> Does that mean that he should give up on his dreams, due to bad timing?
I don't know about giving up on dreams in the abstract, but yes, having kids should change the priorities in your life and that will most likely mean giving up some of your own wants, big and small, in order to care of your kids. If you aren't comfortable with that change, then you shouldn't make the choice to have kids.
Contributing genetic information and some parenting can be a net positive even if the parent is ultimately absent (for whatever reasons).
Take the extreme case of a parent who disappears just after the child's birth. The other parent may still be thankful to have the child, and the child may still be a credit to society.
Is the disappearing parent a good parent? Not really. Should he/she have never had the child, as you suggest? Well, that's up to the child, really.
I.e. it's hard to fault your parents for making you, whether they're good parents or not.
Do you have kids? It's relevant because I used to make arguments like yours until I had a child and realized how much more nuanced these arguments actually are.
He believed in this. His wife presumably knew he did.
I salute them.
Now could we please get the hell out of their personal decisions? Seriously. I'm not comfortable with HN acting as if they're entitled to judge his and her choices. I doubt any of us would want our community to judge ours.
I upvoted you for the 'never a good time...' line lolz, but your last statement is truly absurd. I assume you don't have kids. Nothing replaces a parent, even a flawed one.
I don't understand all this harsh judgement, especially from the HN crowd.
Who are you to say what he should or shouldn't do? He essentially died from a freak accident that couldn't be predicted ahead of time.
Telling him that he shouldn't do something because he's married with children is like someone telling you you shouldn't pursue a dream (whether that be climbing a mountain or trying an innovative startup with a high chance of failure) just because you happen to be married.
You don't know his situation. I don't know his situation.
Can't we just stop this judging and simply feel bad about an unfortunate death?
I think the criticism on here is not too harsh and could have been predicted by people who knew he was doing this. Many people see the father as the protector of the household. Sure, this view plays into traditional gender roles, but to deny it would be to ignore the reality of how many people think.
By going off and risking his life on a personal accomplishment, he wasn't doing the best job to protect his family. There are an unlimited number of other ways that he could have challenged himself physically and mentally without the risk to the people close to him.
This isn't a criticism of John as a person, but a decision that he made. I don't know who he was and I'm sure that he was a great man. But he put his family at risk to pursue a challenge that is mostly a boost to his own ego.
My point is that you don't know his situation, so you can't judge his actions. You don't know how many "externalities" there are (whatever an "externality" is).
The fact that you can't imagine a worthy justification (in terms of his value system or your own) doesn't mean that one doesn't exist. And no, you cannot categorically deny the existence thereof.
All these differing opinions really highlights what you hear a lot of mountain climbers say about how people either "get it", or the sport is a complete enigma to them.
If you can pass judgement on the living then you can do the same to someone who has died. While putting the dead on a pedestal may comfort our own feelings about death, it doesn't escape the reality of their actions.
So? Are you seriously suggesting that if the family had disapproved of his mountain climbing, they would actually say so in a public interview?
'We're terribly upset and saddened and she'll never know her father, but while we're suffering in public, we'd like to mention that we were against the whole climbing thing in the first place. We told you so, John!'
Someone doesn't have to be a complete narcissist to occasionally behave in a narcissistic manner. Hell, we all act narcissistically from time to time (some would even say all the time).
Ok this is kind of ridiculous. Really? Really? No I'm quite sure in this case it's definitely selfish, independent of what his wife thinks. And not passing judgement on the dead? Cmon man you have to be trolling.
Tasteless? I don't think you're getting it. He risked his life completely unnecessarily while he needed to be a father. What he has done is categorically selfish. Your defense of his actions is that "It was his lifelong ambition." If you believe that then you already acknowledge that his action is selfish; <i>his</i> ambition caused him to abandon his responsibilities as a father and husband.
I don't see it as much as criticism as it is a simple fact. I posted not because I wanted to make a change so much as because I was utterly surprised by someone defending this person. Furthermore, my comments are in reply to your post and not directed at any members of the family, but I would hope that at least the wife realizes the moral implications of her husband's decision at this point.
How about that we remain silent.on matters of which we are ignorant? We are not party to this man's innermost thoughts and family conversations indeed such is none of our business and it is more than a touch offensive to offer up judgments. Let's leave the family to mourn their loss, shall we?
