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bogdanb comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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True, suicide by mistake is probably rare, but I don’t think that’s what Vladimir meant.
If I’m tortured and I can’t find a way of making it stop, I might “want to die”. But that’s not because I don’t want to live, it’s because I don’t want to live in torture.
I don’t really have much knowledge of the subject, but my impression was that most suicides are of the “I can’t live like this anymore” kind, not “dying would be kinda cool”, albeit with the “like this”=“torture” being a YMMV issue in many cases.
I’m not saying there aren’t other possibilities, just that simply pointing to suicides without more careful analysis is not clear proof of Harry’s induction being wrong.
Harry's induction is only correct if either wanting to live one more day implies wanting to live two more days as a mathematical law(which is not true) and that it's impossible to change your mind partway through a two-day period(which is also not true), or if he knows what he will desire at every possible future date. Since neither of those conditions holds, mathematical induction fails.