DanHeidel

I am not a lawyer but I've read quite a bit of /r/legaladvice and this is correct.

10% of the threads are someone that's balls-inside-out-stupid insisting they have a case and everyone thats not insane telling them they don't.

The rest are someone asking for legal advice followed by a ton of uninformed conjecture and a real lawyer telling them that they can't give out actual legal advice on the internet and to go talk to a lawyer and stop wasting their time there.

The only thing that /r/legaladvice is good for is to determine if you even have something worth taking to a real lawyer. And the best way to do that is to just skip the /r/legaladvice step and talk to a real lawyer.

Edit - I forgot that about 30% of the threads involve the OP openly admitting to a crime or saying things that would destroy their case later in court and everyone telling them to delete their posts and to immediately shut up and go talk to a real lawyer.

TL;DR - go talk to a real lawyer.

He was trying to be supportive but the suggestion was very naive and ultimately quite condescending to Pieter. The geneticist here is completely correct and the OP's post, while well-meaning, is the atheist version of "You need to pray your way to better health".

It's suggesting that Pieter disrupt the remainder of his life, take time away from putting his affairs into order and saying goodbye to his family and likely undergo a great deal of suffering in order to invest his time into a hunt for a cure which is overwhelmingly unlikely.

Pieter is an intelligent person who has clearly taken the time to learn about his condition and is making an informed and carefully thought-out decision. It's pretty clear that it's not just a defeatist choice prompted by depression or an ill-conceived split decision. While it may not be the emotionally satisfying choice that movies and books have led us to crave, I think we owe it to Pieter to trust that he is making a choice that is correct for him.

There's been a lot of buzz about the SP/ARC reactor designs being enabled by improvements in high temp superconductor magnet technology. Is there any benefit to focus fusion designs with larger external magnetic fields to help boost the plasmoid field?

Blown up Millenium Falcons: 0

Blown up Death Stars: 3

Are you sure you want to stick with that answer?

The only sensible goal is moving things forwards, and a new set of eyes cannot possibly hurt.

New sets of eyes will ultimately contribute to the end of this disease. However, what you are suggesting will take away much of the precious time Pieter has to spend with his family and put his affairs in order as well as likely subjecting him to tremendous suffering. Yes, it can possibly hurt. It's not Pieter's responsibility to significantly reduce the quality of what little life he has remaining to make a very, very tiny contribution to the eradication of one disease.

This is like telling someone whose Mac crashed and who needs a working computer in 15 minutes that he should write a new OS.

No, it's not. It's like "let's put more eyeballs attached to smart brains on the problem in form that works well in other endeavors."

If anything the Mac analogy is massively understating things. I used to be a biologist. I know that you're trying to be supportive and helpful - that's very admirable. However if you don't work in biology and medicine, you don't realize just how monumentally difficult these problems are to deal with and how much time is required to make significant progress on solving them. This is not software or a human engineering issue. This is an insanely complex evolved system where pretty much everything is interconnected in non-linear ways. The probability that the next few months or even years can significantly change the general prognosis of this disease can be very accurately approximated as zero. These problems have been studied by literally millions of the smartest people on Earth for decades. The sheer size of the knowledgebase required to attack this problem dwarfs the entire body of knowledge of the semiconductor/software world over its entire history by orders of magnitude.

It's more like telling someone whose Mac has crashed who needs a working computer in 15 minutes that they need to debug a broken OS written in a largely unknown form of machine code that was made by a trillion generations of random genetic algorithms and BTW, you'll also have to figure out how to build your own semiconductor fab while you're at it.

You were well meaning and OP should have been less of a dick about it. But in the end, what you're suggesting really is just a fancier version of telling Pieter to get to church and pray so god can fix the disease with a miracle.

You weren't meaning to but what you were suggesting was really condescending to both the entire fields of biology and medicine that have been working on these problems as well as Pieter's deliberate and well-studied plans. Your attitude is an admirable one - without that sort of enthusiasm and positive attitude, we'll never cure this disease. However, there is a big difference between being positive about the long-term goal and where Pieter is at now. He's on a plane and and a wing has fallen off. Yes, maybe he can construct a makeshift parachute out of a blanket and jump, hoping he'll land on a mattress factory. But his time is better spent getting on his phone and telling his loved ones goodbye.