Comment by ignoramous

3 days ago

Jason Zweig, Kahneman's friend, wrote about this and many other thoughts Kahneman would have gone through in making the decision.

  As Barbara Tversky, who is an emerita professor of psychology at Stanford University, wrote in an online essay shortly after [Kahneman's] death, their last days in Paris had been magical...

  One afternoon, according to her online essay, she asked what [Kahneman] would like to do. "I want to learn something," he said.

  Kahneman knew the psychological importance of happy endings. In repeated experiments, he had demonstrated what he called the peak-end rule: Whether we remember an experience as pleasurable or painful doesn't depend on how long it felt good or bad, but rather on the peak and ending intensity of those emotions. "It was a matter of some consternation to Danny's friends and family that he seemed."

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/daniel-kahneman-assis... / https://archive.ph/fEWrc, The Last Decision by the World's Leading Thinker on Decisions (March, 2025).

4 comments

ignoramous

RickJWagner 3 days ago

I have to wonder if they could have had one more magical day. Or maybe two.

Maybe in a different city, or with different friends.

If he did “learn something new”, could he have incrementally improved upon it, using his brilliant mind? Could he have made one more wise observation?

It seems he likely left something on the table.

LogicFailsMe 3 days ago

You know how the story is going to end if you stick around for it. I would make the same choice he made. And I would do it before I was ruled mentally incompetent to do so. My wife and I have already had conversations on doing exactly this having watched multiple family members succumb to dementia. It's horrific and the state salivates at institutionalizing you for the final lap.
No cure for getting old and no cure for dementia on the useful horizon. Having made it to 90 intact, he had knocked living out of the park already. I completely understand his thinking here and support it. He likely could have gone a little longer, but he also might have had a stroke or some other nonfatal cataclysmic event that took away his options.

ignoramous 3 days ago

Kahneman's family & friends who knew beforehand apparently did object.

You should read the piece by Jason Zweig, if you haven't. The decision was deeply personal and was most certainly not an endorsement of euthanasia.

  ... Kahneman's final email said: "Not surprisingly, some of those who love me would have preferred for me to wait until it is obvious that my life is not worth extending. But I made my decision precisely because I wanted to avoid that state, so it had to appear premature. I am grateful to the few with whom I shared early, who all reluctantly came round to support me."

  Kahneman's friend Annie Duke, a decision theorist and former professional poker player, published a book in 2022 titled "Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away." In it, she wrote, "Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early."

  She is frustrated by his decision. "There's a big difference between it feeling early and it actually being too early," she says. "You're not terminal, you're fine. Why aren't you taking the outside view? Why aren't you listening to people who will give you good objective advice? Why are you doing this?"

  Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who befriended Kahneman more than 50 years ago, says, "Danny was the type of person who would think long and hard about things, so I figured he must have thought about it very slowly and deliberatively. Of course, those of us who spend our lives studying decisions, we think a lot about the reasons for those decisions. But often the reasons aren't reasons. They're feelings."

jfengel 3 days ago

You're always going to leave something on the table. One of life's trickier lessons is learning when too much optimization becomes less optimal.