Princeton Grad Student And 'Brilliant' Programmer, Dies In Apparent Suicide
huffingtonpost.com
huffingtonpost.com
No counseling, no attempt to talk you out of it, just a chance to be somewhere that will put you within a new world.
Thanks.
Well let's disprove this path mathematically. YC would like that. I will prove by contradiction.
1. maxklein's assertion is that someone has it worse than you so you shouldn't kill yourself.
2. That means the person with the worst life in the world CAN kill himself.
3. Following that, the new worst life person can kill himself.
4. Then a new person. This can continue until one person is left on the earth. Does he kill himself?
There are different ways life can be bad. Living in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Congo is perhaps one way.
The assertion is that when you consider suicide, you have your reasons and those reasons are a product of your environment. A chance to see yourself in a completely new environment, for instance in a desperate area of the world where human help - any help - is needed can give you a whole new experience and give you the nudge you need to re-evaluate yourself.
There is no kill-yourself-if math here. It's about giving people time off from their (perceived) issues to think.
But let's explore your reasoning further:
Can you please explain to me how sending Bill Zeller to a war-torn country would have helped him deal with the sexual abuse that he experienced?
Suicide rates are the highest in the happiest countries. One hypothesis is that sad people constantly surrounded by happy people are driven to remove themselves from society. Bill might have fit well in that kind of new environment. Presumably, he was anhedonic, so giving up the comforts of the West would not have been such a shock.
The point would not be to encourage comparisons with others' circumstances, and realize "how good he has it". Such comparisons are worthless anyway, as someone with worse circumstances might be at peace, while someone much better off might be in the same kind of turmoil.
Rather, going to such a place would allow for picking up coping strategies while removing certain pressures. People in America have an unaccepting attitude towards tragedy, and this may have made Bill Zeller feel like an outcast. We're all constantly force-fed an image of health, wealth, and well-being. It's hard to forget that this was not the set point for most human beings in history. Life can be gruesome in ways that are hard to imagine, and we are insulated from that.
There are countries where it's OK to have negative circumstances, and it's OK to be sidelined by them. If I had my arm amputated tomorrow, my social life would be significantly disrupted. If lived in a place like India, my missing limb would make much less of a difference.
And 3 months is not a long time to wait, if you've been miserable for 27 years. According to the original suggestion, no one would be trying to talk you out of it. He would still be free to kill himself, preserving his right to die in a manner of his choosing.
But I will say open this registration for everyone (in turns maybe)! Let everyone understand where they are and where the "world" is!
How ostracism causes depression in the laboratory. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-pain-of...
Ostracism (parents, girlfriend, job) causes depression, advanced depression causes suicide.
http://freeideasblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/proposed-demotedis...
http://freeideasblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/demotepromote-or-d...
http://freeideasblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/good-nutrition-to-...
http://freeideasblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-theory-about-w...
http://freeideasblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/dont-trigger-disca...
Sorry for posting so many links, but taken as a whole it's a very provocative train of thought.
"I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I'll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it's true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning."
It occurs to me that suicide was widely accepted in many cultures, for a long time, certainly in pre-Christian Europe. Roman generals might kill themselves after their forces were routed, if they feared being captured. Japanese samurai might kill themselves after defeat, even if they evaded capture. Christianity brought in a belief that most of the time suicide was wrong, but many Christian writers allowed for some exceptions. In his book "The Education of a Christian Woman", published in 1547, Juan Luis Vives praises the mass suicide of women in a Greek city whose walls were about to fall to seige. He argued that it was better that they die with their honor intact. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=sy...
I say all this to suggest, the current trend in psychology, which views all suicide as irrational, is perhaps somewhat misguided. There are surely times when a person is in so much pain that, barring any hope of ending that pain, suicide becomes a rational option. We have, in recent years, begun to accept this line of reasoning as it applies to end-stage cancer patients, and others facing terminal diseases, but if you allow that this reasoning is valid anywhere, then you have to allow that it is valid everywhere that certain conditions are met, in particular, a great deal of pain, and no hope for ending that pain.
