FtttG
User ID: 1175
Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
There's a common argument that if you ban guns, people will just find another way to kill themselves, so why bother? And no doubt this is true of the sufficiently determined suicidals. But the convenience factor of firearms (and other methods) does appear to play a big role. The example of gas ovens in the UK is illustrative:
Anderson points to another example where simply making a change in people's access to instruments of suicide dramatically lowered the suicide rate. In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.
In other words, there was no replacement effect: people didn't immediately switch over from inhaling oven fumes to another method. There's a non-negligible chance that Sylvia Plath would have lived to a ripe old age if the UK had made the switch to natural gas a few years sooner.
Another example is here in Ireland, in which, although it's available over the counter, it's illegal to sell more than 24 tablets of paracetamol* in a single transaction. For years I thought this was silly: what's stopping you from driving or walking to three pharmacies or supermarkets to stock up on enough paracetamol (hell, even newsagents and corner shops sell it)? And obviously this is true for the sufficiently determined suicidals, about whom there's little we can do to stop them from killing themselves short of sectioning them. But adding in the trivial inconvenience of forcing people to go to multiple different shops does appear to serve as an obstacle: by the time you've walked into your third newsagent in an hour, you might well be thinking to yourself "Do I really want to do this?"
Decades of psychological evidence strongly suggest that the vast majority of suicides are impulsive, opportunistic ones (perhaps even "cries for help" that were rather more efficacious than their user strictly intended), and that these suicides would not have occurred if not for the convenience and ease of use of the method employed. If someone is so determined to kill themselves that they voluntarily choose an extraordinarily painful method of doing so like hanging, I think it's fair to say there's little we can do about them. But on the margin, there are huge savings to be made among the less-than-maximally determined suicidals. In the counterfactual world where the US had banned guns ten years ago, I don't think that all of the people who killed themselves with firearms in our world would have instead hanged or drowned themselves. In fact, I don't think that even 50 or 25% of them would have done so.
I'm not arguing that this, in itself, is a persuasive argument in favour of banning guns, and can see the merits of both sides of the debate (particularly the "guns as a check against encroaching authoritarianism" argument advanced by many, including Handwaving Freakoutery, formerly of these parts). But the causal role that guns play in suicide owing to their convenience factor is something that opponents must take seriously. "If we're going to ban guns to stop people from killing themselves, why not go the whole hog and ban ropes to stop people from hanging themselves?" is not a serious argument, for the reasons outlined above.
*A.k.a. acetaminophen, sold under the brand name Tylenol among others.
FtttG
2mo ago
Do mallards deserve death for this?
I don't know, but it makes me feel a whole lot better about ordering the Peking duck.
In point of fact, I do literally believe that a great many Western environmentalists are only tooting the horn about climate change as a convenient pretext to instate global communism or something approximating it. (I think Greta Thunberg had a bit of a mask-off moment in which she more or less copped to this.) But even if that was true of 100% of them, it wouldn't change the factual question of whether or not the earth is actually getting hotter because of human activity. "You're only sounding the alarm as a pretext to instate global communism" could be literally true of the entire movement's motivations, and yet completely irrelevant for the narrow question of fact under discussion.
FtttG
2mo ago
I know, it's weird for a self-proclaimed Marxist to criticise others for being unrealistically utopian.
A week ago I said that I'd finished cutting stuff out of the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project and was ready to start adding new things in. On reflection I decided I hadn't killed quite enough darlings yet, so I'm halfway through a second pass. It's now down to 109k words, with the goal of the second draft being no more than 85% of the first draft i.e. 113k words.
FtttG
2mo ago
Correct. Right now, there's no way for us to confirm whether breathless AI predictions will come true in the near future, because they're just that - predictions. But we have Bayesian evidence pointing one way or the other.
A response to Freddie deBoer on AI hype
Bulverism is a waste of everyone's time
Freddie deBoer has a new edition of the article he writes about AI. Not, you’ll note, a new article about AI: my use of the definite article was quite intentional. For years, Freddie has been writing exactly one article about AI, repeating the same points he always makes more or less verbatim, repeatedly assuring his readers that nothing ever happens and there’s nothing to see here. Freddie’s AI article always consists of two discordant components inelegantly and incongruously kludged together:
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sober-minded appeals to AI maximalists to temper their most breathless claims about the capabilities of this technology by carefully pointing out shortcomings therein
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childish, juvenile insults directed at anyone who is even marginally more excited about the potential of this technology than he is, coupled with armchair psychoanalysis of the neuroses undergirding said excitement
What I find most frustrating about each repetition of Freddie’s AI article is that I agree with him on many of the particulars. While Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence is, without exception, the most frightening book I’ve ever read in my life, and I do believe that our species will eventually invent artificial general intelligence — I nevertheless think the timeline for that event is quite a bit further out than the AI utopians and doomers would have us believe, and I think a lot of the hype around large language models (LLMs) in particular is unwarranted. And to lay my credentials on the table: I’m saying this as someone doesn’t work in the tech industry, who doesn’t have a backgrond in computer science, who hasn’t been following the developments in the AI space as closely as many have (presumably including Freddie), and who (contrary to the occasional accusation my commenters have fielded at me) has never used generative AI to compose text for this newsletter and never intends to.
