
Raw Nerve by Aaron Swartz - jkaljundi
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve
======
singular
Part of my extreme, _EXTREME_ shock at the tragic, horrible news about Aaron
was quite how much I enjoyed this series + found it utterly engaging. Usually
stuff on this topic is full of bullshit, but Aaron really had some very
interesting things to say here.

Another wonderful, challenging and _important_ article was the one on faith in
science - <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/sciencefaith>.

RIP Aaron.

~~~
Tloewald
Treating life as a hackable problem seems to be a recipe for despair. It may
be interesting, but there lies madness.

~~~
singular
Really, you think so? Please expand. Do you mean perhaps that might make it
more difficult to deal with things you can't control?

~~~
Tloewald
I think that when you're young and really smart you think you can reason your
way through tough problems because for a lot of problems other people find
difficult it's been true. Eventually you'll learn that for many of the
toughest problems in life, no clever algebraic trick exists to sort it all
out, and you either learn something or you go down the rabbit hole. My first
rabbit hole was mortality (I lost sleep for months trying to reason my way
around mortality), and my second was simple financial transactions.
Relationships, kids, politics, justice -- anything involving other people --
tend to be intractable problems.

One of my "great insights" was figuring out that I didn't understand how I
made decisions -- that when I consciously made a decision wasn't when I
decided but more like when I became aware that some kind of unconscious
tipping point had already been reached. When I have mentioned this to other
people I have _never_ ended up in an argument -- they either nod at me as
though it's about time I figured this out, or they stop and think about it and
agree.

This insight is almost a cliche in matters such as romance, but really it
applies to almost everything. When you realize how little we know about our
own consciousness, how our rational minds are constantly fooled into thinking
they're in charge, the idea we can truly just reason our way out of every kind
of problem quickly becomes laughable.

I'm very sad that such a brilliant guy killed himself, but looking at all his
blog posts with dewy eyed admiration is morbid, silly, and perhaps even
dangerous. Suicide is stupid and -- worse -- selfish. It's not cool or tragic
or deep — just sad.

How to be productive, achieve great things, etc.? Hint: do not kill yourself.

------
nakodari
Raw Nerve is the best series I have ever read on getting better at life. In
the last email communication I had with him (when he wrote only 4 parts of the
series), I suggested that he turn it into a book. This was his reply,

<http://jumpshare.com/v/Z7HjqR>

Mirror: <http://i.imgur.com/qPzol.png>

------
jayeshgopalan
yep he had many controversy too but he did many good things too. Dan
Haubert,Ilya Zhitomirskiy and now Aaron Swartz dont know what is happening. is
the situation so bad that life has no meaning.

------
verroq
Why are people posting all of his stuff after he's died? Because I'm pretty
sure it's not because the 3 part trilogy of his life just ended and now it is
the best time to marathon. Karma whoring at its finest.

~~~
jkaljundi
Personally why I posted this: loved the essays when they came out. And I know
many people have not read them. More than that, even many people here on HN
had never heard of the guy or don't know his mindset. Those essays open up a
lot of who he was.

~~~
danso
Thanks for posting them. I admire Aaron's work very much but will admit to not
knowing of everything that he has written. I guess I don't have the
photographic memory like the parent commenter