Are not all the facts of this case known? Father of N, does something dangerous and unnecessary, leaves N children fatherless. Are there other relevant issues of fact that we do not know?
True, it may be tasteless to call it out . . . but the internet is tasteless. :-/
I think this is where we differ. You believe that because he took a risk for the goal of something other than his wife or kids, which you believe are his primary priority, and because that risk did not pay off, he is selfish.
I just want to point out that this is a very slippery slope. Does this mean that fathers in the army are being selfish for going to war rather than staying at home with their kids?
What about businessmen who work long hours and neglect their families?
There are many ways to live your life. This man chose a risky path, and sadly was killed before he could watch his children grow up. In his mind, perhaps, the risk was outweighed by the benefits of being able to tell his kids that he had fulfilled his dreams.
> I would hope that at least the wife realizes the moral
> implications of her husband's decision at this point.
That to me sums up why I disagree with your comment. I hope his wife all the best in recovering from her loss, and raising her kids. The moralizing of some uninformed person on the internet are completely irrelevant to her at this point.
> I happen to believe that criticizing people that cannot defend themselves is tasteless, and judging situations that I know nothing about is misguided.
That's not how the intertubes, or people for that matter, work.
Consider - there's another thread on HN right now about the utility of battleships. It's full of strongly held opinions by folks who confuse being smart with knowing what they're talking about. Oh, and the critics are savaging the long dead folks who built battleships.
Same situation with Rob Hall in 1996 (a very bad and very famous season on Everest) and his 7 month pregnant wife Jan Arnold. She was also a climber and physician who had submitted Everest with Hall in the past. He called her via sat phone from the summit to say goodbye.
This comment makes me extremely angry. Do you know anything about this man or his family? Do you know anything about the reasons that he was climbing the mountain?
I believe they're not strongly correlated. I know a lot of people that take risks that most of us avoid. Most of these people share very few characteristics of your typical CEO. Half of them end up on YouTube with clips that begin with, "Check this out...".
It's a big difference to risk starting a company vs climbing Mt Everest. That's actually a big mental block people have - they are afraid of risk, but starting a company or asking a cute girl out and failing is more of an ego hit than a threat to your existence.
"To date, there have been 1,924 ascents of Mount Everest (more than 1,300 different climbers), and 179 people have died. The overall fatality rate is thus about 9% (fatality rate is defined as successful summits compared to fatalities). However, since 1990 there has been an explosion of summiteers and fatality statistics have changed. Up to 1990, the Everest fatality rate is a whopping 37%, with 106 deaths and only 284 summits. Yet from 1990 until today, the rate has dropped to 4.4%; 73 people have died, and 1,640 have summited. Thus, the rate decreased to about eight times less than the pre-1990 fatality rate!"
Everest may be statistically less dangerous, but I suspect that's because the vast majority of climbers today (really, all except a handful of Sherpas at the start of the season) are climbing with fixed ropes on guided ascents. Everest today is still a dangerous mountain, but the dangers are themselves statistical (bad weather, illness, etc) more than technical.
I think the the fact that the dangers are mostly statistical is what makes Everest so dangerous. Not to make light of the difficulty in summiting Everest, but you can literally just hike to the top. This invites a lot of amateur climbers who lack the experience to even recognize dangerous situations, much less deal with them.
One of the guides in a documentary on it said that if Everest was at sea level, you would take your kids to summit it. But the altitude makes it a completely different animal. I wonder what the statistics are on frostbite and amputated body parts (fingers, toes). All of the documentaries I've watched seem to include a pretty high rate of some kind of frostbite in many of the climbers.
Interesting. Though I imagine that a lot of people who die climbing Everest die because they did something stupid. What's the death rate for people who are sensible? (This guy doesn't seem to have done anything stupid, his brain just didn't like the altitude).
I wouldn't do it. But I do want to climb Mt Kilimanjaro sometime (much less dangerous).
What's the death rate for people who are sensible?
Sensible how? Like not climbing Everest? Be careful how you define it, because there's the danger of saying that everyone who lived was sensible. Anyway, that's kinda like saying that drunk driving is only dangerous if you're not sensible when you're doing it. We can't survive that long that high, and our judgement becomes seriously impaired, similar to being drunk.
Dying on Everest isn't a matter of sensibility. Most people who die are stricken with altitude sickness[1]. HACE and HAPE move fast, and the only effective treatment is reduction in altitude. Hyperbaric chambers can buy time, diamox isn't shown to be effective for HACE and HAPE.
