jimrandomh comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: NancyLebovitz 17 September 2010 01:44AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 26 September 2010 01:04:06PM *  6 points [-]

I don't know what to make of this:

Suicide note

Article

The man who took his own life on Harvard's campus Saturday left a 1,904-page suicide note online.

According to the Harvard Crimson, Mitchell Heisman wrote "Suicide Note," posted at http://suicidenote.info, while living in an apartment near the school. The note is a "sprawling series of arguments that touch upon historical, religious and nihilist themes," his mother, Lonni Heisman, told the Crimson. She said her son would have wanted people to know about his work.

The complex note, divided into four parts, touches on Christianity, the Holocaust and social progress, among other topics, and mentions Harvard several times.

IvyGate calls the note "probing, deeply researched, and often humorous."

Heisman was 35 when he shot himself on the steps of Harvard's Memorial Church Saturday. He had a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Albany. According to the Crimson, he worked in area bookstores and lived on inheritance from his father, who died when he was young.

I've begun skimming a few of the chapters (the titles aren't anything if not provocative). On the one hand I am quite predisposed to view the entire work as mostly bunk, because manifestos of this nature often are. However on the other hand, the idea of a philosopher driven to death by his learning is a stimulating archetype enough for me to explore this. And yes I know that considering he quotes:

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward. —SOCRATES, PHAEDO

Its certain he was playing on that.

I've decided to post this here for rationality detox so I don't pick up any craziness (I'd wager a high probability of there being some there).

He seems to have developed what he terms a sociobiolgical analysis of the history of liberal democracy, reminiscent so far in parts of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. This judging by a few excerpts of the ending chapter culminates in a kind of singularitarian view and the inevitability of human extinction at the hands of our self created transhuman Gods.

Comment author: jimrandomh 26 September 2010 05:22:32PM *  12 points [-]

Mitchell Heisman starts off by saying

If my hypothesis is correct, this work will be repressed. It should not be surprising if justice is not done to the evidence presented here. It should not be unexpected that these arguments will not be given a fair hearing. It is not unreasonable to think that this work will not be judged on its merits.

This is obviously false - it's up on the internet, it's gotten some press coverage, it quite obviously has not been repressed. But he is right that it won't be judged on its merits, because it's so long that reading it represents a major time commitment, and his suicide taints it with an air of craziness; together, these ensure that very few people will do more than lightly skim it.

The sad thing is, if this guy had simply talked to others as he went along - published his writing a chapter at a time on a blog, or something - he probably could've made a real contribution, with a real impact. Instead, he seems to have gone for 1904 pages with no feedback with which to correct misconceptions, and the result is that he went seriously off the rails.