Thinking, super slow, about Danny
I was hit hard by learning about Danny Kahneman's very deliberate decision to end his life by assisted suicide in Switzerland last year (Danny's former collaborator on the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and friend Jason Zweig's recent WSJ article made it very public: https://lnkd.in/gM9BrvN6). I was fortunate to meet Danny a number of times at CASBS at Stanford, Minerva University or with our mutual friend Stephen M. Kosslyn. Not being part of the inner circle by any stretch of the imagination, why this struggle to come to terms with his decision? I am not judging his decision as much as I am wondering how I would (or, in fact, how I will) choose my path in similar circumstances (fame and Nobel Prize notwithstanding).
For context, borrowing from Zweig's article, Kahneman sent a final email to close friends, saying:
▶️ “I discovered after making the decision that I am not afraid of not existing, and that I think of death as going to sleep and not waking up. The last period has truly not been hard, except for witnessing the pain I caused others. So if you were inclined to be sorry for me, don’t be... Thank you for helping make my life a good one [...]. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am ninety years old. It is time to go.”
He had a wonderful trip to Paris with his family, enjoyed every moment of it, and then he went to Switzerland. Why? What was his decision framework? He had witnessed dementia in his mother and late wife, but he was still working on papers. The one thing I can relate to is the "frequency of mental lapses" and how it can affect someone with an intense intellectual life. But still, why?
My conclusion (if you want to call this a conclusion) is that these decisions are deeply personal and integrate values and considerations that are hard to pack into a generalizable model.
And then I found this MIT Technology Review article from August 2024 in my inbox today (https://lnkd.in/g7yWUMdx). It mostly deals with terminal patients without surrogates (Danny would have appreciated the fact that surrogates accurately predict a patient's end-of-life patients' decisions about 2/3 of the time), so a very different situation from Danny's. Still, it made me wonder, do AI or decision-support tools actually support decisions or do they nudge you toward decisions without your being conscious of it?
@scott belsky
More people: 100x more people will gain the confidence to express their ideas visually and engage with creative tools again (most of whom abandoned drawing as children and never attempted creativity again). Excited for an era of renewed creative confidence for humanity.
More possibility: The greatest artists will have 100x more cycles to discover more surface area of possibility across more creative categories than they were ever able to cover before, ultimately yielding better solutions (and this will raise the bar for digital experiences for the rest of us). With more time and less friction, artists will break many ceilings.