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Clarity comments on Open thread, Sep. 26 - Oct. 02, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm going to contain anything I post to this thread. Just incase it's nonsense. I was just thinking of asking: Is it rational to 'go to Belgium' as they say - to commit suicide as a preventative measure to avoid suffering?
Only in very extreme case. Have you looked up on every alternatives?
I suppose I'm up to date on the alternatives. New alternatives pop up every so often but it's pretty frustrating tracking depression research, and opportunities for short hedonistic bliss that end in death.
I suspect there are cases where a perfectly rational, knowledgeable agent could prefer the suffering of death over the suffering of continued life.
Agents with less calculating power and with less predictive power over their possible futures (say, for instance, humans) should have an extremely low prior about this, and it's hard to imagine the evidence that would bump it into the positive.
The problem with depression is that it skews your entire ability to think clearly and rationally about the future. You're no longer "a rational agent", but "a depressed agent", and it's really bad.
From an outside view, of course only very extreme pain or the certainty of inevitable decline are worth the catastrophic cost of death, but from the pov of a depressed person, all future is bad, black and meaningless, and death seems often the natural way up.
Absolutely! Depression changes one's priors and one's perception of evidence, making a depressed agent even further from rational than non-depressed humans (who are even so pretty far from purely rational).
That said, all agents must make choices - that's why we use the term "agent". And even depressed agents can analyze their options using the tools of rationality, and (I hope) make better choices by doing so. It does require more care and use of the outside view to somewhat correct for depression's compromised perceptions.
Also, I'm very unsure what the threshold is where an agent would be better off abandoning attempts to rationally calculate and just accept their group's deontological rules. It's conceivable that if you don't have strong outside evidence that you're top-few-percent of consequentialist predictors of action, you should follow rules rather than making decisions based on expected results. I don't personally like that idea, and it doesn't stop me ignoring rules I don't like, but I acknowledge that I'm probably wrong in that.
Specifically, "Suicide: don't do it" seems like a rule to give a lot of weight to, as the times you're most likely tempted are the times you're estimating the future badly, and those are the times you should give the most weight to rules rather than rationalist calculations.