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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Eh, as someone with a degree in philosophy, it’s this sort of overanalysis that has led to the field’s sidelining. The so-called folk wisdom stated by the dying might not be logically rigorous, but it’s a perspective that we would do well to remember. Being trite or simple doesn’t make something wrong.

My own personal theory is that the deathbed perspective is quite similar to the childhood one: without the constraints of life placed upon us by social pressures and resource acquisition, we have an easier time realizing what is actually important.

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Deathbeds are where people have maximum experience and low incentive to lie. Nothing magical. Louis XIV saying "I loved war too much" on his deathbed gives a perspective to his life achievements.

There is plenty of incentive to lie on your deathbed. A lot of people spend their entire lives worrying about how they’ll be remembered.

But crucially, the incentives are different than those people have in the middle of their lives.

Most people's usual incentives lead to them optimizing for the short-to-medium term future, i.e. the next couple of months or years.

People on their deathbed will optimize either for the extremely short term (finishing this conversation) or the extremely long term (the last chance to affect how they'll be remembered).

This suggests that if people lie on their death bed, they'll lie in different ways than ordinarily. Even if you can't take deathbed statements as unvarnished truth, their differences from everyday statements can be revealing.

For the dying, caring about other's perception is a luxury. For the living, it is a necessity. Any incentive to lie on your death bed is irrationally self imposed, which is not to say that it doesn't happen but that it doesn't have to.

People lie. On their deathbeds with the sense of impending finality they will do their damndest to come up with anything at all to feel better. Lie to God (I'll convert! I'll be a better person!), lie to their spouse (I was always faithful, and always loved you!), lie to themselves (It's not that bad! I'll live.)

Pack any situation with emotion and adrenaline, you'll get world-class mental gymnastics. Look at the exceptional efforts even animals put out when mortally threatened. The burst of energy and struggle seems like it would be epic. Including struggling with the truth.

People lie as in "some people lie". That sounds like a narcissist what you are describing there.

Some people lie like they breathe, it’s automatic, and doesn’t have any meaning. It’s not meant to be malicious.

Does the intent really matter?

Of course the intent matters. There’s quite a difference between a mother in a warzone holding their kid and saying “it’s going to be alright” to assuage their fears and Bernie Madoff saying he was going to invest people’s money judiciously.

It matters, in the same way intent matters when you cut somebody with a blade. Was it attempted murder? Self-defense? Carelessness? Accident? Surgery?

Lies, similarly, are fundamentally destructive - a lie is a piece of invalid data that corrupts, to smaller or greater extent, the minds of everyone who come in contact with it. Incorporating a lie in your reasoning moves you further from accurately perceiving reality. Sometimes, very rarely, a lie may be justified - the best of available options, even accounting for second-order effects. Usually, it isn't. But it matters whether the lie was accidental, good-faith, attempt at poisoning someone's mind, or wanton disregard for peoples' ability to grasp reality.

I would hope lies to protect another person from harm are allowable.

We suspect an enemy of the revolution is being harbored in hour house. Are you hiding this person? (forgive the preposterous example, but I hope you get my intent). It could be someone hiding from a jealous lover, someone hiding from loan sharks, etc.

Not being Murdered is one level.

Did you do the dishes is another.

Have kids. Did you eat chocolate bar? No!!!! So how did the chocolate get all over your face?

That's why I mentioned surgery at the end of my comparison with blade cuts. Much like cutting into a body is traumatic for it, but is sometimes require to save it, sometimes the ethical benefits of a lie far outweigh the costs. Yours is a very good example.

There are also more fuzzy ones. Since I mentioned medicine: there's an ongoing discussion in the medical community as to if and when lies by omission are OK - is there a point to informing the patient about something they can do nothing about, when if they learn about it, it would cause them great amount of emotional distress? Caring for health doesn't mean just servicing the body like a mechanic, but also catering for person's emotional well-being.

The point I was trying to make is that lies, by default, are bad things (much like being cut by a blade). Intent, care and consequences are what can make lies very bad, or - sometimes - good.