Acute mountain sickness (AMS) can strike even lower. A friend of mine was in Nepal with the Discovery Channel this past Fall. One of the producers was evacuated due to AMS when they were under 6000m. Altitude is a lottery. For my part, there's plenty of climbing near sea level that kicks my butt.
Can't reach the page, but the submission title made me want to share an on-topic book recommendation - Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, by Jon Krakauer. [1] It's a very sad, but thrilling, account of a catastrophic journey up Everest.
It is a great book. Sadly, the hostile reaction toward the Everest climbers expressed after the disaster seems to also be present in many of the comments on this thread.
I think most would agree that climbing Everest (with a young kids) represents poor judgment.
Sometimes I wonder if various acts of greatness are often made possible by the person having a "blind spot". Maybe starting Intrade was equally stupid.
Generally I think of this mostly for entrepreneurs and fiction authors.
I have yet to meet anyone who started a company and is not a little crazy, and a little less risk-averse than most.
Where do you draw the line for acceptable behavior? Is flying a plane OK? Riding a motorcycle? Skydiving? Having an extra helping of dessert?
Hell, starting a company is a risk and takes a toll on a family.
Whenever you read a tragic story like this, you try to think of all the reasons it couldn't happen to you.
He spun the dice, maybe a little harder than most, and he lost. You could draw an unlucky card tomorrow driving in your car, or get cancer from your cell phone.
If you don't want to spin the dice that hard, you don't have to, I know I wouldn't. Some people have the need to go to the limit. They shouldn't put others at risk. But if he was a CEO and reasonably prudent, the family is, I hope, well-provided for. If he loved them, and he did that and died doing something he loved, bad break and a life well lived.
Being passenger on a commercial flight is much safer than driving a car. Fooling around in a Cessna is about an order of magnitude more dangerous than driving a car.
Hoping the best for his family. I posted on HN 4 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592958) about it and it got no attention until today with this new submission. Really rather unfortunate.
There is a time and place for everything, so we are told. personally, I believe that HN is not the place for this. And if HN is now the place for this, then perhaps HN's time has now passed.
Other people's personal lives are their own. They make their choices, the people they share their lives with share their choices, by choice or otherwise.
Leave them alone. Leave it alone. Go build something useful.
I am not sad for him personally. We all die, he chose his time and place. Attempting to summit Everest is meaningful in part because one out of every ten climbers making the final push doesn't make it home alive.
Compare and contrast his death to Bob Parsons' cowardly choice of shooting an elephant. Bob was never in any meaningful danger, where is the courage in killing an animal that can't shoot back?
John Delaney left behind two sons and a pregnant wife pursuing a meaningless accomplishment. Bob Parsons killed an elephant who was destroying crops and fed an African village.
I'm troubled by your use of "meaningful" in describing danger. Danger is not meaningful in itself. An act does not become meaningful because 10% of the people who attempt it die. Acts are meaningful based on their impact on the world around them. Ascending the summit of Everest is ultimately meaningless; killing an elephant who was destroying crops and feeding an African village is quite meaningful.
>> Bob Parsons killed an elephant who was destroying crops and fed an African village.
The most instructive part of that video was the end where the crop Bob Parsons was trying to "save" was totally destroyed by people trying to get at the elephant. Those people did much more damage to the crop than the elephants.
So a lump of rotting flesh that will spoil in days takes the place of a field of grain that could have lasted a season. Not very meaningful. The farmer/village sure didn't benefit from Bob Parson's "help."
Saying that Bob Parsons did anything meaningful isn't being honest about what he did. Some people take pleasure in killing things; that's the basis of hunting as a sport. I'm not really interested in it one way or another. What does pique my interest is the idea that Bob Parsons was doing anything meaningful.
If he takes pleasure in killing things, he should go ahead and be honest about it. He shouldn't try excusing himself with some antiquated colonial view of white man helping some poor impoverished people with a big gun. That's the repulsive part of the whole thing.
If Bob Parsons really wanted to do something other than kill an animal, he could have given a micro-loan or grant to all those people to help them out of subsistence.
Sorry, that's YOUR definition, and good for you that you consider altruism more meaningful than courage. But yours is not the only definition, as I'm sure you are perfectly aware.