Tumblr: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/suicide?before=1294400750
Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/46479466/Bill-Zeller-Suicide-Note
Also, his twitter account is alive (his last tweet is from last year): http://twitter.com/billzeller
In any case, I'm disturbed and outraged by the religious comments (ranging from wishing him well in the next phase of his life to saying how much God loves everyone even despite this to how he should forgive himself for the suicide). I thought respect was fundamental to religion.
I say this as a devout (but not fundamentalist) Christian. This entire article grieves me–including his descriptions of how his father treated him. No matter what choices my kids make, I could never treat them that way.
I should really isolate my statement to Christianity. Jesus spent time with prostitutes, thieves and the marginalized. He likely drank alcohol. He wasn't concerned with wealth (other than warning against it's trappings). And, ironically, the people he was least respectful to were the religious leaders of the time.
Contrast that with the descriptions of Mr. Zeller's father and you can (hopefully) see the point I'm trying to make. His type are the only people I criticize—not because they don't live up to a standard but because (just like the leaders in Jesus' time)they create unnecessary standards for the purpose of controlling people or satisfying their own pride.
I hope that explains it better. As a side, I appreciate your approach. Religion can be a hot topic and I generally avoid it on HN. When it does come up, it's nice to share views in a respectful manner.
I take issue with even that much of the concept. Religions are not entities, only the people that make them up are.
And it seems the unfortunately vast majority of the time, those people are hateful, ignorant, or just plain dulled.
I could have phrased what I said better, but I stand by the essential meaning of what I said, and I disagree with you.
A "religion" as a particular body of ideas, is distinct from the adherents to that religion. Which is why it's perfectly reasonable to say something like, "Most Christians don't actually live up to the teachings of Christianity."
For example, nobody can reasonably deny that Christianity involves (1) belief in Christ; (2) a large helping of faith instead of reason; (3) a significant element of self-sacrifice. Or for Islam: (1) belief in the teachings of Muhammad, and in Allah; (2) a large helping of faith instead of reason; (3) a significant element of self-sacrifice (this time posited as "submission"). Buddhism, arguably, might only be (2), depending on your interpretation; I think Buddhism is probably "less well-defined," so to speak, but maybe I just no less about it. Still, there are clearly certain concepts that define and/or are implied by any particular religion.
I suggest you explore religion, especially religion that exists outside of the spotlight, more deeply to gain an appropriate understanding of how these things work.
For instance, religion does not emphasize faith over reason, but faith in tandem with reason; faith on a basic level is merely sufficient trust to give something an earnest try (or, in more religious terms, "things hoped for but not seen", which is to say, a belief in potential), which is a principle necessary in the acquisition of all meaningful knowledge.
That's a contradiction.
faith.. is necessary in the acquisition of all meaningful knowledge.
I strongly disagree.
Believe me, I've looked into it.
The same process occurs in the spiritual and religious realm with regard to faith. Religious people hear that certain information and/or manifestations are available to them, and they have faith sufficient to follow the path outlined. As they do so, they find their initial faith validated, and then they continue to have faith on the next point outlined in the scriptures, and find that faith validated, and so on.
Faith is not knowledge; faith is a stopgap on the way to knowledge, and it's a principle necessary for healthy or reasonable conduct in all forms, which is part of why religion requires such an emphasis of faith. If a man obtains all knowledge, there is no more need for faith, because he knows everything of himself and has no need to believe something without a formal proof, as he has already received a formal proof of every true thing, which can only happen as that man has sufficient faith in true things to experiment and learn of their truth with help from God. He has no faith because he no more has a mere hope in things not seen; he now sees all things.
A scientist engaging in an experiment is attempting to gain knowledge, and he may expect the experiment to go a certain way, based on what he knows.
Someone engaging in faith says, "I believe this, just because I want to." There is no reference to knowledge, reason, or reality. It's putting an "I wish" over "It is."
To engage in faith is to surrender your mind. To surrender your mind is the most basic kind of evil there is; it's anti-human life.
If you are actually interested in thinking about this further, you'll probably find my cousin response (i.e. responding to another child of this comment's grandparent) highly relevant.