Growing up in Church, not lying was a big issue. 10 Commandment and all. Caused a lot of heartache for a lot of people. Met lots of missionaries who Preached in extremely bad countries and situations.

Quite annoyed to find out it was a translation issue.

You don’t lie then testify against people. Which is a highly specific and malicious sort of lie.

> Well said, Cephalus, I replied; but as concerning justice, what is it? --to speak the truth and to pay your debts --no more than this? And even to this are there not exceptions? Suppose that a friend when in his right mind has deposited arms with me and he asks for them when he is not in his right mind, ought I to give them back to him? No one would say that I ought or that I should be right in doing so, any more than they would say that I ought always to speak the truth to one who is in his condition.

Intent very much matters. It's right there at the beginning of the reading on the topic. (The Republic, Book I)

Nice example, I remember that from Ethics back in college. But there's lots of Greeks that would say Yes! Give them their weapons.

See, you have no right to decide another's state of mind is 'not right'. That's taking their agency from them, treating them like an incompetent child. Like trying to 'murder their Self' or some such.

You can say for instance "I know where they are but you're upset. Can we talk about this before you do something you'll regret?"

It can.

If it’s meant to hurt. Then that’s a bad person.

Otherwise it’s a personality flaw that needs to be addressed. Like the “pull my finger uncle”

It’s very troublesome regardless.

I agree and I do know several people like that. It does have the intent of propping up the reality they live in but it is inconsistent and quite laughable to be honest. I find another type of liars a bit more dangerous, the kind that can put a mask of sincerity and when they can take advantage they do lie horribly. My point was that some people lie, others tell the truth and in the face of death where inexistence is next door, only the narcissists would probably lie to leave a grandiose legacy, the rest, I think they have no incentive to do so.

All people lie: deceit is part of being human. Robert L. Trivers has much to say about this. See for example Trivers' book "Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others".

https://www.amazon.com/Deceit-Self-Deception-Fooling-Yoursel...

"All people lie" is such a dangerous mindset. Of course it's true, if you apply the right semantics. But it's simply faux-philosophical when out of qualifying context.

There are many actions which you might call "lying", including self-deception and politeness, but which are pretty far from the deliberate verbal deception which is generally associated with the word. If you want to understand "lying" in a broad sense, then you should definitely clarify that people lie with different motivations, methods and impacts.

It's just such a trope for narcisstic people to say "all people lie, at least I admit it to myself".

Just quoting Dr. House

I don't think getting someone's perspective when they're actually on their deathbed is particularly interesting.

The point of the deathbed perspective is that imagining you're looking back on your life from your deathbed can help you figure out what you find important now.

It's trying to get a different perspective on your future, looking at it from another angle.

I agree that this is the goal. The problem is that the more I think about being on my deathbed (or death, or read obituaries, etc.) the more I realize I won't care how I spent my life. All of which tells me that how I spend my time today is irrelevant. A long run perspective most definitely does not tell you what really matters to you.

Yeah, I think deathbed is the part of the issue because it distracts from the goal. Maybe a better exercise might be "Imagine yourself in the (distant?) future, while you're still healthy. What would you want that life to look like?".

Imagining things is never the same as facing a finality that has been ingrained throughout your life in your psyche.

You can't accurately imagine being old until you're old. You can't accurately imagine being right at the edge of life until you're there. It's like imagining how you'll feel at the end of a movie that wasn't filmed yet, or what the last block of a blockchain will look like before being close to it. When you're there and have the power of retrospective it's easier to have a final perspective, and even easier to express it since the concept of consequence no longer exists for you.

On one hand you have the full experience of your life so it's easy to draw the line of what was important. On the other hand this never takes into account how many of those "bad" decisions got you where you are now. So the deathbed perspective is the individual's assessment on what were the high and low points of their life, after computing the whole equation. Like deciding which block in the blockchain you're most proud of, it's only possible once you went through all of it.

That's completely missing the point of the exercise. You don't need to accurately imagine it. The point of the exercise is to figure out what you want in life now, by giving you a different perspective.

