Aaron knew what he was doing. There are many charities more deserving than his legal defense fund -- that isn't changed just because he was apparently mentally ill enough to take his own life.
There should be a high burden you have to overcome to successfully find crowd-funding for anything including a legal defense.
...and at the time, I said the same thing I am saying now: Aaron Swartz was doing the right thing and should be praised for being brave enough to try to use access to a university to make human knowledge available to others. When universities are in the business of punishing people who spread knowledge, there is a serious problem with society, and Aaron knew that -- and unlike most people, he went out and tried to do something about it.
I was angry when the prosecutor tacked the extra charges on. I am just as angry today.
There's a world of difference between choosing not to help someone or some cause when they need it - a choice we all make, passively or actively, all the time - and mocking them and encouraging others not to help. That's just kicking a guy when he's down. That's the part some of us find really objectionable.
Which causes deserve funding is a matter of personal choice.
This is ridiculous hindsight bias, people have been charged with far more than Aaron and didn't kill themselves. Aaron had been depressed for a long time leading up to all of this, yet everyone seems to argue that the prosecution is what did it and he would have been completely fine otherwise.
They have nothing to base that off of, but that's still the case that is frequently made here.
Hindsight bias, not really either, a plain old fact. Some people are more resistant than others, but at some point anyone will snap (for the toughest it may require severe sleep deprivation and torture, but most people have a much lower threshold).
I didn't know Aaron Swartz, and I am thus not familiar with the details of his alleged depressive past.
There are usually a lot of factors that bring people to kill themselves. Assuming he was indeed depressed, the intensity of the symptoms get modulated by external influences. The absolute weight of the charges is also completely meaningless. They were intentionally unfair, and the meaning of a given sentence varies from people to people.
Blaming depression for his suicide on depression alone simply shows you don't know what you're talking about (FWIW I hold a MD).
It's not worth much in this discussion.
Your logic here is fuzzy man. Asserting that everyone has a point at which they will kill themselves? Maybe you're basing this on knowing that YOU have a point at which you'd take your own life.
But what in the thousands of years of human suffering gives you this certainty that "everybody" has this suicidal breaking point?
You can't make an assertion into a "plain old fact" just by repeating it.
I know you can't prove the threshold thing, short of trying to break each and every person on earth. That being said, there are various ways to weaken people (including, for the die hards, prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, manipulation, mental and physical torture, destroying their social status, friendships and families... I never practiced this, BTW), and I believe that you can drive anyone to suicide using them.
For example, put someone in a situation where he has the choice between killing himself or killing someone he loves. 5 seconds to decide, after which, if he didn't act, the other person is killed.
This is becoming really gloomy. I balk out.
Edit, actually the bargain I set up above is not a good example of what I meant exactly, but a good example of the level of cruelty you can use.
Edit2: I didn't downvote you, BTW (AFAIK, you can't downvote the answers to your comments).
Dressing up speculation doesn't change what it is.
> but that doesn't make you correct.
My aim was not to be 100% correct about Arron, but rather to on average be more correct with similar cases.
The fact that you're experiencing or you've experienced depression in the past doesn't mean you're inherently broken.
As for suicide, most people have an acute and a chronic stress threshold that can lead to a so-called "major depression" episode.
Perhaps, but many, many people have been in situations such as Aaron's and not killed themself, so it's warranted to at least ponder if there was something else going on than a mean prosecutor. And here we don't have to wonder, it's been reported already that there was a lot of depression involved.
I've written on my blog about my own encounters with him; but the biggest thing that stands out was his naivete, his childlike perspective.
It's telling so many eulogies of him describe him as a boy.
IMO, it was his innocent perspective, combined with what he thought was the clear and obvious path, that drove him to do what he did, not understanding the consequences.
Ed made a comment that was pretty harsh, although true given the information available at the time, and is now being singled out by Techcrunch and the rest of the HN community. Of course, in fine HN tradition everybody is now jumping on Ed in exactly the same way that he jumped on Aaron at the time.
I keep remembering Tim Bray's adage that "A change in perspective is worth 40 IQ points." The average HN user has 40 IQ points more now than Ed when he wrote that comment - I don't think they have more than 40 over the current Ed.
Also note that tptacek seems to have been driven away too - hopefully not permanently.
We are here to learn, right?
“Four things come back not: the spoken word; the sped arrow; time past; the neglected opportunity.”
- Umar ibn al-Khattab, Caliph (AD 592-644)
Couldn't have said it better.
Whether you think he deserves a measure of blame or not depends on whether you think his original remark was just or not. Evidently some could not tell ahead of time that the remarks were unjust, and evidently, this sort of person makes up the majority on HN, and it is just this sort who is making excuses for the original remark. They refuse to look in the mirror.
Did Ed know Aaron and tell him this publicly?
Or are you simply saying the act of making the original post on HN amounts to taking away moral support and consequently Ed bears some responsibility?
If so (and please correct me if that's not what you are saying) then I don't agree with that. What you are implying is that people can't speak their mind in a public forum about how they feel about something. (That has already happened with this issue as I've gotten some bullying behavior by someone simply because I questioned something because everyone is so worked up over this.). Or, perhaps people who are thought leaders (and/or top commenters on, say HN) need to be especially careful of what they say. Specifically what their opinion is which others are free to use their mind and agree or disagree with.
The argument that he could have had the foresight to not do what he did is a separate matter.
I think I understand but to be clear you are saying that because he is a top commenter, and can change the opinions of others, on HN he needs to be especially careful and restrict what he says?
(For the record I don't have a problem with what he wrote as I read it.)
Does he bear responsibility for what happened to Aaron? No, but it is also not hard to see how the top ranked comment from a respected member didn't carry some weight in how people perceived Aaron and his situation.
The big take away here is that words matter and maybe if you don't have all 'the facts available' you can give someone the benefit of of the doubt. Or the next time you feel like making a 'meh' post, just say nothing at all.