I'm going to use this time to drop the Marshall Brain work that had the biggest impact on me, and is some of the most prescient speculative fiction I've read.
Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future
He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized social credit system.
The other society uses the similar technology not as a social class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom.
Very cool story, quite impactful on my thinking, although I will caution that the dystopia is better conceived than the utopia, mainly because the later requires inventing fantasy technology while the former does not. Indeed it's not clear at all what forces might destabalize the dystopia, since the power structures are immortal and self-replicating, and physics and biology (at least) prevents the utopia from existing. Maybe an asteroid or a caldera explosion? In fact I would love to read a sequel where the dystopia wins and AI-empowered oligarchs and human wage slaves create generation ships to nearby stars and eventually setup fast food restaurants in every corner of the galaxy.
Manna was fairly eye-opening ( and you can see some parallels to today's LLMs to me. I will admit that I read it without knowing much about the author way back when and being fairly amazed at well he knew human nature and likely course that invention would take.
I found it to be an extremely interesting and useful tool to understand and imagine the impact of wealth distribution and automation in society. Personally, I believe in strong redistribution in society, because (at least in America) we largely live in a world of abundance, and automation should make everyone’s lives easier and more leisurely.
But I would like to point out that the “utopia” has a few serious panopticon elements which are very 1984. It seems as though high-welfare and high redistribution societies are predicated on high trust of your peers, and this takes that to the extreme…
> Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric grew up during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global terrorism, and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows incredible abuse. It does not matter if you are sending anonymous, untraceable emails that destroy someone’s career, or if you are anonymously releasing computer viruses, or if you are anonymously blowing up buildings. Anonymity breeds abuse. In [utopia], if you walk from your home to a park, your path is logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone else’s home. If someone looks up your path that day to see who walked by, that fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to commit an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime. Anyone who commits a crime is immediately detained and disciplined.”
I’ve read it all recently and I felt like the later described utopia was also a kind of dystopia, very Brave New World like (or at least the seed for a BNW-like dystopia). I kept waiting for a twist in the story, where the main character would realize that both worlds were terrible, but it never came.
A gut punch for me. He was influential in many ways, as multiple comments here have already attested-- in particular the 'Manna' story that has been mentioned several times, which definitely knocked my socks off.
Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" (https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or theological treatise you've ever encountered, but it crystallized several points I still consider hugely significant.
For anyone raised by Christian fundamentalists of the type who continue to claim to believe in miracles being possible as a direct result of prayer, it is one of the most important things you may ever read. It lays bare the blatant falsehoods at the root of all such claims, forcing you to grapple with the fact that whatever higher power(s) may exist, they do not keep their supposed written promises in any way that we human beings would consider honest amongst each other.
I wonder how long that site will be up, given his death. Hope someone mirrors it.
It's interesting to read the Nicholas Kristof op-ed from 2006 (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03kristof.html) which he links because it mentions the site (in its incarnation as "whydoesgodhateamputees.com") as "part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive", and essentially argues that the New Atheists should back off and stop being so mean.
While the New Atheists were definitely sharp-tongued (another page on the site asserts that there's no such thing as an 'atheist', for the same reason that someone who doesn't believe in leprechauns wouldn't be called an 'aleprechaunist', and atheists should instead call themselves 'rational people'), I think they had some excellent points about how the religious point of view is treated as the default in public discourse - and one of the ways that manifests is that arguments for religion (and more nebulous spirituality) are seen as expected and ordinary, while arguments against religion are seen as inherently aggressive and mean-spirited.
Obviously someone who has come to atheism is not going to speak well of prayer. The guy ends each section with more questions than answers. And each of those questions comes from a highly confused state about what religion is, about what prayer is, about what God is. And maybe even what your purpose is.
In the words of the Bible, “ the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ...” meaning his guide will only take him to further darkness and misguidance.
It does contain a bit of a false-dilemma though: It asserts that the only "real" form of god involves a specific flavor of Christian evangelical prayer-interventionist deity, and that the only other option is (B) no god(s) exist at all.
I'm very much in favor of showing how silly or self-contradictory (A) is, but it is fundamentally unsound to jump from that to asserting (B) is true.
Interesting website. But there's one rationalization missing, imho: that God alters the timeline. That is, amputees are in fact healed in response to prayer, but nobody knows about it because God goes back in time and ensures the amputation never happened in the first place.
