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army1987 comments on Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) - Less Wrong
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So, The Tech is reporting that Aaron Swartz has killed himself. No suicide note has surfaced, PGP-signed or otherwise. No public statements that I've been able to find have identified witnesses or method. Aaron Swartz was known for having many enemies. There's the obvious enemies in the publishing industry and the US attorneys office. Cory Doctorow wrote that he had "a really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors."
I'd like to raise the possibility that this was not a natural event. Most of this evidence can be adequately explained by how little time has passed, so we'll know more in a few days or weeks.
Strange side note: He had a PGP public key on his web page at http://www.aaronsw.com/pgp, retrievable from Wayback Machine, but the link went bad some time after Jul 28 2012. All other links on the site seem to be fine.
Additional side note: if your chance of being murdered ever goes past 0.01, state publicly that you don't believe in suicide and that any suicide note would definitely be cryptographically verifiable. If it ever goes past 0.05, set up a record-audio-to-Internet button that you can activate in under a second, then give your lawyer a signed message saying that any supposed suicide note which lacks a certain phrase is fake.
That's the first think that came to my mind, but I dismissed it as paranoia. But if I'm not the only one...
EDIT: OTOH, there's this... What person makes a will at 26?
He seems to have been smarter than most, had more money than most, and cared more about how the world was going than most. Having a will might just have been being relatively reality-based rather than a sign of depression.
His online will is directly inspired by Eric S. Raymond's (whose example he links to as the good idea that inspired him), and ESR certainly isn't depressive.
Can you give links? (Turns out that “will” is about one of the most ungoogleable nouns out there.)
ESR's, aaronsw's.
I made a will shortly after my first child was born, and I was around 27. Standard best practice.
It seems he published "If i get hit by a truck" in 2002, at age 16. Sad. Also, perhaps, awe-inspiring. Eliminating the problem of one's bus-factor would ordinarily be admirable... if you do it for the contingency where you simply get hit by a bus. I want, but can't, quite make myself believe that he didn't write this, at that time, in anticipation of an end like this. In that case; not awe-inspiring, only sad.
He commented that he had willed his money to GiveWell 8 months ago. I don't think Quirinius Quirrell's hypothesis is particularly likely, but I also don't think it's likely that he was planning suicide for 8 months. If he wrote up a will last week, I would find that more convincing.
Why not? Do you expect he'd have said, if he was habitually suicidal?
He was arrested two years ago, so eight months is compatible with his legal troubles being a cause.
If he did not, at that time, want to commit suicide, it seems kind of odd to have the agency to make a will as a countermeasure in case you commit suicide in the future, but not have the agency to get help to prevent yourself from committing suicide. If he did want to commit suicide, it seems a bit odd to begin serious preparations more than 8 months prior to following through. Not saying it's impossible, but it reduces the strength of the evidence.
Getting help does not necessarily prevent you from doing it eventually. A lot of people waffle for a long time.
The former is odd, but possible. I'd expect him to (find a clever roundabout way to) say "I'm not acutely suicidal right now, but I'm likely to become so. I'll get my affairs in order. Please watch out for me.", given that he talked about depression, but sometimes what you can and can't do is weird.
The latter wouldn't surprise me at all. "If you want to commit suicide, wait a year" is common advice, and if he was able not to immediately choose suicide, he sounded like the type to follow it - reflective, planning ahead, productive enough to make preparations in meantime.
I dismissed it as well, (absurdity) but... I don't really have words yet for why it just seems weird.
It is weird that someone would choose suicide. To choose death over life... I cannot imagine myself making such a choice. Or are you saying it would be weird if it turned out to not be suicide after all? That is probably because the prior on committing murder over something like that is low, despite the fact that they were harassing him with serious legal hassles. Let's see how this plays out. Here is my predictionbook prediction on the subject.
This makes it a little less weird.
Bit late to this, but just noting for future readers that I just made one at age 25 in a batch along with power of attorney documents and life support / living will directions after seeing how useful power of attorney documents were with a family member's medical treatment.