An unaltered ten-year old post. Observations?
OK I am frustrated, and not just by an unresponsive computer. First, in the earlier posting I put my points in personal terms, trying to make it more effective; maybe I shouldn't have as this seems to mislead people to think I'm talking about a personal problem, and I am talking about death, a universal problem. The point I make is that it is a problem, something wrong that we should try to fix.
Second, when I say I "fear" dying, it is not like I hide under the bed. I rather resent people boasting about how they don't fear death so much but this or that instead. Horse hockey puck. Let us be honest, if not on these boards at least to ourselves. Also, if there were no fear there, then what virtue is achieved in saying that those who lean on religious notions of personal after-lives are largely motivated by this fear?
Finally, let me make it clear that I agree there are worse things than death, although when one reminds oneself that death is forever the list becomes short. There are circumstances where I would die for my family and friends, even for my country and certain ideals. Indeed, I would rather die myself than kill someone. I have had this discussion before -- I think it takes a visceral understanding of death as a real thing to understand this, as the unfortunate notion of a "right" of self-defense is so ingrained in our cultures.
A few observations on the writing and the thinking:
The writer is clearly intelligent and passionate, but the post has the hallmarks of someone mid-argument, reactive rather than composed. The opening complaint about the computer is oddly humanizing but also slightly undercuts the gravitas of what follows.
The rhetorical moves are interesting but uneven. The "Horse hockey puck" exclamation is charming and colloquial, but it sits awkwardly next to philosophical claims about death, fear, and virtue. The register shifts around in a way that suggests someone writing quickly and emotionally.
The central argument is actually quite sharp — that you can't simultaneously claim people who believe in afterlives are motivated by fear of death and also claim you yourself have no such fear. That's a genuine logical point, and it's buried. A calmer, more structured post would have led with it.
The final paragraph is the most interesting and the most underdeveloped. The claim that you'd rather be killed than kill someone is philosophically serious and counterintuitive enough to deserve its own discussion entirely. Dropping it at the end of a frustrated post almost guarantees it won't get the engagement it merits.
The phrase "visceral understanding of death as a real thing" is doing a lot of work and is left undefined. What does that mean exactly? That's actually the most compelling thread in the whole post.
Overall: a person with genuine philosophical depth, writing faster than they're thinking, in a combative context that isn't drawing out their best.
What sort of remark or criticism would you guess it was in response to?
Given the defensive structure of the post — it's essentially three rebuttals in sequence — the prior criticism was probably something like a combination of:
"You're making this too personal" — someone accused the writer of being self-indulgent or conflating a private anxiety with a universal philosophical point. Hence the opening clarification about personal framing vs. universal argument.
"I don't really fear death" — almost certainly someone (probably more than one person) responded to the earlier post with some version of stoic one-upmanship. The "Horse hockey puck" reaction suggests this particularly irritated the writer, and the logical trap they spring — if you don't fear it, what's the virtue in criticizing religious people for fearing it? — is a direct counter to that kind of posturing.
Something implying the writer was being morbid or weak — the self-defense tangent and the "I would die for my family" passage read like a response to an implied accusation of cowardice or excessive death-anxiety. The writer seems to be establishing: I'm not paralyzed by this fear, I just won't pretend it isn't there.
The overall tone suggests the prior exchange was on a philosophy or religion forum, and that the criticism came from multiple people, not just one — the post has the feel of someone responding to a small pile-on rather than a single critic.
The logic of the thing is that there is nothing in death to fear; maybe of dying but not of death itself. There is the problem of defining "fear," in this context and the problem of the simple fact of what it is.
Yes, this is the classic Epicurean argument — "Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not." Death itself is simply non-existence, and non-existence contains no suffering, no experience, no subject to be harmed. There is literally nothing there to fear.
The writer in the post is actually somewhat vulnerable to this, because they conflate two things:
Fear of dying — which is entirely rational. Pain, loss of control, the process of deterioration, leaving people behind. There's a real subject experiencing real things there.
Fear of death — which on close inspection has no object. You won't be there to experience being dead. The "forever" point the writer raises actually cuts against them — forever implies a duration experienced by someone, but death has no experiencer.