Wow, I never realized that Manna and Amputees were both created by him. Both of those had a big impact on my thinking and have stuck with me since I read them.
Wow, when I was a kid back in the early 2000s, howstuffworks was my favorite website. I bet I read every article on how various things work (there were many hundreds).
I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website.
Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
Same story for me. I got into electronics as a kid, and he had articles on how components such as the capacitor worked[1]. It opened up a whole new world for me. Sad news to hear.
I had the same experience, as I’m sure many others did. It’s easy to forget now how much rarer it was to find high quality and engaging educational content on the internet back then. Howstuffworks got me interested in so many different things, and exploring the articles was a lovely way to spend the time as a kid.
Marshall was one of my closest Mentors through college. Truly heartbreaking to hear of his passing. I wish his family; wife and kids, the best through this tragic period.
He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students, incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering. My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to spend with him.
His premise seems to be that life past 65 averages out to suffering and a slow decline toward death, which I think many active and happy older people (who don’t wish to be killed!) would argue is very mistaken.
Misanthropic environmentalism isn’t environmentalism at all. Environmentalism designed by humans should be good for humans, not give them scheduled death dates.
This is likely satire along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal. The main giveaways are the directness of the language and the time of writing (on the tail of covid when people were unironically making such proposals).
Wow, this is very tragic. I was actually just reflecting on the influence Howstuffworks.com had on my life and interests. Quick story:
My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it. It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years ago.
I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created and the impact they had.
Same experience for me. I was able to buy my first drumset from the money I got for making a PHP+MySQL+HTML website for someone (also done all in notepad). I did not know anything about computers but I needed to buy a drumset. And that page actually got me going about how HTML works.
I still remember their animations about car differential which were magical.
I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what they could do with their lives.
I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic.
Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to me.
Given the amount of dystopian content he was posting on his website and subreddit lately, he seemed to be despairing quite a bit regarding the direction of society.
I shared this on the other HN thread, but I spent some time revisiting the HowStuffWorks c 2001, and highly recommend as a catharsis and reminder of the web as it once was:
Oh man. Sad to hear that. I remember in the early '2000s before Wikipedia printing out those tutorials to read before I'd take these long bus rides out of town to work at the meat (slaughter) plant. I was trying to educate myself so I would not have to work at the meat plant for long. That job kinda sucked but at least it got my mind straight. I was debating whether or not to save up for college. Working there for a year let me save up and to convince me that I'd rather go to school to try to not work a blue collar job.
I read a few of those How Stuff Works articles printed on paper at the public library on those long hour bus rides. They'd keep my spirits up.
Well, damn. Some time before HowStuffWorks, he was an instructor for our newly minted development team teaching us all how to do C++/Motif programming in a reasonable way in 1993. For #reasons I was the only person on the team available to help him out with getting our development environment set up and we worked together for the better part of a day on Sun SparcStations running Solaris.
Later in the year we were both in Manhattan and decided to meet under the WTC towers to head to lunch.
He got there a little early, stepped off the base of one of the World Trade Center towers, and knowing the length of one side of one tower and the number of floors, estimated how many Zebulon NC's would fit in the 2 towers (Zebulon was where he either lived at the time or where he was born.)
I've forgotten the value he came up with, but the mental math there amused me that he'd bother to try.
Marshall taught one of my classes at NCSU when I was there ten years ago. He was a little eccentric but super nice. I remember that he said if we made a website, the “natural exploratory pressures” of the internet would find it, so all we had to do was have good content. I wonder how much of that still holds, but it’s a good memory. Hope his family finds peace.
Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.
Was he dark or just trying to be responsible and keep his head out of the sand in the face of massive challenges?
He wrote an essay about people being euthanized after age 63 in order to relieve the environmental strain of the high population. I don't know if he really believed that, but if he did and saw his health and quality of life deteriorating rapidly, then it is possible that he literally was trying to serve as a role model to people of how to be a good citizen and fight climate change.
I personally hope that we don't have to resort to such things as a society. But I believe that resource constraints and climate or other challenges are much more severe than people understand. I hope that we will be able to leverage technology to avoid disaster.
Intelligent people are able to understand and solve problems. That's why they don't ignore them and hope they will go away, like many less intelligent people. Brain might have been demonstrating a "last-resort" but effective solution to these types of global challenges.
