Comment by nurple
2 months ago
Thanks for writing this. It reminds me of Steve Job's commencement speech at Stanford.
> Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Until it killed him (ignoring doctors advice on cancer)
He had an inoperable cancer and wanted to spend his remaining time doing what he wanted rather than sitting in a hospital getting ultimately fruitless treatments. Pancreatic cancer doesn't fuck around. It's not like he died of pneumonia because he loved sleeping outdoors in the rain.
What? That's not at all the case. The type of cancer that Jobs has could be surgically removed. He spent time receiving alternative treatments and delayed his surgery.
> Jobs had a rare form of the cancer, known as neuroendocrine cancer, which grows more slowly and is easier to treat
> GEP-NETs are slow growing tumors that have the potential to be cured surgically if the tumor is removed prior to metastasis.
> Many journalists mentioned and even focused on Jobs’ initial decision to forego conventional treatments and instead use complementary and alternative medical (CAM) therapies, including acupuncture, botanicals, and dietary changes.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pancreatic-cancer...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4924574/
Agreed, but it’s remarkable how well this approach worked for him till then. No approach can solve every problem. I wonder if this one, on balance, was the right one for him, or for others.
Lol, yeah, there is that...
You can connect the dots easy when winning the lottery or being Steve Jobs. But for the majority will not magically connect.
In short this is called survivorship bias.