byrnema comments on Mike Darwin on Steve Jobs's hypocritical stance towards death - Less Wrong
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Comments (78)
If we're going to dissect Job's comments and measure how hyprocritical he is from a handful of sentences at a commencement, we should at least once see the full context:
He was just making the standard 'carpe diem' speech, and his segue was his near brush with death (the claim being he now had the experience to make this comment with more weight.) He already said he didn't want to die and he explicitly said he hoped for a few more decades.
I think what he said was kind of dumb -- I'm sure he would choose to live forever if he perceived the immediate chance, and wouldn't have begrudged our immortality either, so he must have meant something else. (Indeed, it's a very 'far' and removed perspective to think of species and generations of humans replacing one another like generations of computers.)
I don't know what Steve Jobs meant, exactly, or what his motives were for making that statement. But I don't think he was claiming he was nonchalant about his own mortality.