Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimystery?currentPage=all

by terpua • 19 years ago

82 53 19 years ago

wired.com

bayareaguy3• 19 years ago

More articles should use the textbox-in-a-frame scheme like this one did to quote things at length.

eru3• 19 years ago

Why not quote them without a frame at length?

bayareaguy3• 19 years ago

I only like that for short things.

One of these days I hope to find a way to get a browser to follow a link by opening a smaller window/area directly in the text. That way I don't entirely lose the visual context on the screen.

I've been told the original Xanadu system was designed that way.

Enso also uses this idea in places. Now that the http://www.humanized.com developers have joined Mozilla, I'm somewhat optimistic that this may actually happen.

PJCrosier• 19 years ago

I really liked the linking used, it's nice to get quotes to put things in perspective but this took you into the story and gave you all these other documents and sites to explore. It was all kind of creepy really, I felt like a voyeur almost.. excellent article.

DarrenStuart• 19 years ago

truely a very sad story.

rkts• 19 years ago

This story and the mention of MIT's "high suicide rate" remind me of something I've wondered about. Depression and suicide seem to be common among very smart people. Does anyone know why?

palish• 19 years ago

Because when you're smart enough to realize you're not quite smart enough, it's crushingly depressing.

mojuba3• 19 years ago

Why should that be depressing? It seems to me quite normal that I'm not smart enough for many hard problems - why should that drive me crazy?

randallsquared• 19 years ago

I don't know. However, here's some hypotheses, some combination of which may be most of the reason:

Even if depression and suicide attempts aren't more common, very smart people may be enough more competent that they succeed more often. Most attempts at suicide don't actually result in death.

It could be that the easy wins in building a smarter brain happen to lead to a genetic predisposition to depression.

It could be that smarter people are more easily able to internalize that there's no ultimate point to life, and less able to just have faith.

eru3• 19 years ago

So smarter people might just be better at suicide?

hello_moto• 19 years ago

You can see from their traits:

1) Super smart

2) Actively thinking every single day

3) Thinking how to solve hard problems

4) Too involved/focused with the area field they are in

When people called that RMS is nuts, sometime I wonder, is he really that nuts? He's fighting for a better world of software. But at the same time, he doesn't fight over super-hard-algorithm. RMS is still in touch with humans albeit he's fighting/arguing with them CEOs/PRs.

The rate of suicide is high among Grad/PhD students because they have to "think outside the box" every single day. They have to find a "breakthrough".

Sometime, "thinking outside the box" means to break all the logics and common sense around you. When you start bending logics, there's a good chance the situation will change the way you perceive things. You began to accept your "new logic" (as in this case, human is just like a program, disease equals to bug).

angryprofessor• 19 years ago

>The rate of suicide is high among Grad/PhD students because they have to "think outside the box" every single day. They have to find a "breakthrough".

That's really not true, though many grad students (especially in physics) think it is. You need to make a useful research contribution, but it can be evolutionary.

My thesis problem is a very popular one: new Ph.D.'s are awarded monthly for incremental advances in this area. Only about 2 theses on the topic (in the past 10 years) have actually been breakthroughs. The rest are just marginal improvements, i.e. 1'st order -> 2'nd order -> 4'th order, spherical coordinates -> arbitrary spherical-like coordinates -> arbitrary coordinates, etc.

curi• 19 years ago

Maybe it's because smarter people tend to be less average. Less conventional. Less traditional.

Deviating from tradition is the only way to get amazing new gains. But the majority of deviations are mistakes and make things go wrong.

And when untraditional things go wrong, there is less support available to help deal with it.

corentin• 19 years ago

The more intelligent you are, the more alien you are to a society designed and run by average (if not dumb) people.

comatose_kid• 19 years ago

Society is designed? Interesting... I'd lean more towards emergent behavior.

yters5• 19 years ago

As the above comments show, smart people tend to take things more seriously. Not that that's a bad thing, but I think it explains the extremes in the views of smart people.

Of course, I've just moved the question up a level here...

DanielBMarkham• 19 years ago

Who cares? It all seems so pointless

yters5• 19 years ago

It's a problem if the situation is escalating...

yters5• 19 years ago

Another question, has it always been this way? I remember reading somewhere that our levels of depression and suicide are a historical anomaly. What is different between now and then?

Hexstream2• 19 years ago

Maybe previously, people were too occupied with subsistance to wonder if they should kill themselves.

tokipin• 19 years ago

i place my bets on existential depression

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Depress... "A number of people have noted a higher incidence of existential depression [in the gifted], which is depression due to highly abstract concerns such as the finality of death, the ultimate unimportance of individual people, and the meaning (or lack thereof) of life."

they recognize the irrelevance of everything. it's not uncommon for all types of people to have these sorts of thoughts, but the very abstractive abilities of the gifted mean these are more than just thoughts to them. these issues are as clear, concrete, and tangible as a brick wall is to mere normal humans

compounding things is the fact that these gifted people hold nature in the highest regard, and see it as the only arbiter of truth. they can't escape the irrelevance of everything, because that's just how nature is

it's a painful QED

akkartik• 19 years ago

Here's my shield against existential depression, arrived at after much pain (with major influences):

Notice that you don't bother wondering what it all means when you're having fun. Meaning comes from having fun. (http://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionar...)

Having fun usually involves work. (http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/24169645 http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/21256293)

How do you figure out what you love? Do something, see where it leads. Iterate between the doing and the loving as fast as you can. Sketch. (http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/24170012 http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/24169153 http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/1451852)

What you love is a moving target, it changes with you. If you neglect it you will lose it.

pchivers2• 19 years ago

Here a link to a previous discussion of existential depression on Hacker News:

Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78594

chandler• 19 years ago

> they recognize the irrelevance of everything...they can't escape the irrelevance of everything, because that's just how nature is...QED

In science, when a model of the world ceases to be useful, the smart thing to do is to find a better model.