In religious circles, one that believes things merely because they "want to" is not considered faithful, but ignorant at best. God has given reason to man and He expects man to use it. You may feel personally that a belief in any spiritual realm or being is unreasonable, but almost all people, historically, and to a somewhat lesser extent, contemporarily, disagree with you.
You're demonizing faith as an entire principle because some bad dudes have couched their badness in religion. It is common to attempt to shroud filthiness in virtue; most people find spiritual matters somewhat confusing but also consider spiritual teachers most noble, and that makes religion and false piety an excellent cover for corruption.
However, not every religious person is bad just because some "religious" teachers exploit and denigrate and abuse the trust of their perishoners ("false priests", as they are called).
Your attack on "faith" as a concept is silly; faith is often used in reference to religious circles because there seems to be some contention among modern persons whether it is worth having any faith in spiritual information at all, and they therefore assume their faith in scientists or physical teachers is not faith, but "reason", or something like that. Faith is a belief in a thing that has not been proven and a set of actions that seek to discover the reality of that belief one way or another. Anything that is eventually proven is proven because of the faith of its provers -- someone has to believe that an idea may have some merit in order to test it and discover if it is real or not.
Religious faith is necessary among all men because spiritual proofs are communicated "spirit to spirit", and as yet, man does not know how to transfer these or write a mathematical proof of spiritual truths learned personally. This, however, does not mean that faith is not necessary in non-religious fields. A small degree of faith is necessary to believe even things that have obvious and blatant proofs available.
The "anti-faith" thing is a silly and petty demonization and misappropriation, promoted by those that hate religion, and I don't really see the point in it, other than an attempt to make those that believe in religion and exercise faith in not just temporal, but also spiritual, matters appear "unreasonable" or stupid. And that's just not the case.
(I also don't consider your definition of faith to be particularly useful, and I suspect that you're equivocating, but those are tangential to my point here.)
It's easier to see when we pick something that the whole culture hasn't coalesced on yet. Like string theory and worm holes. Some people believe there's a worm hole at the center of our universe. They have 'evidence' that supports their theory. I can believe or not, but I'll never know one way or another. 100 years from now, if everyone believes the _exact_ same theories we have today, with the _exact_ same raw data, my great-grandkids will say they know the worm hole exists and the 'evidence' is obvious. The only difference between now and then is how widely those theories are dispersed and accepted. Yet today I (and you?) wouldn't say we know worm holes exist. And my great-grandkids won't 'know' any more than you and I do.
In other words, my 'evidence' is what is commonly known and accepted to be true. Yet I personally don't know it to be true -- I trust that it is. Isn't that blind?
Heck, that goes for atoms, electricity, just about everything. All I KNOW (without getting existential, etc) are things I've personally experienced. Everything else is pure belief (and blindly at that) based on trusting the sources.
You don't "blindly believe" the scientific facts/phenomena to which you refer. First, you have ample evidence to suggest that they exist. Second, they do not contradict anything else in reality that you are aware of. Third, you have reason to trust the process of cognition that led to those conclusions, i.e, the thought process and work of scientists that reference reality in their work and seek to prove things objectively.
Faith---which in common use (properly so) is equivalent to "religious faith" unless otherwise specified---breaks all of those rules.
On more complex things, it's harder (and sometimes uncomputable) to come up with such precise probability estimates, but that doesn't change the principle. I believe with greater than 99% certainty that evolution happened. I believe with less certainty that Moore's law will continue for another two or three process nodes. I have very little belief that "psychics" can talk with the dead; equivalently, I have a very high degree of belief that they can not talk with the dead.
The degrees of belief we have about things should be revised upward or downward based on evidence, and should be based on the evidence we have available to us. Your belief that mars is real is supported by a lot of evidence, and therefore should have a high degree of confidence. But if I told you that there's a planet, unknown until now, called Uldune, and that this planet has space pirates using it as a supply base, then believing me with non-negligible certainty would be an act of blind faith. (Disbelieving me, with high certainty, would not be. My story about the planet Uldune contradicts a lot of evidence about the current state of the art in space travel, and the laws of physics, and so on.)
