Dear Pieter,

I'm a long time fan of your work, but your Planned death article puzzles me. It's uncharacteristically obedient to the situation.

I'm curious if you considered "Planning to survive"? You said you will try to fight this thing, so why not plan for success, even if the chances are slim? I'm almost sorry to ask this, but I think it's a bit important. I hope you don't mind!

Planning ones own death is audacious and I applaud your openness. However, given your skills/inventions in social architectures and ability to solve problems, would it not be an option to organize an open source "Let's solve bile duct cancer with metastases in the lungs" project? Maybe with crowd funding as needed. It could be a seminal experiment.

Rationale: Medical doctors are excellent professionals, but not necessarily all that good at problem solving, finding patterns, discovering correlations or generally thinking outside the box. They certainly don't have the time to do it anyway. They need help.

So okay, little chance of success, but I also think it would give the best chance of success with the right participants.

Regardless of outcome, if the social architecture thesis is true (and I think it is), I believe it would maximize output of useful information for future work. You surviving would certainly be a nice side effect.

I don't believe in miracle cures, but I do believe in science and solving problems in the open. Razor sharp focus on your specific case should speed things up.

There's a sufficient number of "incurable" cancer cases with a positive outcome for this to seem worthwhile. Those cases may seem like "luck", but obviously something physiological happened.

If it wasn't a miracle, then surely one should try to reproduce it. If anyone could pull this off, it could just as well be you and a team of brainiacs and field experts.

Maybe you don't have the energy to drive such a project, but you have willing friends and you could assign them tasks :)

I have no details about your current state. But maybe, just maybe, it's not too late to give it a shot, and I think a lot of people would donate and help in various capacities. Because it would be interesting, novel and hard.

(I'm not sure what such a project would specifically entail, but certainly it would mean collecting as much information as possible about your case, get world leading experts on board, then try solving the problem by cooking up the most likely recipe for successful treatment, possibly abroad)

Thanks.