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Viliam_Bur comments on Is suicide high-status? - Less Wrong
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Comments (81)
I was surprised to see the initial spike of downvotes. Stabilizer suggested a model for a not-at-all-uncommon thinking pattern and asked for more information. Whether the model is good is debatable, but the post itself is certainly not below the average quality for Discussion.
There may be other reasons to downvote. For example thinking that publishing this article is likely to create a ton of negative utility. We live in a world, among humans. There are consequences. Now it depends on one's model of how will people react on articles and discussions like this; and also a model of how would the discussion develop if this article gets positive karma.
Are you saying that some readers might be afraid that someone proposing that suicide can be a status raising move may encourage someone to go through with it? This seems a bit far fetched.
No, it's not far fetched. Newspaper reports of the sucide of celebrities increase sucide rates. http://www.samaritans.org/media-centre/media-guidelines-reporting-suicide is a fairly straightforward media guide on how to handle talking in print in a public forum about suicide.
As of now the article ranks top for googling "high status suicide".
As I mentioned before, the popularity of this forum does not approach that of news media. Not even close. I'm guessing that even similar posts on Reddit rank much higher. And given how balanced the discussion here is, the potential for neg utility is minuscule.
As for your specific search query, it's fragile, as none of the synonyms or similar queries I could think of (not posting them here to avoid accidental indexing) result in the article being anywhere close to the first page in the search results.
If you think that it's good when the article has a low readership than it makes sense to vote it down.
I find it plausible. All else equal, most people prefer doing things that raise their status, and someone suggesting that suicide's high-status is evidence that suicide raises one's status. (I do agree with you that an LW post's quantitative effect is almost certainly small, though.)
I think pointing out that something is high status typically makes it less high-status though... reduces the mystique somehow.
How small is small? If the chance would be p=0.001 that the post kills someone, is that small?
Fair question. I'd expect an LW post & discussion of similar size to this one to cause 10^-3 to 10^-4 suicides, but I might now be anchoring on your reply. (Also, that expected value only counts one side of the ledger; I'm ignoring the possibility of the discussion discouraging people from committing suicide.)
To me, it feels big, in the sense of disproportionate, but small in absolute terms.
If someone is already considering suicide, helping them contemplate the topic from many aspects will increase the probability of really doing it. I don't have a good estimate about how much the probability would increase, but my guess is that the expected damage is far greater than expected benefits of having this specific discussion.
For me this topic is kind of a taboo. In theory, there is nothing wrong about discussing suicide between psychologically stable people. The problem is, depressed people usually don't see themselves as unfit to participate in such a discussion; they are probably even more likely to start it or join it. I don't want to participate in possibly providing the last straw for someone.
The article itself is not the whole risk; the comments (assuming the article starts a large discussion) would be a greater risk. The more different perspectives, the higher chance that one of them would impress a fragile mind.
If anything, being able to think about their motivations for doing makes it more likely that they'll realize it's a really dumb move.
I see your point, though it seems overly cautious to me. Reasons for suicide are discussed online and in print all the time, by scientists, fiction writers, poets and just random folks. I doubt that a single post on a single forum is likely to make a difference either way, not nearly enough to make it a taboo.
The majority of posters here are in the prime demographic to suicide, and are indeed susceptible to arguments in favor of far-fetched premises without evidence, i.e. revival of cryonicists by a machine intelligence. However, their strong belief in this prospect will insulate them against suicide attempts just as devout Christians are protected by their belief that hell awaits suicides and that heaven is possible for those meeting a natural end.
Did you mean that the posters are drawn from a demographic which has suicidal tendencies (young adults), or that Lesswrong is a demographic which has a higher proportion of people with suicidal tendencies?
Young males, often single, that is the demographic (though I believe that IQ is inversely correlated). Religion is a protective factor, and though singularitarian is not a recognized religion (though SIAI is tax exempt) its adherents hold beliefs that should have the same effect as those held by more orthodox believers.
Not necessarily. One of the big protective aspects of religion is its community. Singularitarians, by vice of their small numbers, have less of that.
That may be part of it and im not sure if it was controlled for but the study i read specifically focused on the beliefs, for instance do you believe suicide is morally wrong, do you believe in hell. Of lesswrongers they could ask do you believe in resurection through cryonics, or another possible question: does a babyfucking await anyone who commits suicide rather than maximizes the chances for FAI.
In many cases, religions provide a being/entity/cosmic absolute/"intrinsic property" which is
Outside of conventional human understanding
A source emotional significance, labelled "transcendent"
Emphasizes emotional experience of the transcendent over intellectual understanding, due to it being outside of conventional human understanding anyway.
Do singularitarians have a such a "transcendent constant"? Is there an "instrinsic property" which was compatible with hard materialism? What would a "cosmic absolute" be? What would "babyfucking" be?
Or maybe it will increase the probability that they realize it was a bad idea. How do you know?
And anyway, for some people in certain circumstances committing suicide may be a rational action.
So that's another basilisk? Hmm, it seem to me that we can put the other basilisk to counter it: Don't kill yourself or ... :D
That was exactly my point. I mean, that sooner or later someone would write something like this.
Now imagine a depressed person reading that, and thinking: "even the smart people on LessWrong agree with me" (because for a depressed person if someone could be in a situation where suicide is a rational action, they believe it's them in the first place).
OK, I give up. Seems like explaining why I believe discussing something is wrong only has the opposite effect.