I'm assuming you're not a geneticist, so you probably didn't verify that the bones that were stacked nicely into a skeleton actually came from the same being. You likely weren't part of the dig team that found them. You don't know where they came from, or even if they are actual bone. And I'm not even talking about people purposely misleading us, but rather the fact that we have to take at face value what we are told. That's blind faith. We both _assume_ we could dig and verify the facts (with enough time, money and education), but we don't -- we just believe.
My argument is the 'evidence' we think we have, is nothing more than blind faith in 99% of the time, simply because we don't have the time and resources to follow up on everything. We simply believe because everyone else does.
For example, I accept on "blind faith" the fact that Australia exists. But if I got on a plane to Australia, I have every reason to expect that it will go to a real place called Australia, rather than secretly taking me to Botswana or something. By your definition, a belief in Australia and a belief in unicorns are both lumped under the category of blind faith, which I think is a really silly classification.
All our observations of the world -- even sight, sound, smell, and so on -- are indirect. Your eyes don't see all wavelengths, and they can be tricked into confusing combinations of red, green, and blue as "the same color" as a pure wavelength of light. And don't get me started on the preprocessing that happens before the signals even reach your brain! Will you categorize everything you see as being taken on blind faith as well? Where do you draw the line?
I'm not lumping them together. Lots of people that I trust tell me they've been to Australia. I don't have any reason to doubt them. I trust them, so accept that Australia is there. Lots of others also publish pictures, movies, etc so I trust them too. But that's a belief, not a knowledge -- I _personally_ have no evidence at this point.
Nobody I know professes to have seen a unicorn. I also have no personal evidence, so I don't believe that.
And like I said above, I'm not trying to go to the point of whether we can trust our senses, or know whether or not we actually exist or any of that. I'm just trying to show that individually, each of us live our lives with 99% belief (ie no personal experience/evidence), and 1% knowledge (things we've personally experienced).
Let's take the atom. How do YOU KNOW that atoms exist? What personal experience/evidence do YOU have that they exist? We both believe they exist, but neither of us have split one and know for a fact that there is a nucleus in there. We both choose to believe, based on the coherent story we hear from many other sources.
To dig deeper, the faith leap is more done when we agree that every night, the spot of light we see at roughly the same place in the sky is the emanation of a unique object, that deserves a unique name. This is related to the identity problem.
We're not so different from the people at the time of Columbus that were taught the world was flat. They didn't (most couldn't verify it), but everyone 'knew' it was true. That had been taught it, they had books describing it, and maps showing it. They had as much evidence as I do about mars.
Many people really have seen mars through telescopes, and a number of rocket scientists have built devices to go and look at it indirectly. THOSE people KNOW mars exists. The rest of us believe, blindly, what we are told about it. I don't doubt mars exists in the least, only because I _choose_ to believe it exists.
But you're right, in that they had as much evidence as you have about Mars. As in, with a some hours of observation, you too could establish that the Earth is round and that Mars is a planet and know as much as a 15th century nobleman. All from first principles. You just need to view the evidence.
That's different than religion and "faith". Those don't require evidence. In fact, faith require the absence of evidence.
You can try to equate evidence-based beliefs and non evidence-based beliefs, but they are not the same.
People have been 'seeing Mars' since way before we actually knew what it was.
And I don't know what' the fuck these extremist Christians are smoking, but they sure as hell haven't read their own bible.
For the record, I read the note, and there's nothing in it that would make it inappropriate to leave a comment like "hope he is happy now" or whatever. Even if he asked people not to say this about his death, which he didn't do, or even remotely hint at, they still would. It's just the common way of addressing death. Most people are religious.
Believe me, we try and if you came to my church you'd probably our pastor speak out against Mr. Zeller's type
I'm not sure what public debate you're referring to
Moderate American Christians, on the other hand, could easily wipe out the ridiculous overpresence of fundamentalist Christians on national television. This is assuming the majority actually consists of moderate Christians. If that assumption is false, then the feelings of nopassrecover are justified by appeal to the probability that the commenters are actually the type of people that are guilty of this mans death.
