctor who took away his license. He argued with me about the state of some chicken he…
Yeah but if you are in that state, you probably don’t give a shit and everybody else seems to be the problem. So how do you solve this? When dementia isn’t too far progressed, your life seems to be still worthwhile to live and once the dementia gets worse, it’s too late to realize this.
I read that in some societies, if you ended up not being able to feed yourself, they would bring you to your favorite tree and leave you there.
If you ended back in camp you’d be welcomed. If you didn’t, that was your end. I found that remarkably comforting and peaceful.