Mike Darwin on Steve Jobs's hypocritical stance towards death

Relevant. (Summary: Jobs' type of cancer is relatively treatable when caught early, which it was. Unfortunately, he delayed 'conventional' treatment for nine months in favor of an 'alternative' diet.)

Not sure what moral to take from this. Fear of mortality makes people do crazy things, perhaps?

Liver stealer. Handicapped-space parker. Charity non-donor.

I like Bill Gates better.

So, did he get himself frozen anyway? Apart from his professed attitude to death, he did also say in that commencement address that nobody wants to die, not even the ones who think they'll go to heaven. He would have been an ideal candidate: dying in his prime of a non-brain-threatening disease, plenty of advance warning that the day was coming, and enough money to pay for the best possible care.

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:

"This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

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.

The common understanding is that death is a great thing, after a life well lived, not during. (with the unmentioned implication that dementia had set in years ago and no more production is being done.)

One might however argue that Steve created more utilons with the time he got from the transplant than any other receiver would have.

Jobs's statement came in the part of the speech where he talks about how knowledge of the possibility of death can motivate a life well lived. He does say about dying that "that is how it should be" but he never says that you should accept death, he says that knowing you're going to die someday is a great motivator. Presumably it motivated him to get a liver transplant. I don't really see any hypocrisy.

Just think how hypocritical it is to err on record, but then go on benefiting from correct ideas like nothing happened. Thank heavens we can rely on honest men to be wrong every time.

How long ago did Jobs receive the liver transplant?

Unless, you know, as Jobs got older and became less of a youth-obsessed person, his "utility of death" view was abandoned.

All of the suggestions in print that Jobs jumped the queue for a non-medically necessary Liver transplant and treated his cancer by going to a vegan restaurant are speculative. Gossip. National-Enquirer class stuff.

Here we are on Less Wrong, and bunches of you are succumbing to the same biases that grocery shoppers succumb to every day when they pick up sensational tabloids at the checkout. Of course I would never claim that this means you are wrong, but it sure as shitake doesn't mean you are right. Indeed, I would claim that it does mean that talking about these suggestions as if they were facts is more noise than signal.

Jobs is not inconsistent or hypocritical.

Noting that death is valuable to life on this planet should be about as non-controversial as anything you might notice. Evolution itself is impossible without death and for a few billion years, evolution has been the most interesting game in town. Even within human culture, we know that most fantastic breakthroughs, especially in math, but to a great extent in the sciences and in engineering, are made by humans in their 30s or younger. In a world with finite resources to support humans, what were the realative surpluses provided by a 40 year old compared to an 80 year old or a 120 year old?

Jobs is not a hypocrite for wanting to live longer than 57 years no matter what he thought about the value of death for the race. Who can even begin to believe that Jobs in his 50s, driving the creation of the iPhone, was not producing a surplus beyond the wildest dreams of anybody on this board, and certainly above that of 99.9999% of the rest of humanity of any age? If you were to make a short list of minds you would want to keep around for a lot longer if you had the choice, who would not have had Jobs in at least the first few pages of that list? Jobs didn't say death was valuable no matter when you died or who died. He said overall a finite lifespan for (culturally and physically) evolving creatures had been indispensable towards their evolution, that like virtually every other major feature of life, evolution had strongly favored death. Its also clear enough that evolution has strongly favored organisms who work effectively to delay their death. Its also clear that in our modern society, brilliant 80 year olds are more valuable than ever. Saying one obviously true thing hardly rules out believing and thinking about the ream of other, perhaps more subtle truths. Talking about Jobs as though he was just another guy, not something special, seems more a tactic than something anybody trying to escape biased thinking would ever do.