I admit it's a fine line between what I'm trying to argue and the 'guilt by association' fallacy, but the difference is the answer to the question: how responsible is a powerful majority subgroup for taking action against the minority leading the group, when the majority subgroup is suffering from that leadership, because members of the majority subgroup are being held accountable for opinions and decisions of the leadership that they don't even agree with? Humans use fallacious reasoning and pointing that out doesn't change a thing about that. Taking away the origin of the fallacy does change a thing and makes the world a bit better. I'm not committting the fallacy in my argument: I'm just pointing out that others will commit the fallacy, which is an unchangeable fact of human nature the majority subgroup should better acknowledge.
Moderate Christians pretty routinely criticize Christian extremists, just like moderate agnostic/atheists routinely criticize their extremists. Last time Pat Robertson made a stupid comment that I heard about, about a third of my Christian friends on facebook used direct quotes of the Bible to contradict him, and nobody said anything in support of him.
If you live in a bubble, you only see the other side's extremists, and therefore come to the mistaken belief that their moderates are silent or nonexistent. The solution is not to criticize the moderates for being insufficiently loud; it's to spend more time actually listening to the moderates.
about a third of my Christian friends on facebook used
direct quotes of the Bible to contradict him
it's to spend more time actually listening to the moderates.
Even the general "Lord, let your loving kindness be upon him; you came to us first, knowing we could not reach you on our own." seems more religious than consolatory, which bugged me as I got the impression from the note that religion was the facade his family and his abuser used to present themselves as good people and rationalise their inner demons.
That has little to do with the religiosity of those people, I think, it mainly just has to do with a group of people that has very little prudence about speech in general. You shouldn't set your standards too high for the unwashed; Hacker News is anathema to people that don't read, as just about everything here is wall-of-text; no funny cat pictures or YouTube memes to attract the less attentive crowd, and generally no stupid political nit-picking, or anything non-business or non-compsci.
Huffington Post is a content farm, essentially, and is filled with lots of distractions. It is also a home base for ideologues, with its founders and editors frequently appearing on talk shows and injecting themselves into political commentary. Much of its readership happens to be religious or Christian, just as most people you meet in the West will happen to be religious and/or Christian. Perhaps we should consider that though many of these people are leaving religiously-oriented comments, the propriety of their writing is not necessarily correlated with their religiosity so much as its correlated with other factors.
I'm willing to give the commentators the benefit of the doubt though and assume they meant no disrespect. They'd probably be puzzled that anyone would find offense. Likely just a lack of exposure to other world views.
This makes me question anything that supports rape fantasies. Anything that would even remotely encourage someone to act out this horrible, life ruining crime on another human being is very bad for society. It's one form of censorship I would support.
I voted you down. I don't think your comment has any meaningful place in this thread. It should go without saying that you shouldn't use someone's death to soapbox about censorship or any other unrelated topic.
Journalistic convention is more related to the topic??
We've just found out about someone that suffered through a hell-filled life because of some sicko's fantasy. I'd hope we would try and figure out a way to spare others the same aweful fate.
No, he suffered through a hell-filled life because of some sicko's _actions_.
What about 'crimes of passion'?
I'm sure that will work out great.
But it is hardly surprising that a religious person came up with this, given that most sins are already thought crimes.
After all, that is what faith is, a strong belief that your fantasies are real.
http://1000Memories.com/BillZeller
If you knew Bill, please join his page.
Cable news particularly abuses this trick to insinuate something that they can deny later when questioned.
Based on his note, he is a compelling writer. If it were not published posthumously, it could have done a lot of good for himself and for others. It probably would not have received the same amount of attention though.
I feel bad for the guy. I'm certainly not one of those self-righteous "suicide is selfish" types, but it does bother me that the victims always seem to lose in these cases. Such a loss.
You will be then less likely to tell it to yourself again in your head.
so-called smart guy kills himself
It's just sad.
To wit:
Area woman "terrified" by Sex Predadtor - implies the woman, when asked, said she was terrified, not that "terrified" should be taken with a grain of salt.
People like Einstein are the only ones who get the exceptions, and I don't mean any disrespect but this guy was simply not Einstein.