Even if there is an objective nature, animals can only hope to experience it subjectively (our brains are remarkable at filtering physical input received from the five senses, and our world view is shaped by a lifetime of filtering and selecting input).

Consequently, the gifted "everything is irrelevant" individual will be depressed, not because everything is actually irrelevant, but because the individual believes this to be the case (moreover, whether or not "everything is actually irrelevant" is actually irrelevant is the follow up joke).

It's a shame that many gifted depressives are apparently so emotionally attached to this ugly model.

mojuba3• 19 years ago

We may be confusing cause and effect here. It's their insanity (actually inferiority complexes) that makes them take over infinitely hard problems when one gets all or nothing - more often the latter.

This also reminds of Dangerous Knowledge (can't find it on Google Video anymore)

pchivers2• 19 years ago

It seems that Dangerous Knowledge was taken down from Google Video. Here is a link to the BBC page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/dangerou...

"In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide."

as• 19 years ago

Material for anyone who wonders about this:

Jonathan Haight's research on conservative and liberal values:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2007/haidt

Kazimierz Dabrowski's theory of over-excitability and positive disintegration.

http://www.stephanietolan.com/dabrowskis.htm

http://members.shaw.ca/positivedisintegration/

Durkhiem's ideas about anomie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

nickb• 19 years ago

> Does anyone know why?

Most of the gifted individuals suffer from existential depression. More here: http://web.archive.org/web/20061020235245/http://www.giftedb...

marcus2• 19 years ago

Because ignorance is bliss.

yason• 19 years ago

Excess bias on the analytical, thinking, and "doing" sides of a human life purges out the practical, hands-on, "not-doing" side that's deeply rooted to nature and connects you to reality. You need to spend time in the nature doing nothing to realize where you come from and that you're not in hurry to anywhere and to balance, you also need to exercise your brain and thinking to break the limits of what you can, thus redefining yourself as you go by life.

Alex39173• 19 years ago

If you want to know what mindpixel actually spent his time thinking about and how others treated him, this k5 article is fairly representative:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/11/224459/073

boredguy82• 19 years ago

Beat me to the k5 connection. But Mindpixel consistently demonstrated an inability to translate his claims into anything remotely resembling reasonable thought. There's a now-lost-forever post in which he claims to have predicted a terrorist attack. http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2006/8/21/121745/650?pid=12... certainly sums up the silliness.

Alex39173• 19 years ago

I think the general consensus was that he was a really intelligent and creative guy, but he lacked the discipline to sit down and spend 20 years proving his theories. I remember the post you are talking about though. Supposedly he used a Bayesian filter on real time Google searches to predict two gas station bombings in Baghdad. It's a shame that story didn't get front paged, it was kind of interesting even if it was made up.

It's really weird though going back and reading my conversations with him on K5. I'm sure a lot of people here probably knew him though; it would be almost impossible not to have had a conversation with him if you were a regular social news user circa 2000. The guy posted constantly on Slashdot, K5, Joel on Software, Usenet, etc.

doubleplus• 19 years ago

heh: "How do you keep garbage out without any form of validation mechanism? ... All you have to do is try to [imagine] Slashdot without the moderation system to see what's going to happen to your database."

icky• 19 years ago

'M-x doctor' made them do it... ;-)

eru3• 19 years ago

My Emacs doctor cares:

> I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.

  I want to commit suicide.

> If you are really suicidal, you might want to contact the Samaritans via E-mail: jo@samaritans.org or, at your option, anonymous E-mail: samaritans@anon.twwells.com . Or find a Befrienders crisis center at http://www.befrienders.org/ . I would appreciate it if you would continue.

tlrobinson• 19 years ago

Antitrust, anyone?

(pretty bad movie, I know, but it makes you wonder...)

dfranke• 19 years ago

Why do so many people rag on that movie? Are they expecting it to be some kind of epic manifesto of open source culture, and then getting let down? It's just entertainment with a few extra morsels for hackers. When you look at it that way, it's easily in the top 20% of what comes out of Hollywood.

rms• 19 years ago

Existential depression is something we all deal with just fine. It doesn't cause suicide. In this case, presumably unmedicated serious bipolar disorder caused suicide. There is a big difference and a life probably would have been saved if someone would have just taken their lithium.

bayareaguy3• 19 years ago

The story mentioned CyC. I haven't heard about that in at least a decade.

Wikipedia says OpenCyc 1.0 was released in July 2006. Google turned up one recent article:

- http://newmobilecomputing.com/story/17331/Interview_with_the...

but that doesn't say much about any practical applications. There also seems to be a web service for it here:

- http://www.cycfoundation.org/blog/?page_id=13

I wonder if anyone has found a good application for it.

The Texai project sounds like it is trying to do the same thing these people were doing using text from Wikipedia and terms from OpenCyC.

- http://www.texai.org/blog/about/texai-project

ojbyrne• 19 years ago

I met Chris McKinstry in Winnipeg, Canada in 1995. I was not very impressed - he wanted to start a course on linux sysadmin or something... - with me doing pretty well everything except collecting the money... and he couldn't even organize it properly. He struck me as a scammer, though obviously it's only a thin line between that and "Internet entrepreneur."

marvin• 19 years ago

...and an even thinner line between scammer and AI guru. At least in web startups your popularity will decide whether you are doing something worthwhile or not. In academia, promises that "it will work tomorrow, I swear!" has historically worked very well while providing few results.

Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?

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