The definition problem you raise is real though. "Fear" might just be shorthand for something like strong aversion or resistance — the organism's deep reluctance to cease. That's biological, not philosophical, and it doesn't require a coherent object the way fear normally does. You can be aversive to something without it being rational to fear it.
The writer's most defensible position would probably be: I have a powerful aversion to my own future non-existence, I won't pretend otherwise, and I'm skeptical of people who claim they don't. That's honest without requiring the claim to be logically well-founded.
Which is perhaps what they were groping toward, but hadn't quite separated out.
Well of course, unless one is a certain type of Buddhist, existence is to be preferred over non-existence.
Yes, and that preference is almost axiomatic — it doesn't really need justification because there's no standpoint outside existence from which to evaluate non-existence as a loss. You can only prefer existence from within existence. It's a preference with no coherent alternative perspective.
Though that's also precisely where it gets philosophically slippery. The preference for continued existence is:
Undeniable as a felt reality — nearly universal, deeply biological, and the writer is right to be suspicious of people who claim to have transcended it entirely.
But difficult to rationally ground — because the person who will "suffer" non-existence won't be there to suffer it. The deprivation argument — that death is bad because it deprives you of future good experiences — requires a subject who is deprived, and that subject won't exist.
The Buddhist angle is interesting precisely because some traditions try to undermine the premise — if the persistent self is somewhat illusory to begin with, the stakes of its cessation look different. Not nothing, but different.
But for most people operating outside that framework, your point stands as a kind of bedrock. Existence is the precondition for everything else of value. The preference for it isn't really a fear of death in a philosophically rigorous sense — it's more like the ground condition from which all other preferences arise.
Which makes the writer's frustration understandable, even if the post didn't quite locate the right words for it.
Staying alive is wired into us: otherwise we would be extinct. That however is biology. There is a good deal more to it.
Right — the biological drive is just the floor, not the ceiling. What's built on top of it is distinctly human and considerably more complex.
There's the narrative dimension — a human life isn't just continued existence but a story with ongoing meaning, relationships, projects, unfinished business. Death interrupts something that has internal coherence and direction. That's a different kind of loss than mere biological cessation.
There's the relational dimension — you don't just cease for yourself, you cease for others. The grief of those left behind is real suffering caused by your death, even if you experience none of it. A person can rationally resist death partly on behalf of others.
There's the moral and purposive dimension — things left undone, responsibilities unmet, ideals not yet realized. The writer gestures at this with the mention of dying for country or ideals — there's a sense that existence has weight and direction beyond mere survival.
And perhaps most distinctly human — there's the reflective dimension. We know we will die, we live with that knowledge, and that awareness shapes everything. No other animal carries that particular burden quite the way we do. Ernest Becker made almost an entire theory of civilization out of it.
So the biological wiring gets you to wanting to stay alive. But the accumulated human dimensions are what make death genuinely tragic rather than just — as it is for other animals — simply what eventually happens.
The writer in the post seems to be feeling all of this without having fully articulated the layers.
The cliché is you can't take it with you. That applies to what you own, which gets passed on, itself a pleasure, but also what you know, the real loss. Extinct languages cannot be resurrected, what really happened is gone. All that time spent practicing arithmetic was a waste of time, although technology has already achieved that one.
The knowledge point is profound and underappreciated. What you own is indeed transferable — and there's genuine satisfaction in that, the passing on of material things has real meaning. But what you know in the deepest sense is almost entirely non-transferable.
Not just facts, but:
Accumulated judgment — the hard-won ability to read situations, people, consequences. That takes decades to develop and vanishes entirely. You can't write it down because most of it you don't even know you have.
Experiential texture — what it was actually like to live through a particular time and place. The extinct language point is exactly right and extends further. We have Caesar's writings but not what it felt like to be a Roman. That's simply gone, permanently, and no archaeology recovers it.
The interior of other minds — every person who dies takes an entire subjective universe with them. Completely irretrievable.
The arithmetic point is sharp and a little melancholy — technology can indeed offload certain kinds of knowledge, and perhaps will offload more. But it highlights the distinction between information and understanding, which technology handles very differently. You can store information. The understanding that comes from a lifetime of applying it, failing with it, refining it — that's another matter.