I’m not here to take Freddie to task on his needlessly confrontational demeanour (something he rather hypocritically decries in his interlocutors), or attempt to put manners on him. If he can’t resist the temptation to pepper his well-articulated criticisms of reckless AI hypemongering with spiteful schoolyard zingers, that’s his business. But his article (just like every instance in the series preceding it) contains many examples of a particular species of fallacious reasoning I find incredibly irksome, regardless of the context in which it is used. I believe his arguments would have a vastly better reception among the AI maximalists he claims to want to persuade if he could only exercise a modicum of discipline and refrain from engaging in this specific category of argument.
Quick question: what’s the balance in your checking account?
If you’re a remotely sensible individual, it should be immediately obvious that there are a very limited number of ways in which you can find the information to answer this question accurately:
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Dropping into the nearest branch of your bank and asking them to confirm your balance (or phoning them).
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Logging into your bank account on your browser and checking the balance (or doing so via your banking app).
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Perhaps you did either #1 or #2 a few minutes before I asked the question, and can recite the balance from memory.
Now, supposing that you answered the question to the best of your knowledge, claiming that the balance of your checking account is, say, €2,000. Imagine that, in response, I rolled my eyes and scoffed that there’s no way your bank balance could possibly be €2,000, and the only reason that you’re claiming that that’s the real figure is because you’re embarrassed about your reckless spending habits. You would presumably retort that it’s very rude for me to accuse you of lying, that you were accurately reciting your bank balance to the best of your knowledge, and furthermore how dare I suggest that you’re bad with money when in fact you’re one of the most fiscally responsible people in your entire social circle—
Wait. Stop. Can you see what a tremendous waste of time this line of discussion is for both of us?
Either your bank balance is €2,000, or it isn’t. The only ways to find out what it is are the three methods outlined above. If I have good reason to believe that the claimed figure is inaccurate (say, because I was looking over your shoulder when you were checking your banking app; or because you recently claimed to be short of money and asked me for financial assistance), then I should come out and argue that. But as amusing as it might be for me to practise armchair psychoanalysis about how the only reason you’re claiming that the balance is €2,000 is because of this or that complex or neurosis, it won’t bring me one iota closer to finding out what the real figure is. It accomplishes nothing.
This particular species of fallacious argument is called Bulverism, and refers to any instance in which, rather than debating the truth or falsity of a specific claim, an interlocutor assumes that the claim is false and expounds on the underlying motivations of the person who advanced it. The checking accout balance example above is not original to me, but from C.S. Lewis, who coined the term:
You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.
As Lewis notes, if I have definitively demonstrated that the claim is wrong — that there’s no possible way your bank balance really is €2,000 — it may be of interest to consider the psychological factors that resulted in you claiming otherwise. Maybe you really were lying to me because you’re embarrassed about your fiscal irresponsibility; maybe you were mistakenly looking at the balance of your savings account rather than your checking account; maybe you have undiagnosed myopia and you misread a 3 as a 2. But until I’ve established that you are wrong, it’s a colossal waste of my time and yours to expound at length on the state of mind that led you to erroneously conclude that the balance is €2,000 when it’s really something else.
In the eight decades since Lewis coined the term, the popularity of this fallacious argumentative strategy shows no signs of abating, and is routinely employed by people at every point on the political spectrum against everyone else. You’ll have evolutionists claiming that the only reason people endorse young-Earth creationism is because the idea of humans evolving from animals makes them uncomfortable; creationists claiming that the only reason evolutionists endorse evolution is because they’ve fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and can’t accept that not everything can be deduced from observation alone; climate-change deniers claiming that the only reason environmentalists claim that climate change is happening is because they want to instate global communism; environmentalists claiming that the only reason people deny that climate change is happening is because they’re shills for petrochemical companies. And of course, identity politics of all stripes (in particular standpoint epistemology and other ways of knowing) is Bulverism with a V8 engine: is there any debate strategy less productive than “you’re only saying that because you’re a privileged cishet white male”? It’s all wonderfully amusing — what could be more fun than confecting psychological just-so stories about your ideological opponents in order to insult them with a thin veneer of cod-academic therapyspeak?