I don’t think it’s hard to see what things concerned him. I think it’s important for all of us to realize that no matter how we think the world is going there is still brightness in the world and Marshall contributed to that brightness through his contributions to society.
So grateful that HSW existed when I was younger. As a teenager, I couldn't afford to get the timing belt and water pump replaced on my car so I had to figure out how to do it myself. I bought the service manual from AutoZone but I needed something to closer to an introduction to even be begin to understand it. He seemed to love explaining how car engines work and that series of articles was exactly what I needed at that time to get started.
RIP Marshall, I hope you knew what an inspiration you were.
Sad to hear. This is an amazing resource that many curious people have grown up with. It alleges here that he committed suicide. It makes me extra sad that someone who gifted others with so much found themselves in that place.
Very sorry to hear that Marshall died :( I just went on howstuffworks.com and I see two articles on astrology on the home page. For real? I thought it was a science-based website.
He was such an amazing guy. We got to interview him on our tiny podcast[1] after we reached out and he so happily joined us for half an hour. His book, Manna (which is $0.99 to download from Amazon[2] or free on his website[3]) is still one of the most fascinating and interesting visions of the future that I've come across (although I don't totally agree it's the only reasonable option).
Very sad, just a reminder that success doesn’t translate to happiness.
The podcasts that came out of HSW.com have heavily influenced my life. Especially Stuff You Should Know (still a top 20 podcast but no longer owned by How stuff works.
I remember 16 years ago going through the whole rigmarole of downloading the podcast on my white MacBook, syncing to my iPod, repeating each week so I could keep up with the episodes of SYSK coming out. Fast-forward to today I still listen to each episode religiously and have learned so much from Josh and Chuck.
I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture, leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic athletes)
Websites that refresh instead of returning you to the previous page (HN in this case) should be nuked off the internet. Microsfot does that A LOT on their support forums.
In other news, yet another website fails at understanding that a hard redirect prior to a 404--instead of just issuing a 404 in the first place--is an idiotic practice that breaks browser history.
As someone who has pulled himself back from suicidality, I absolutely abhor the expression "died by suicide".
If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all (especially not those still living in that hole).
I would much rather have it framed as me having done something unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there; that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did nothing to prevent.
I've had similar experiences, and I have exactly the opposite beliefs.
Depression isn't a failing on the person's part, and it isn't stupidity. Nor is suicide resulting from depression. It's a disease, and you "die from suicide" the same way you "die from cancer" - from the effects of your disease disrupting vital functions of your existence until you can no longer survive.
For me, at least, understanding and healing from severe mental illness required understanding that the illness wasn't "me". It was this crappy thing I had to live with because some part of my brain Just Does That Sometimes. See [1] among other posts, but the only way I've ever found to beat my own tendencies towards mental illness - and they are extremely strong - is to treat them like a chronic disease. The same way that a person with liver disease has to avoid drinking, I have to avoid the things that trigger my own chronic depression.
monocasa|1 year ago
Manna: Two Views of Humanity’s Future
He contracts two societies. One is a dystopia where AI very, very similar to today's ML models is integrated into society as a replacement for the middle class, removing social mobility as well as acting as a panopticon lower management, and centralized social credit system.
The other society uses the similar technology not as a social class moat, but as a tool to form a synthesis with all members of their culture and and unlock new levels of individual freedom.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
simpaticoder|1 year ago
A4ET8a8uTh0|1 year ago
vineyardmike|1 year ago
But I would like to point out that the “utopia” has a few serious panopticon elements which are very 1984. It seems as though high-welfare and high redistribution societies are predicated on high trust of your peers, and this takes that to the extreme…
> Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric grew up during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global terrorism, and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows incredible abuse. It does not matter if you are sending anonymous, untraceable emails that destroy someone’s career, or if you are anonymously releasing computer viruses, or if you are anonymously blowing up buildings. Anonymity breeds abuse. In [utopia], if you walk from your home to a park, your path is logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone else’s home. If someone looks up your path that day to see who walked by, that fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to commit an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime. Anyone who commits a crime is immediately detained and disciplined.”
cblum|1 year ago
slfnflctd|1 year ago
Since no one else has brought it up yet, I want to say that one of his websites, "Why Won't God Heal Amputees" (https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/) was very important in my world. It may not exactly be the most highbrow philosophical or theological treatise you've ever encountered, but it crystallized several points I still consider hugely significant.