My intensely normal upbringing means I can't ever hope to comprehend what he must have gone through
RIP
Talking about suicide is a taboo subject. And doctors and others in caretaker positions are legally required to alert the authorities if they suspect someone may harm themselves. If it is discussed, there is a reasonable chance the person discussing it will be sent to a mental institution, the experience of which may be less appealing than suicide.
I wonder what would happen if physical suicide could be replaced with social suicide, administered by something analogous to the witness protection program.
Someone posted a great quote in the comments on the story on Gizmodo: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
RIP Bill Zeller.
(Offtopic, I know, but doesn't this strike you as weird?)
It seemed appropriate.
tried to get rid of it, go to school etc. , but had to communicate with his family and probably that nullified his self-help totally every time.
Its probably something like working like mad on some programming project for a year and then someone hacks your system and deletes everything... after that one year to restore the system and then someone again comes and deletes it ..one more year to restore , and back to zero again
- Going into counseling, as sometimes it's just not enough. - Getting attention, as it's a distraction that can sometimes make falling back into the 'darkness' more painful. - Love, as more times than not it's easy to not be able to let go of the pain and transmit it to your loved ones and hurt them because of it.
It's easy to judge other people when you're living a sheltered life and you have some delusions of grandeur about how people with X and Y attributes should behave in a certain way that has been lodged in the back of your mind because of your upbringing or religion. The fact that you can so easily say that smart and brilliant people don't take their lives is a clear indicator that you really don't have a grasp on what being smart or brilliant is, but more important than that, it clearly shows that you have not had to go through anything as traumatizing as what this man went through.
In reality when you've gone through traumatizing events such as this, there is only one thing that will define if you're suicidal or not, and it's if you are strong enough to live with yourself, your 'darkness', and knowing someone else is either alive and unpunished, or suffered an undeserved and painful death.
I've seen stuff you could get out of a Saw movie, and sadly had to live a violent episode defending my home and loved ones (despite a middle-upper class upbringing, I did end up living on the crappiest and violent part of town on a small room with 2 other persons sharing a bed). Because of what I've lived I can tell you three things: smart/brilliant people take their lives because they can't deal with the feelings, not because they're actually dumb by some morality troll's standards; things like this mark you for life, and no amount of counseling can turn you back into someone you once where, though that doesn't mean that you can't live with the events or your decisions (In my case it gave me the most untrusting and uncaring character, which is something that affects every relationship I've had, romantic or otherwise); and people that act judgmental regarding things like this are doing so because they have this grand ego which gets fed by making others feel like they're beneath them. No one who has ever had to go through something as traumatizing as this would have the the heart (or the balls) to say the bullshit you've said.
Be more respectful and stop letting your nonsense morals talk crap of other people that deserve at least the silence of the witch-hunt people holding the pitchforks.
Honestly: How do you know? Should I invoke Alan Turing or look up suicides on Wikipedia?
I think we, who are not going through these kind of things, tend to underestimate just how damaged people can be. I'm not saying he made the right choice, but I'm definitely saying that it's not as clear cut as you imply.
The OP seems to equate 'smart' with evolutionarily successful. While there is no question that removing yourself from the gene pool before reproducing is lousy evolutionary fitness, I can certainly understand looking at the world and deciding that one just doesn't want to play that game.
For the most part I think the downvotes are because the post is offensive and lacks insight, not because people are applauding suicide.
I don't think it's a failure to contribute to point out that rational people( and here we would presume that brilliant programmers are generally rational )would conduct their lives and solve their problems rationally.
Physical trauma that occurred and ended 20 years ago is not the kind of thing a rational mind would choose suicide as a solution to.
I understand that the "feelings first" zeitgeist of modern America makes this kind of thinking unpopular, but for some reason I thought unpopularity alone was not considered an appropriate rubric to downvote on HN.
"Physical trauma that occurred and ended 20 years ago is not the kind of thing a rational mind would choose suicide as a solution to."
Childhood sexual abuse is not the kind of thing that lends itself to a rational emotional state. If you read Bill's note, you'll observe that he recognized this fact, sought help, and obtained little. Maybe all he needed was someone like you to tell him to "get more rational".
Even this is very arguable, there are plenty of perfectly rational reasons for suicide.