Well, Sasha did not isolate himself socially at all. Beyond his extropian
friends, he had his coworkers and his dancing / techno friends in Cambridge.
I've gone over his mail on several mail lists he belonged to on egroups, and the
first indication of any kind that something was wrong was that monday when a
dancing friend of his posted that he had said over the phone he was going to
kill himself and hung up, and could not be reached after that. I also know that
Sunday he went out for a drive in the country with a couple friends and was
quite cranky, complaining that "everything was in the city, why are we going to
the country, etc." though he seemed to have relaxed once they got to where they
were going in Newburyport.
Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Robin Hanson writes:
> > One lesson we might want to learn here is that we brainy
> > discuss big ideas types might try to pay more attention
> > to the emotional health of those among us.
>
> Robin, it is hard to detect suicidal predisposition (if this is indeed
> as to what has happened) over such a tenous link as email. Looking
> back, I still fail to notice any signs of impending doom in Sasha's
> email exchanges, with the possible exception of phases of prolific
> idea generation, which in the retrospective might be indicative of a
> manic phase of a bipolar personality.
>
> The only lesson I can derive from this, is that those of us who live
> in physical proximity should meet more often, and use this meetings
> for more than just intellectual exchanges. Unfortunately, we are all
> busy people, which makes this hard to achieve.
>
> Still, worth a try.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:11:17 MDT