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MixedNuts comments on Is suicide high-status? - Less Wrong
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People get suicidal in response to very bad things, status loss is and tends to accompany very bad things. What else is there to explain?
The fact that the suicidal person frequently seems to be posthumously awarded status.
After about 0.5 seconds of thought, I might become interested whether suicide after status-loss has a different frequency in different cultures, and if yes, whether this difference can be explained in the respective way of handling the death of the person. The simple emotional question behind that is whether in all cultures suicides after a status-hit are more strongly motivated by the pain of the status-loss itself, or also by the expected development after death. I might even be interested in whether this question makes sense at all. Still, it remains something to be explained.
Also, "What else is there to explain?" sounds suspiciously like "Are you so stupid to not see that?".
At the risk of saying something obvious, there's a possible confound: You have to make sure that the cultures assigning high status to suicide don't assign extra-low status to refraining from it (à la "it really would have been the decent thing for him/her to kill him-/herself"), so that those not committing suicide will experience greater status loss in this culture than in others that don't assign high status to suicide.
There's also the problem of comparing cross-culturally the severity of status loss.