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DeVliegendeHollander comments on What Would You Do If You Only Had Six Months To Live? - Less Wrong
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Write a book for my child, basically trying to put all my wisdom / experience into it. My father passed away a year ago and it still bothers me we have not discussed anything serious in the last 10 or so years. I need his brain, his experience, it is far too hard to deal with life without his advice, and yet all I have is photos. We really owe it to our children to write down everything we could teach them.
I would write a book anyway, even if I had no child, the best service I can give to the world is helping others figure out certain things quicker than I did.
Apparently, retiring professors traditionally give a lecture entitled, "The Last Lecture," during which they talk about what wisdom they want to leave behind. This particular book is the lecture Randy Pausch gave after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
My father-in-law has literally only ~6 months left. He did write books with his life wisdom. These were intended for his children to preserve and pass on his knowledge. These are part biography part message and a trove of insight into his life. But I didn't get much general insight from that and I'm unsure whether it helps his daughter in her life-decisions. One early book is called 'living as a warrior' and a late one 'some lint from my shroud'. Some ideas appear to me obscure. Some trite. And the context is missing (both sides: a) to understand what he means and b) how he'd apply that to our situations).
I'm considering this. I'm accumulating an Anki-Deck of 'essential real-life insights'. But I'm not sure about the right way to 'teach' this. These concepts are so much condensed and they can't be taught easily. The inferential gap is too large. Currently it is more a reminder for me to build up toward that and to use ideas from that in everyday interaction. Explaining things I do with (strictly unneccessarily) precise terminology that will be needed later. I considered a book. But more an orbis pictus kind with multiple layers of meaning. But that is just too hard to do in parallel.
Sure. However the goal is not merely to help, although that is a big part of it. The goal would be to leave something better behind than photos. Something as close to a "mind upload" or "mind simulation" as possible. To enable my child to have something like a discussion with me after I am gone.
For example, one of my most "radical feeling" and unusual feeling ideas is that learning some martial arts is essential to developing masculine qualities, and developing some qualities is essential to well-being as a straight man at least, because fighting is one of the basic animal experiences like feeding, sex, or social life and should not be missed out. I mean, it is essential for probably everybody, but for a straight man it is even tied to sexual selection, so doubly so... My dad was kind of telling me similar things when I was 15 but I brushed them off I said "I am an intellectual, I live in my mind, I have no need for this body-oriented animalistic things, don't try to turn me into some baboon". Then I figured it around 35. So it would be pretty cool now to have this quasi-conversation with him, a chapter in a book, describing how he figured this out and what the experiences were like. It would be simply better than just having photos, a mind dump, a mind download onto paper. I don' thave Anki cards in mind, rather the opposite, a biographical narrative that tells how was what figured out through what life experiences.
And even doubling as a historical account. Have you read The World Of Yesterday from Stefan Zweig? Too bad he died childless, as it is awesome to read such perceptive subjective histories even if you care not for the person who wrote it, imagine how cool it would be if you really were close to the author!
But then he did tell/teach you. And all the context and real life experience was necessary. It wouldn't help to just read it.
Sure but at 35 I could now read it and see his bio how he interpreted it and how he figured it out and how used it.