The person you are replying to is unfortunately no longer with us. :-(

If you don't know "what on earth [your interlocutor is] talking about", this should make you less sure of your footing.

I'm pretty sure the question was rhetorical.

I do not trust everyone to judge the effects of their actions on others,

Unfortunately, the mere fact that you are raising this concern specifically in this context communicates a certain stance on the underlying issue(s), or, more bluntly, alignment with a certain faction in this particular power-struggle.

...and I'm probably communicating the opposite alignment by replying in this manner. So it goes.

Coercing sexual intercourse via physical violence or the threat thereof.

But you see, women don't find men who try to be nice to them attractive...Women are genetically programmed to only let alpha sperm in

Oversimplified to the extent that it is basically not true.

And yet I would bet that it is still closer to true than I approve of. In particular, closer to true than the mental model used by the naive "nice guy"/"beta".

1) I think the increase in probability of suicides is non-tiny

What would be the mechanism linking this post to future suicides? (See also below.)

2) I don’t value “not having taboos” particularly highly

That would certainly help to explain your reaction. I, however, value it very highly indeed, and think that taboos are incompatible with rationality and "enlightenment" values (such as freedom of speech) more generally. (There could be exceptions, but they must always be considered, and never knee-jerk or uncritically inherited from general society.)

3) I think there are better ways to express regret than by saying, essentially, “So did he do the right thing or what?”

You have misunderstood the post. It does not ask whether Chris did the right thing. It invites readers to consider the rationality of suicide in general. It also invites them to critically examine society's attitude (of which you evidently happen to be an exponent). It does so as a tribute to Chris: this is a discussion that I think he would have wanted to see happen, and I feel he deserves to have his fellow aspiring rationalists pay some attention to this issue before he is forgotten.

If you somehow found out that someone had decided to kill themselves because of this thread, how confident would you be that they made the right decision?

So far as I am aware, my post does not contain any argument in favor of any particular person committing suicide. It is therefore difficult to imagine that anyone could rationally decide to kill themselves "because of" it. And I do not accept the Orwellian idea that we can (or should) prevent irrational suicides by avoiding discussion of the issue. Even if the effect were non-negligible (which I don't particularly believe), I would not consider it worth the censorship cost.

In short, while I may very well say "Oh shit" in response to such a suicide, the significance of that exclamation would not be any different than if the person had committed suicide in response to any other LW post I had written (on any other topic).

But I suspect that you're depressed yourself

I am not, in fact, currently depressed, although I have been in the past. But I (in my non-depressed state) respect the feelings, wishes, and preferences of my depressed self, just like those of someone else like Chris.

Many commenters here have reacted to the suicide not with "how must he have felt" but with "how can we prevent more such things from happening?" It seems you think this reveals a lack of empathy or respect

I haven't said much of anything in response to most comments here; you seem to be extrapolating from things I said in the post. But there I was criticizing specific bad arguments, ones that are encountered in the general culture and not necessarily here ; the remark about lack of empathy was in specific reference to the argument from grief of friends and relatives.

the banal and maudlin point that this was a tragedy and a mistake

That it was a tragedy is certain; unfortunately, that doesn't automatically imply that it was a mistake.

However, it may very well have been a mistake in Chris's case. I'm not sure he realized how close he was (a few keystrokes by him or someone else, like me) to the kind of friendship he needed.

But it's that kind of miscalculation that would make it a mistake, and not the mere fact that other people are sad, or that "we must prevent suicide" is a widespread moral-sounding meme.

I myself am very sad about this, and become more so the more I read his writings. I hope he is not forgotten.

I really don't understand your objection to this post specifically. I tried to craft it in the most sensitive way possible, it wasn't directly addressed to suicidal people themselves, and you agree that all subjects are fitting subjects for rationality. Furthermore, many commenters (including yourself) have in fact used it as an opportunity to reach out to those in the community suffering from depression.

What aspects of this post are so harmful that you think they outweigh the benefits, and how could it have been better written so as to allow the topic to be discussed while minimizing harm?

Has this been debunked in some way, or is this thread a really terrible idea?

Those are not the only two alternatives.

If minimizing the number of suicides were the only consideration, then you might have a (weak) argument that this post is a bad idea. (But note that gimpf's link specifically discussed television coverage; more generally, the "copycat effect" is generally considered to be a result of sensationalizing or glorifying suicide, not merely discussing it.) However, there are other, competing, values involved, such as:

• not having taboos
• finding out in what circumstances suicide is and isn't rational
• finding out to what extent our society's approach to combatting suicide is ethical
• acknowledging the death of a LW user ("one of our own"), and expressing sadness at the loss of a valuable member of the human species

and in my judgement these outweigh whatever tiny increase in the probability of some future suicide you're worried may result from this post. Not to mention the possibility that some people reading this post and the comments here might be less likely to commit suicide than they otherwise would have been. (Even if a significant copycat effect applies to this kind of discussion [unlikely], the LW readership is an atypical population, more likely to be moved by argument, and more likely to be regretful of Chris's death in particular.)