> That's completely missing the point of the exercise

No it's not, you're just too invested in your example to realize there is no point to the exercise you proposed. A model where up to 90% of data (the "unexperienced" part of your life depending on age) is imagined and by definition inaccurate can't be used for any determination.

> The point of the exercise is to figure out what you want in life now

That's the point of the exercise you proposed, very different from a deathbed perspective, and one I believe couldn't work as described.

The deathbed perspective is an exercise of taking your entire life experiences and distilling them to get a concrete core as seen from the "final checkpoint". The key is knowing that there will be no future experiences to alter the result, and that makes the determination as final and as accurate as it can ever reasonably be. It's not a decision making tool, it can't be used to alter the future. It's a conclusion, a punchline.

But if you want to see what's important now that's a decision, a seed for your future, and it's open to change and evolution. This cannot be more different from a real deathbed perspective. So taking this decision by imagining one of infinite possibilities of your future up to your distant deathbed makes no sense. Your subjectivity will lead you into imagining a completely different future every time, and getting a different perspective and decision.

That girl you like? Deciding she's "what you want now" is just a matter of imagining a future deathbed where she was key to your life happiness. Or maybe it's that job... Or something else entirely. When you're 20 or 30 your "old age" deathbed could have you a billionaire, homeless, or anything you can imagine. An imagined, relatively random, and distant future outcome can't help you decide what's best in the present more than flipping a coin will.

At best you can imagine you are now on your deathbed and go through the exercise to take a decision as if it were the conclusion. I still think it's pointless because imagining you're on your deathbed is like imagining a new color.

the more I think about being on my deathbed (or death, or read obituaries, etc.) the more I realize I won't care how I spent my life

It's why the "bus factor" is such a weird concept. If I get hit by a bus then I guarantee that I will not care in the slightest if anyone else knows how to run the TPS reports. Same if I win the lottery!

But you will care if someone else wins the lottery and you're stuck dealing with their project after.

Big one for me is having small children and no one that can look after them I die.

Thought of them going into state care is quite motivating.

There's less and different incentive to lie, which helps make it a potentially interesting perspective. Though there is also less disincentive to lie, as repercussions of being found out won't be experienced. IDK how it nets out except that it's still probably different.

In contrast to humans, many animals do not put out extraordinary efforts when they are dying of old age or serious disease. Ever see the videos of the sick old Cape Buffalo lying down while lions munch its rear?

I'm very curious about your assumption that dying people have low incentive to lie. How do you figure?

It seems as if nearing the moment of death might make people desperate to represent themselves as better people, more noble than their lived experiences might have shown them to be.

I certainly have ideals to which I fail to live up, and while dying I might express those ideal to those around me, since observing my life may not have made those ideals obvious to observers.

Lying might or might not even enter into it, but I also don't see any reason why dying people wouldn't lie just as often as those who don't realize they're dying.

For example, a dying person may say: "I regret every day I spent at work; the career was absolutely not worth it; I wish I would have spent more time with my friends and family" without being worried about potential impact on their future employment.

Dying can give you the ultimate form of freedom of speech, when you are also free from the consequences.

I agree that a person who cares about how they will be remembered has an incentive to lie. But is it greater than before that?

That seems to be highly dependent on your own psychological state and disposition …

To me it seems just as plausible that you don’t really want to think of all the bad times, all the bad decisions you made. Your hypothesis requires a certain point of view that a dying person doesn’t necessarily have.

In that example, the statement is both useless and also possibly still dishonest.

While I might be free in that context of worrying about future employers, I might also feel heavily constrained by the presence of my family and friends. How many people would feel free enough to say the following? "If I had spent more time with my family, they would have driven me absolutely crazy. I got so much more respect and fulfillment as a person at work than I ever did with friends and family. My only real regret is that I left that one job early to spend more time with my kids when they were teens, and they didn't even want to spend any time with me, and I missed that job."

Surely there are people who feel that way, but that kind of honesty in that context is not met kindly, so instead everybody says they wish they had spent time with family.

