[Vespasian]

It's not blaming him to mention that an immediate surgery would have vastly increased his chances of survival.

And it wasn't a lack of courage it was a misguided belief that he knew more than his doctors.

I'm also not blaming my beloved grandfather either when I mention that smoking likely killed him in the end and he knew that years before.

Jobs was a very smart guy with all the means to improve his situation but decided against it. For me it's a lesson to consider where my closely held beliefs could be wrong.

[philosophty]

"And it wasn't a lack of courage it was a misguided belief that he knew more than his doctors."

You don't know anything about human psychology if you think searching for alternatives means he thought he was smarter than his doctors.

Here's the most relevant quote from Steve Jobs: "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,"

This is the language of fear not arrogance.

[anonymars]

He waited 9 months to listen to his doctors -- or anyone -- by all accounts instead trying to cure it with diets and spiritual fads.

Genentech CEO (and PhD in Biochemistry) Art Levinson: he "pleaded every day" with Jobs and found it "enormously frustrating that [he] just couldn't connect with him"

Andy Grove: "Steve talked to me when he was trying to cure himself by eating horseshit and horseshit roots, and I told him he was crazy"

--

Marc Andreessen: "Steve Jobs was 'one of the most disagreeable people in the history of humankind,' and that was part of his genius."

He was an obstinate man who thought he knew better than everyone else. Sometimes he did. This time he didn't.

[philosophty]

Steve Jobs's entire job for thirty years was recruiting, listening, and working with experts in various fields. He never would have succeeded without being able to accept that other people knew more than him in certain areas. He worked with doctors very successfully most of the time.

My take is that he was scared and acting out of fear. Hoping against hope that his bullshit alternatives would work because he was so terrified of having his body "opened" and "violated" by a major surgery. Maybe that fear sometimes masqueraded as arrogance but that's still just fear.

Like many others, you seem excited to be able to judge Steve Jobs on this point. To judge and laugh at him for his arrogance killing him. When in reality you're judging and laughing at a pancreatic cancer patient for procrastinating on their surgery out of fear.

[anonymars]

Steve Jobs found success by doing just the opposite: not accepting the status quo / accepted wisdom and disrupting it.

In this way Elon Musk is very similar. That gets you EVs where none existed and it gets you crappy self driving by eschewing LIDAR for cameras only. It gets you rockets that land themselves and it gets a flat concrete launchpad obliterated by the first Starship launch as others warned.

If you'd said merely "I think it was fear, more than arrogance" that could have been an interesting discussion, but instead you've been making it strangely personal throughout.

Frankly I dont care enough about Jobs to be "excited" or "laugh" or whatever accusations you are throwing around the thread -- they reflect more on you than on me.

Jobs was a flawed man, as are we all.

[philosophty]

You're the one judging a cancer patient's response to their diagnoses. I'm the one pointing out how wrong that is. So yes, it's about you personally and your actions. Not just you of course.

We are all flawed. I think Steve Jobs was less flawed than most of his critics. Maybe less flawed than myself. The difference is we know everything he did wrong in his entirely life because it's so well documented.

[anonymars]

I don't know why you feel the need to white-knight the man, and I find it especially rich that you somehow think that he's "probably less flawed than his critics" whom you know nothing about, but statistically probably don't park in handicap spots, rip off business partners, or abandon their children during their formative years (his denialism about the paternity test seems to resemble that of the surgery).

I said his personality--the one that led him to rip off Wozniak along with his other actions (positive and negative)--likely led him to die [earlier]. But in your view the true moral failing was not in these acts which actually harmed other people, but in merely making an observation about how the man's personality likely ended up harming himself too.

Make of that what you will.

[saagarjha]

Just to be clear, you're the guy in this thread explaining how Steve Jobs shouldn't have his memory tarnished.