Open Thread: December 2009

CannibalSmith

ITT we talk about whatever.

You seem to be generalizing from fictional evidence, which is frowned upon here, and may explain the downvote (assuming people inferred the longer version from your initial question).

fictional evidence

I have heard of real drugs & poisons which induce vomiting at high doses and so make it hard to kill oneself; but unfortunately I can't seem to remember any cases. (Except for one attempt to commit suicide using modafinil, which gave the woman so severe a headache she couldn't swallow any more; and apparently LSD has such a high LD-50 that you can't even hurt yourself before getting high.)

2bgrah44917y

That post (which was interesting and informative - thanks for the link) was about using stories as evidence for use in predicting the actual future, whereas my question is about whether these fictional stories are examples of a general conceptual framework. If I asked if Prisoner's Dilemma was a special case of Newcomb's, I don't think you'd say, "We don't like generalizing from fictional evidence." Which leads, ironically, to the conclusion that my error was generalizing from evidence which wasn't sufficiently fictional.