Maybe it's true. Then again, most people who choose to quit their jobs and stay home end up facing money troubles, which doesn't lead to happy times with family, so inasmuch as it's true, it's empty.

I mean, let's say someone suddenly and unexpectedly recovers. Are they going to then, in fact, quit their job and spend all of their time with their family and friends? Is that feasible? Is that actually what they want? Is that actually what their family and friends want?

I think there is generally just as much motivation to lie as there is for any person's entire life, just about different things, or in a different way. For the same reason, too! Most people still care what others think of them, even up to the moment of death.

They still lie for emotional reasons. Because of what they want you to remember about them or because setting old scores and what not.

And it is also the time when they are in pain, under influence of various drugs that doctors prescribed to manage pain, confused about where they are, because sickness or injury make them so.

What is "overanalysis" in this piece?

It seemed a fairly straightforward if slightly controversial position to me. I'm not even a philosophy major.

And as someone who has been near death before I tend to agree with what the author claims. When I thought I was dying I had regrets that in my late twenties I didn't have a family and kids.

Luckily I recovered and have been healthy for 4-5 years since. I'm still not married and don't have kids. Why did I think it was so important when I thought I was dying?

Hard to say but I think because I was terrified of dying, the unknown, and wanted some piece of me to live on into the future. Now that I'm not in that position I realize that I actually don't want kids at least at this point in my life.

And me having kids or not isn't going to change the fact that after I die, hopefully many years from now, I will be completely forgotten in 100 years, probably less. Maybe an old photograph on my grandkids wall. That's true of 99.9% of us.

Your "deathbed perspective" is important but the hackneyed old idea that it's THE true insight into what's important in life is oversold, IMO.

When you think you're dying it terrifies you, I don't care who you are, I've seen enough people go through it that the "I'm not afraid of death" braggadocio is horseshit in almost every case. Your views on life when you're terrified of the unknown are important, sure, but not THE most important, or best insight into what life is.

What about this. Ask a person right now, what would they do if the knew they only had a week to live. Or if they had plenty of money and no obligations. This seems to help getting at parts of life they are neglecting. But not everyone is good at hypotheticals. Maybe that's why we put more weight on the deathbed words - the situation is very real?

Yeah, that’s a good point too. We all live in a mental projection of the future, where we have essentially endless time ahead of us. People without the luxury of that illusion usually have insightful things to say.

If I knew I only had a week to live, then I'll max out my credit cards, liquidate my retirement plans, and have a great vacation. This has nothing to do with my values though. I'd rather spend the week working on my antique collections, but the custom parts I need for the next step won't arrive in less than a week if I ordered them today. Those parts are too expensive to pay cash for without saving up for them, since I believe the long run is more than 10 years I'm better off saving up for those parts instead of taking our a loan.

I don't think this necessarily diminishes the importance of the deathbed perspective - many people apply pressure to themselves to seek status or resources far beyond what is required for a fulfilling life, and finding a way do loosen the grip that has on you could be a good thing for many.

I agree. I was diagnosed with an incurable illness last year and retired after that and I feel much more free to just say whatever I want and not worry about what people think about it.

> My own personal theory is that the deathbed perspective is quite similar to the childhood one: without the constraints of life placed upon us by social pressures and resource acquisition, we have an easier time realizing what is actually important.

The most important thing in life today is riding around town in a yellow double decker bus. Tomorrow the most important thing in life is watching Peppa. The day after it’s chocolate.

It's not the overthinking part of this essay that reflects poorly on the field of philosophy. It's the complete lack of interest in evidence.

> For one thing, the status of the (so-called) hindsight bias is contested

Why? Were some seminal studies in hindsight bias overturned? This sounds interesting!

...Oh. No, some other guy thought really hard and decided it doesn't make sense. This must be a philosophy paper.

That people on their deathbeds do not think of their legacy seems naive. Maybe people realize what's actually important, or maybe people fantasize about impossibilities in an effort to make themselves look good, in contrast to how they lived.

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