For anyone raised by Christian fundamentalists of the type who continue to claim to believe in miracles being possible as a direct result of prayer, it is one of the most important things you may ever read. It lays bare the blatant falsehoods at the root of all such claims, forcing you to grapple with the fact that whatever higher power(s) may exist, they do not keep their supposed written promises in any way that we human beings would consider honest amongst each other.
cipheredStones|1 year ago
It's interesting to read the Nicholas Kristof op-ed from 2006 (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03kristof.html) which he links because it mentions the site (in its incarnation as "whydoesgodhateamputees.com") as "part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive", and essentially argues that the New Atheists should back off and stop being so mean.
While the New Atheists were definitely sharp-tongued (another page on the site asserts that there's no such thing as an 'atheist', for the same reason that someone who doesn't believe in leprechauns wouldn't be called an 'aleprechaunist', and atheists should instead call themselves 'rational people'), I think they had some excellent points about how the religious point of view is treated as the default in public discourse - and one of the ways that manifests is that arguments for religion (and more nebulous spirituality) are seen as expected and ordinary, while arguments against religion are seen as inherently aggressive and mean-spirited.
nyc_data_geek|1 year ago
nashashmi|1 year ago
In the words of the Bible, “ the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. ...” meaning his guide will only take him to further darkness and misguidance.
WorkerBee28474|1 year ago
It's worse than that, it's bad theology on a topic that has been discussed for millennia.
Terr_|1 year ago
I'm very much in favor of showing how silly or self-contradictory (A) is, but it is fundamentally unsound to jump from that to asserting (B) is true.
amelius|1 year ago
Disclaimer: I didn't read the entire website yet.
qgin|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
paxcoder|1 year ago
[deleted]
yrral|1 year ago
I found that the knowledge from that website helped me understand how everything in the world worked and satisfied my curious mind. I attribute my knack for understanding new things and fixing things to this website.
Back then, the site was clean and had very good clean and expertly written explanations of how various mechanical, everyday and scientific equipment worked. Nowadays that website is not the same, seems riddled with SEO spam and fluff articles like a content mill.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, thank you for all your contributions to my (and likely others) life
sd8f9iu|1 year ago
[1] Which is still incredibly up: https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/capacitor.htm
slaucon|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
arcanemachiner|1 year ago
FlynnCruse|1 year ago
He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students, incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering. My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to spend with him.
Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, a real-life legend.
panoply220|1 year ago
goodmunky|1 year ago
rafram|1 year ago
Misanthropic environmentalism isn’t environmentalism at all. Environmentalism designed by humans should be good for humans, not give them scheduled death dates.
bufordtwain|1 year ago
ororroro|1 year ago
gothink|1 year ago
My first introduction to programming was building a Geocities website in HTML (using notepad, of course) at a science camp in 1999. They also showed us the "How HTML Works" web page as a resource, which became my first technical resource. I remembering struggling with something on my website and eventually emailing my question to Howstuffworks, not expecting much back. Not only did a very patient and informative woman respond to me, she continued to answer my questions and offer helpful guidance to this very eager kid for the rest of the summer. Without that positive experience, who knows if I would have stuck with it. It's been on mind a lot since I just realized that was 25 years ago.
I hope Marshall knew how much people valued the things he created and the impact they had.
schiffern|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain#Publications
ilayn|1 year ago
I still remember their animations about car differential which were magical.
arresin|1 year ago
StephenSmith|1 year ago
I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic.
RIP Marshall. You were loved.
AlphaWeaver|1 year ago
He will be dearly missed.
BadHumans|1 year ago
schiffern|1 year ago
His commentary near the end of this interview is also telling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o
An optimist in (increasingly) a cynic's world. Be at peace, Marshall Brain.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
BobbyTables2|1 year ago
Aside from his futuristic works, his Win32 API book was extremely good and my first introduction to Windows programming.
It’s our loss to loose such a talented human being.
panoply220|1 year ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffwo...
thr0waway001|1 year ago
I read a few of those How Stuff Works articles printed on paper at the public library on those long hour bus rides. They'd keep my spirits up.
panoply220|1 year ago
What are you up to now?
raphman|1 year ago
michaelcampbell|1 year ago
Later in the year we were both in Manhattan and decided to meet under the WTC towers to head to lunch.