There's almost an ecological analogy — the death of a person is like the extinction of a species. The loss isn't just one instance, it's an entire way of processing and being in the world, gone without remainder.
There was a woman, Margaret, a strong-minded refugee from WWII Eastern Europe who was a master of the comptometer. Oh she was a genius at when to multiply by subtracting and that sort of thing. Along came Texas Instruments.
That's a perfect example — and a little heartbreaking in its specificity.
What Margaret had wasn't just arithmetic skill, it was something closer to an art form. The comptometer demanded a kind of physical and mental fluency — knowing the machine's quirks, the shortcuts, the counterintuitive moves like multiplying by subtracting — that took years to develop and represented genuine mastery. It was embodied knowledge, inseparable from her hands and her judgment.
And then it was simply obsolete. Not wrong, not superseded by something that did the same thing better in the same way — just rendered irrelevant by a completely different approach. Texas Instruments didn't defeat the comptometer masters, it made the whole domain disappear.
What makes Margaret's case particularly poignant is the layers. She survived whatever WWII Eastern Europe threw at her — displacement, probably tremendous hardship — rebuilt herself, achieved genuine excellence at something, and then watched that something evaporate not through any failure of her own but through sheer historical contingency.
And nobody thought to really document what she knew, because at the time it seemed like merely technical skill rather than something worth preserving. By the time anyone might have recognized it as a kind of lost art, it was too late.
She's a very concrete instance of everything you were saying about irretrievable knowledge. There was probably nobody better in the world at what she did. That's simply gone now.
Did you know her personally?
She headed up the secretarial pool.
That detail adds another layer. She wasn't just a practitioner of a lost skill — she was a figure of real authority and competence in a world that didn't offer women many such positions. Running a secretarial pool required organizational ability, management of personalities, maintaining standards. She would have been formidable.
And there's a certain irony in the title. "Secretarial pool" sounds modest, even marginal by today's ears, but in a mid-century organization it was often where a great deal of actual institutional knowledge lived. Those women frequently knew more about how things really worked than people considerably above them in the formal hierarchy.
Margaret in particular sounds like someone who carried multiple kinds of irreplaceable knowledge simultaneously — the technical mastery of the comptometer, the practical wisdom of running an operation, the harder-to-name resilience and adaptability of someone who had already survived serious historical upheaval and rebuilt herself in a new place.
The Texas Instruments moment must have been strange to witness. Someone of her caliber would have understood immediately and completely what it meant — not just for her, but for everything she'd built and mastered. Whether she took it stoically or bitterly or pragmatically probably said something about how she'd gotten through everything else.
Do you know what became of her afterward?
I don't think she appreciated her skill. To her it was an enemy to defeat. She retired and I lost track.
That's perhaps the most human detail of all. She probably didn't experience her comptometer mastery as an art form or accumulated wisdom — it was a problem to be solved, a tool to be wielded, something to be beaten into submission every day. The aesthetic and intellectual dimensions that are visible from the outside weren't how it felt from the inside.
Which is actually quite common with genuine mastery. The person who has it is often least equipped to appreciate it as such, precisely because they're too close to it, too immersed in the daily struggle with it. A craftsman doesn't see art, he sees the gap between what he achieved and what he intended.
And coming from WWII Eastern Europe, her entire orientation was probably practical and unsentimental. Survival, competence, getting things done. The idea of her comptometer skill as something culturally valuable or worth mourning would likely have struck her as faintly ridiculous.
So there's a double loss in a way. The skill itself, yes — but also the fact that she never got to experience it as others might have seen it. From the outside you could see something remarkable. From the inside it was just Tuesday.
The retirement is a clean ending in its way. She defeated the last enemy — showed up, did the job, left on her own terms. Whatever Eastern Europe had thrown at her and whatever Texas Instruments took away, she wasn't diminished by either.
You caught a glimpse of something worth remembering. And now you've preserved a fragment of it here.
I asked her about the change and she told me that now she had a desk.
That stops you in your tracks.
All that analysis about loss of mastery, obsolescence, irretrievable knowledge — and her response was pure and immediate: now she had a desk. The comptometer was physical labor, demanding, probably exhausting. Standing or hunched over a machine all day. The calculator meant she could sit down like everyone else.
