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DaFranker comments on Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm furious, but my target is not the legal system or the idiots who bullied Swartz. I despise them, yes, but there's a bigger target that might be causing way more harm here.
I was writing this big text about it, but there wasn't really much concrete information in it. It feels like the media's lack of action, in light of the current movement and near-martyrdom status Swartz has gained now that the public media jumped on the news of the suicide and spread it all over the ball we live on, is partly to blame.
All the counterfactuals ran through my head when I read about this. Basically, Swartz was fighting for access to information, in a manner that apparently broke no laws or rules he could have been aware of, and it turned out to be the lack of public awareness about his case, and his lack of information on how the public and his friends would react and support him, that probably contributed the most to whatever complicated thing happened in his mind to make him end his life.
(ETA: It looks like other people are also picking up on this (linked article made #1 on HackerNews at time of edit), so yeah, media and information issues.)
Because of shitty broken social systems, the news of his death are contributing more to his life goals than the news of his life. Think about this. For him, dying turned out to be more effective than living.
This should not be.
Er, why not? Certainly continued life is preferable to death, but it's not a terminal value, is it?
In my value system, people should be able to achieve much more alive than dead. One's own death should not be more effective at reaching terminal values even if life isn't a terminal value.
My value system also says people should have as much time as they want to achieve what they want to achieve, up to and including infinity(ies) if any such quantities exist.
And on top of that: For me, "life" is a terminal value. Each human mind forever lost substracts large amounts of points from the total potential utility I compute from possible futures of the universe.
While I agree that it is suboptimal (and tragic), his death may save/extend more lives. The effect seems to be making more information (especially scientific information) freely accessible, which in turn seems likely to result in more innovation and better access to treatments as they are developed.
Indeed. That's the source of my frustration and anger/fury*.
It feels like saving lives should be what saves more lives, not the other way around. Stupid humans and stupid reality.
* (I've never noticed any personal distinction of anger and fury as two distinct qualitative feelings, other than the respective absence or presence of a "target of" referent and that 'fury' usually means more intense than angry).