Now as to Mr. Parsons, don't be suckered into equating his killing an elephant with the question of whether elephants should be culled. Culling an elephant involves game wardens. What he did was murder tourism, big difference.
My definition? If your definition of "meaningful" doesn't take into account an act's impact on the external world, I don't know what to say; we probably have very little to discuss. I have no interest in arguing against what effectively amounts to solipsism.
"Murder" is the intentional killing of humans. Hunting elephants, licitly or otherwise, is not and never can be "murder tourism". But since you seem intent in this discussion on using words with meanings other than their commonly accepted ones, perhaps we should go our separate ways now.
None of my words said or implied that acts that help other people are not meaningful. I'm a father, I consider parenthood meaningful. I also consider climbing Mt. Everest meaningful even though I have no interest in trying it. The two are not exclusive in my mind.
My point was and is that testing one's courage is part of the meaning for climbimng Mt. Everest, as are many other things such as testing one's discipline to and sacrifice. I think these things are meaningful even when if and when they are not altruistic. That does not mean that digging a well or planting a tree or raising a child is not meaningful, they are also meaningful for different reasons.
Ok, killing an elephant that would have been culled anyways is not murder. Fine. Buit still, Bob parsons paid for the right to be the one that killed th elephant. The elephant would have been shot any ways, it's not like the Africans were unable to shoot it and needed Bob's help. The man paid for the right to kill something. Whatever word you apply, the fact remains that he killed a living thing for pleasure and then boasted of it on the Internet.
Mainly because moving them to an elephant reserve costs a good amount of money (something like $5000 per, if I recall correctly) and it's cheaper to just shoot them. His hunting trip was probably more expensive than that.
to play devils advocate: Elephants are far more endangered than humans. Does something have to propagate the human species to be meaningful, or can non-physical aspirations not be considered meaningful too?
I'd say so. It may not be meaningful in the life accomplishment sense, but I'd imagine that staring death in the face in those moments before the click is probably about as vivid and emotionally intense as life can get. An experience doesn't have to be virtuous or reasonable to be meaningful.
I find this conversation pretty bizarre. Of course climbing Mount Everest is meaningful. It's used ubiquitously as a metaphor for the ultimate in human achievement! Just because it may be selfish or egotistically motivated in some circumstances doesn't mean it isn't a deeply meaningful and symbolic challenge to undertake.
Ironically, the odds on an InTrade bet might have warned him that he was not expected to survive. The crowdsourced research about conditions and the likely physical ability of Mr. Delaney would have exceeded his own and might have led him to delay or reconsider the trip.
From what I've read of his death, it sounds like he was killed by high-altitude cerebral edema. (Swelling caused by altitude-induced blood leakage within the brain) HACE is essentially impossible to predict. Fit, healthy, experienced climbers die every year from HACE, often with almost no warning. It is unfortunately a risk you take when climbing extreme heights like Everest.
I'm unconvinced that this is relevant unless the markets you're talking about have a history of accurately predicting random or chaotic systems like weather :P
A lot of the decision points for whether to go on or turn back have to be made in the short term on the mountain.
It is too dangerous to try and recover bodies. At those altitudes your body is doing everything it can to survive and the margin for error is nearly zero.
I don't think anyone here is taking delight in his judgement, where did you read that? It seems like many posters here can't comprehend why a human being would play Russian roulette knowing that they have two children and one in the womb.
I can't judge. Everyone dies, but not many die awesome. The sad fact is that even though he died tragically young, he still probably provided far more both in money and example for his kids than I will be able to manage with a lifetime of cautious mediocrity.
I think the drive in people who push boundaries between what is safe and what is dangerous is beneficial to overall human survival. It puts us more in control of the surrounding natural environments.
We all take survival risks. I wouldn't climb Everest but I do ride a motorcycle and scuba dive. Both hobbies do add survival risks for only enjoying life more.
> And really? 5 downvotes for saying that the link does't work? This community has really declined.
Downvotes for an error message posted with no context[1] on the other hand, are entirely appropriate.
[1] The error appears to have been fixed, so reading the article provides no context - I didn't even realize that that was where it had appeared until reading brk's comment.
Overall death rate for Everest climbers is pretty close to 3% - pretty high (although its been falling).
Edit: 3% is for climbers above base camp - for summit climbers its close to 10%! According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Mount_Everest_disaster