He got there a little early, stepped off the base of one of the World Trade Center towers, and knowing the length of one side of one tower and the number of floors, estimated how many Zebulon NC's would fit in the 2 towers (Zebulon was where he either lived at the time or where he was born.)
I've forgotten the value he came up with, but the mental math there amused me that he'd bother to try.
Super neat guy.
dodongobongo|1 year ago
joemazerino|1 year ago
mandmandam|1 year ago
And all of us, even the von Neumanns and the Ramanujans, have restraints and guard rails.
las_balas_tres|1 year ago
ilaksh|1 year ago
He wrote an essay about people being euthanized after age 63 in order to relieve the environmental strain of the high population. I don't know if he really believed that, but if he did and saw his health and quality of life deteriorating rapidly, then it is possible that he literally was trying to serve as a role model to people of how to be a good citizen and fight climate change.
I personally hope that we don't have to resort to such things as a society. But I believe that resource constraints and climate or other challenges are much more severe than people understand. I hope that we will be able to leverage technology to avoid disaster.
Intelligent people are able to understand and solve problems. That's why they don't ignore them and hope they will go away, like many less intelligent people. Brain might have been demonstrating a "last-resort" but effective solution to these types of global challenges.
bckr|1 year ago
I wonder what was happening with him.
Mistletoe|1 year ago
>While the university would not confirm any details related to his death, sources close to Brain said he died by suicide.
:(
Marshall was a frequent poster in subreddits such as /r/collapse.
https://www.reddit.com/user/MarshallBrain/
I don’t think it’s hard to see what things concerned him. I think it’s important for all of us to realize that no matter how we think the world is going there is still brightness in the world and Marshall contributed to that brightness through his contributions to society.
zackangelo|1 year ago
RIP Marshall, I hope you knew what an inspiration you were.
nisten|1 year ago
May he rest in peace.
pinkmuffinere|1 year ago
blackeyeblitzar|1 year ago
Dang - deserves a black bar?
ziofill|1 year ago
ilaksh|1 year ago
pgl|1 year ago
What a loss.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-...
[3] https://marshallbrain.com/manna
Edit: Fixed "free to download from Amazon" - it's not
willio58|1 year ago
The podcasts that came out of HSW.com have heavily influenced my life. Especially Stuff You Should Know (still a top 20 podcast but no longer owned by How stuff works.
I remember 16 years ago going through the whole rigmarole of downloading the podcast on my white MacBook, syncing to my iPod, repeating each week so I could keep up with the episodes of SYSK coming out. Fast-forward to today I still listen to each episode religiously and have learned so much from Josh and Chuck.
readthenotes1|1 year ago
I suspect that the pursuit of happiness, without the capture, leads to success. Or perhaps a strong avoidance of the fear of failure (iirc, that was a common motivation for Olympic athletes)
dyauspitr|1 year ago
Horffupolde|1 year ago
xyst|1 year ago
grupthink|1 year ago
pabs3|1 year ago
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/?q=marshallbr...
He seems to have a lot of domains, if you know of any, please post them here.
justinclift|1 year ago
mulhoon|1 year ago
chakintosh|1 year ago
TZubiri|1 year ago
RIP
evilDagmar|1 year ago
mmmlinux|1 year ago
thimkerbell|1 year ago
[deleted]
kridsdale3|1 year ago
yarg|1 year ago
If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all (especially not those still living in that hole).
I would much rather have it framed as me having done something unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there; that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did nothing to prevent.
rachofsunshine|1 year ago
Depression isn't a failing on the person's part, and it isn't stupidity. Nor is suicide resulting from depression. It's a disease, and you "die from suicide" the same way you "die from cancer" - from the effects of your disease disrupting vital functions of your existence until you can no longer survive.
For me, at least, understanding and healing from severe mental illness required understanding that the illness wasn't "me". It was this crappy thing I had to live with because some part of my brain Just Does That Sometimes. See [1] among other posts, but the only way I've ever found to beat my own tendencies towards mental illness - and they are extremely strong - is to treat them like a chronic disease. The same way that a person with liver disease has to avoid drinking, I have to avoid the things that trigger my own chronic depression.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41113032