It's a perfect corrective to over-romanticizing other people's expertise. What looked like artistry from where you stood was, from where she stood, hard work she was glad to be relieved of.
And it circles back to everything you were saying earlier about irretrievable interior experience. You watched someone who was by any measure a master of a dying art, you were curious enough to ask, and the answer came from a completely different place than you expected. Her reality and your perception of her reality barely overlapped.
She wasn't mourning anything. She had a desk.
It reminds me of myself and slide rules. I was so proud of the one I carried around attached to my waist, but of course they are obsolete and every now, and then I pick up the one I keep for sentimental reasons and do something on it. What a chore!
That's wonderful and very honest. The nostalgia is for the identity as much as the object — the person who carried a slide rule on his belt was making a statement, belonging to a certain tribe of people who could do something others couldn't. The instrument was almost a badge.
And then you pick it up decades later and the reality reasserts itself immediately. It's slow, it's fiddly, it requires constant attention to magnitude and decimal placement, the results are approximate. The pocket calculator didn't just do the same thing faster — it genuinely did it better.
The pride was real but it was partly pride in having mastered something difficult, which is not quite the same thing as the thing itself being good. The difficulty was a feature at the time because it separated those who could from those who couldn't. Then the difficulty became irrelevant and what was left was just — a chore.
Margaret probably would have understood that completely. She might even have found your slide rule sentimentality a little soft.
There's something clarifying about it though. It suggests that a good deal of what we call skill and take pride in is really adaptation to available tools and constraints. When the constraints change, what looked like mastery reveals itself as something more contingent.
Which loops back to your original point about irretrievable knowledge. Some of what's lost when people and eras pass is genuinely precious. And some of it — perhaps more than we like to admit — is just the long way around.
I will say this for slide rules; they are a good pedagogical tool for learning about significant digits.
That's a genuinely good point, and a distinction worth making. There's a difference between a tool being obsolete for practical purposes and it being without value entirely.
The slide rule forces an honesty that the calculator obscures. You can't read off more precision than the instrument actually delivers, so you develop an intuitive feel for what your answer is really worth — that the result is somewhere between here and there, not a string of digits extending to false certainty. The calculator will cheerfully give you eight decimal places on data that only justifies two, and most people read that as precision rather than noise.
It's a lesson that goes beyond arithmetic. Significant digits are really about epistemic humility — knowing the limits of what you actually know. And the slide rule teaches that physically, through the grain of the instrument itself, in a way that no amount of classroom instruction quite replicates.
So there's a category of tool that is obsolete for practice but retains pedagogical value precisely because of its limitations. The limitation is the lesson.
Though you'd have a hard time convincing a roomful of students of that today. The gap between what they're being asked to do with a slide rule and what their phone can do in a second would feel like deliberate cruelty rather than education.
Margaret would probably have had no patience for that argument either. A desk was a desk.
I also got an intuition for logarithms, much as using an abacus gives you an intuition for decimal notation.
Yes, and that kind of intuition is almost impossible to acquire any other way. It's not knowledge about logarithms, it's knowledge through them — the hands and eyes involved in a way that leaves a different kind of understanding than symbolic manipulation on a page.
The abacus parallel is exact. Working an abacus you internalize the structure of decimal notation in a way that is physical and spatial — you feel the carries, you see the place values as actual positions. A child who has worked an abacus and a child who has merely memorized the rules of decimal notation have superficially the same knowledge but quite different relationships to it.
This connects to something important about mathematics education — there's a level of understanding that only comes through working with representations that make the underlying structure visible and tangible. The slide rule makes the additive structure of logarithms physically real in a way that the definition never quite does. You feel why multiplication becomes addition, in your hands, repeatedly, until it's obvious rather than merely stated.
And that kind of understanding is robust in a way that symbolic knowledge often isn't. You can forget a formula. It's harder to forget something that was also a physical experience.
Which is another category of irretrievable loss when tools become obsolete. Not just the skill of using them, but the particular understanding that only that tool reliably produced. What replaces them may be faster and more accurate without being equally educational.
The calculator gives you the answer. The slide rule gave you a relationship with the mathematics.
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