You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

DanielLC comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion

28 Post author: Punoxysm 16 October 2014 05:58PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (364)

Comments (364)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DanielLC 17 October 2014 04:17:06AM 5 points [-]

According to someone else's post on here, suicides are the bulk of the problem, provided that you consider suicide a problem.

Comment author: Brillyant 17 October 2014 04:42:49AM -1 points [-]

I consider it a basically unrelated problem.

Comment author: DanielLC 17 October 2014 05:33:44AM -1 points [-]

It's caused by guns. If you're considering gun control, most gun-related deaths are suicide, and you consider suicide to be just as bad as any other form of death, then the most important consideration is suicide.

Comment author: drethelin 17 October 2014 06:13:36AM 9 points [-]

If you assume people won't find another way to kill themselves, and IF you consider suicide to be just as bad, and if you assume gun-related deaths is actually the right metric to judge as to whether or not you want gun control.

Comment author: DanielLC 18 October 2014 12:43:37AM 7 points [-]

If you assume people won't find another way to kill themselves

I've seen something about this that Google showed me is discussed here. It works out that one in three people who would have killed themselves with gas found another method, and the other two thirds just didn't bother. Ideally I'd find some other statistics along this line, but since I'm lazy and I don't actually care all that much about this issue, I'll just go with that. Accounting for this, and not accounting for people find another way to kill others, there's still a little more suicides caused by guns than homicides.

Comment author: rkdj 18 October 2014 04:38:57PM 2 points [-]

Robbing people of effective means to die doesn't make suicidal people stop being suicidal. It just forces them to endure whatever unbearable and possibly untreatable pain they are in.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 18 October 2014 04:56:02PM 4 points [-]

I don't think suicidality (is there such a word?) is a condition one has or doesn't have. If thoughts of suicide can be induced by literature and communities (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide ) then the opposite should also be possible at least in principle.

Taking away one means of simple suicide at least provides a trivial incenvenience for boundary cases.

Comment author: hyporational 18 October 2014 06:13:55PM *  3 points [-]

It's a commonly cited figure that at least 90% of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable mental disorder, and here's a paper that claims the figure is as high as 98%. Of course there could be some tautology in the diagnostic methods, but suicidality itself isn't classified a mental disorder.

Comment author: kalium 24 October 2014 04:49:02AM 1 point [-]

It bothers me that this fact is usually interpreted to mean that suicides are the result of poor judgment or a disconnect with reality. Mental illness is a common cause of genuine severe suffering.

Comment author: hyporational 24 October 2014 08:18:24AM *  1 point [-]

It bothers me that this fact is usually interpreted to mean that suicides are the result of poor judgment or a disconnect with reality.

It would bother me too if the interpretation was that this is always so. I'm not sure how you could reliably investigate the quality of their judgement concerning suicide. Much of the poor judgement might not be so much the mental disorder itself, but normal hyperbolic discounting combined with severe temporary suffering.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 18 October 2014 06:45:57PM 0 points [-]

Thank you for your reference. I'm not clear whether this is intended to support or reject this point or just provide additional data.

Comment author: hyporational 18 October 2014 06:56:58PM 2 points [-]

I referred to the first sentence of your comment. My point was given the statistics "suicidal" could just as well be a shorthand for "severe mental disorder". Such mental disorders are usually chronic.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 18 October 2014 07:17:22PM 1 point [-]

OK. But suicide => mental disorder doesn't equal mental disorder => suicide. So this doesn't support nor deny the original claim.

Comment author: hyporational 18 October 2014 07:29:28PM *  0 points [-]

Actually the paper supports the other direction too, just not as strongly. I don't think the original comment was meant to be taken literally. If it was, it was especially angsty.

Comment author: VAuroch 19 October 2014 12:18:37AM 3 points [-]

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 25 October 2014 04:21:30AM 2 points [-]

Suicide is indeed often an impulsive act, in which the urge must coincide with the means.

Stronger evidence for this claim:

Decrease in suicide rates after a change of policy reducing access to firearms in adolescents: a naturalistic epidemiological study.

The use of firearms is a common means of suicide. We examined the effect of a policy change in the Israeli Defense Forces reducing adolescents' access to firearms on rates of suicide. Following the policy change, suicide rates decreased significantly by 40%. Most of this decrease was due to decrease in suicide using firearms over the weekend. There were no significant changes in rates of suicide during weekdays. Decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents. The results of this study illustrate the ability of a relatively simple change in policy to have a major impact on suicide rates.

Use of army weapons and private firearms for suicide and homicide in the region of Basel, Switzerland.

FINDINGS: Firearm suicides were clearly the most frequent means of suicide. They were also used in 30.0% of domestic homicides, although other means were used at similar rates. Firearms for suicide were mainly used by men, especially army weapons. These men were younger, professionally better qualified, and fewer had ever been treated in one of the local state psychiatric services.

Comment author: kalium 24 October 2014 04:50:26AM 0 points [-]

This sort of testimony strikes me as weak evidence. If you've just failed to kill yourself and don't want to be committed, or have been committed but want to be let out soon, this is exactly what you'd say regardless of truth.

Comment author: VAuroch 24 October 2014 09:31:34AM 1 point [-]

That would explain why you said so to a doctor, but not why you agreed to an interview with reporters and said the same thing there.

Comment author: DanielLC 18 October 2014 05:26:42PM 2 points [-]

Replace "suicidal" with "suicidally depressed" and I'll agree.

Depression isn't always chronic, and when it is, you aren't depressed the whole time. It doesn't seem clear to me if a depressed person committing suicide is on average a net loss or a net gain.

I suppose I should have made my position more clear in my earlier comment, and said that that could just as well be a cost to gun control.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit