I decided to write here about something unrelated to my academic work. Normally I wouldn't write about more personal things in this space, but without another venue (and since this space is essentially defined only by my own needs in writing) I decided to place this here.
Aaron Swartz was someone I only tangentally aware of, through learning about RSS feeds and reading about some of the early players in Reddit. He was a pioneer in the development of social technologies and a staunch advocate for free and open information. He committed suicide this weekend, and his loss is a terrible one. What I have learned of him and his work in the ensuing days has led me to find his loss even the more tragic. His work in ethics, cognition and sociology are tied very closely to my own, and to discover this as a consequence of his death is in a number of ways troubling for me. I would imagine he would share this perspective, considering the extent to which he applied some of the core quandaries of ethics and social dilemmas in his examination of The Dark Knight. I wanted to write about working through becoming more familiar with is work through this tragedy.
At the core I found myself disturbed that it took this incident for me to learn more about Aaron. Suicide is always a manifestation of an unhealthy mind, either to fill a void, send a message, reach for attention or end unbearable suffering. For his action to prompt mine and others' attention is morbidly successful in some ways, making the attention itself a questionable action. We don't want anyone to be encouraged to take their own life through our actions.
Of course given the directionality of time and consequence, the act of examining the life of a person who has committed suicide does not justify the action that drew the attention. The victim is not alive and able to gain the benefit from the attention resulting from the behavior. That said, the actions of those in this or similar condition who plan and attempt to take their lives are far from what could be considered rational. The projection of the potential attention into the future might lend a perception of benefit to the mind at the time of planning. Being present for the "payoff" matters little at the decision point. It is completely absurd to presume that an act that will end your existence would somehow lead to an improvement in one's own well-being.
Working my way through this as I am, I am reminded of the asymmetry of losses and gains, of pleasure and harm. Economics and decision making theories tend to view losses and gains as relative changes in states. If from the status quo the situation improves by 5 and then decreases by 5, the result is no change. We know that experiencing a gain and a loss is much different than nothing happening (better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all), but the models rarely consider this. Prospect theory suggests that people perceive losses as greater than gains, but this is still a matter of absolute shifts in overall well-being on a single scale.
In experimentation and observation it is clear that people behave differently when avoiding harm than when gaining benefit. It is not only a lack of symmetry in gains and losses, it is a completely different set of preferences when one is attempting to stop pain than when they want to gain pleasure. If you stick your hand on a hot stove you don't want your favorite food to compensate for the pain, you want to remove the cause of pain and lessen it. We project tradeoffs on to ourselves, such as giving children a lollipop when the have to get a shot at the doctor. In reality there is no actual tradeoff. Instead pain and pleasure are simultaneously experienced. In the case of mental illness, it is wholly incorrect to think that the pain a person has experienced will somehow be lessened by an attempt to gain benefit through attention.
Coming to this conclusion gives me a greater sense of loss at learning of Aaron' passing. His pain becomes apparent and clear, and his action and my attention to his life are linked only in terms of the coincidence of the act leading to my gaze being drawn. No one would mimic his behavior to increase their visibility or to draw attention to themselves, and even if they would it is only another manifestation of mental illness. His actions and his work live on, and his untimely end serves as yet another too frequent reminder of the failings of our mental health system in this nation.
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