simplicio comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: simplicio 25 November 2012 10:10:59PM *  10 points [-]

As an aside, I almost forgot a really good example of the phenomenon of "harmful facts," which is that the suicide rate in a region goes up whenever a suicide is reported on the news. Indeed, death rates in general go up whenever a suicide is reported, because many suicides are not recognized as such (e.g., somebody steers into oncoming traffic).

For this reason, police tend to hush suicides up (at least, they did in my old hometown & I think it's widespread).