But it’s also, ultimately, a waste of time. The only way to find out the balance of your checking account is to check the balance on your checking account — idle speculation on the psychological factors that caused you to claim that the balance was X when it was really Y are futile until it has been established that it really is Y rather than X. And so it goes with all claims of truth or falsity. Hypothetically, it could be literally true that 100% of the people who endorse evolution have fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and so on and so forth. Even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us a thing about whether evolution is literally true.
To give Freddie credit where it’s due, the various iterations of his AI article do not consist solely of him assuming that AI maximalists are wrong and speculating on the psychological factors that caused them to be so. He does attempt, with no small amount of rigour, to demonstrate that they are wrong on the facts: pointing out major shortcomings in the current state of the LLM art; citing specific examples of AI predictions which conspicuously failed to come to pass; comparing the recent impact of LLMs on human society with other hugely influential technologies (electricity, indoor plumbing, antibiotics etc.) in order to make the case that LLMs have been nowhere near as influential on our society as the maximalists would like to believe. This is what a sensible debate about the merits of LLMs and projections about their future capabilities should look like.
But poor Freddie just can’t help himself, so in addition to all of this sensible sober-minded analysis, he insists on wasting his readers’ time with endless interminable paragraphs of armchair psychoanalysis about how the AI maximalists came to arrive at their deluded worldviews:
What [Scott] Alexander and [Yascha] Mounk are saying, what the endlessly enraged throngs on LessWrong and Reddit are saying, ultimately what Thompson and Klein and Roose and Newton and so many others are saying in more sober tones, is not really about AI at all. Their line on all of this isn’t about technology, if you can follow it to the root. They’re saying, instead, take this weight from off of me. Let me live in a different world than this one. Set me free, free from this mundane life of pointless meetings, student loan payments, commuting home through the traffic, remembering to cancel that one streaming service after you finish watching a show, email unsubscribe buttons that don’t work, your cousin sending you hustle culture memes, gritty coffee, forced updates to your phone’s software that make it slower for no discernible benefit, trying and failing to get concert tickets, trying to come up with zingers to impress your coworkers on Slack…. And, you know, disease, aging, infirmity, death.
Am I disagreeing with any of the above? Not at all: whenever anyone is making breathless claims about the potential near-future impacts of some new technology, I have to assume there’s some amount of wishful thinking or motivated reasoning at play.
No: what I’m saying to Freddie is that his analysis, even if true, doesn’t fucking matter. It’s irrelevant. It could well be the case that 100% of the AI maximalists are only breathlessly touting the immediate future of AI on human society because they’re too scared to confront the reality of a world characterised by boredom, drudgery, infirmity and mortality. But even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us one single solitary thing about whether this or that AI prediction is likely to come to pass or not. The only way to answer that question to our satisfaction is to soberly and dispassionately look at the state of the evidence, the facts on the ground, resisting the temptation to get caught up in hype or reflexive dismissal. If it ultimately turns out that LLMs are a blind alley, there will be plenty of time to gloat about the psychological factors that caused the AI maximalists to believe otherwise. Doing so before it has been conclusively shown that LLMs are a blind alley is a waste of words.
Freddie, I plead with you: stay on topic. I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate. Resist the temptation to psychoanalyse people you disagree with, something you’ve complained about people doing to you (in the form of suggesting that your latest article is so off the wall that it could only be the product of a manic episode) on many occasions. The only way to check the balance of someone’s checking account is to check the balance on their checking account. Anything else is a waste of everyone’s time.
FtttG
2mo ago
cost Larry Summers his position as President of Harvard.
It frustrates me that whenever his name is mentioned, I picture Douglas Urbanski.
The other day I started reading Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Only about twenty pages in but I'm liking it so far.
FtttG
2mo ago
Richard Hanania certainly agrees with you.
FtttG
2mo ago
I genuinely wonder if there's anyone so deep into wokeness and with enough disposable income that they would deliberately select for a gay son and/or thot daughter just to own the cons.
Board games nowadays are primarily played by younger, indoorsy people. That's generally going to be left-leaning people.
I think that answer only kicks the can down the road. I agree that we naïvely expect young, bookish people to lean left rather than right - but why is that the case?
FtttG
2mo ago
mild sexual titillation became taboo while extreme hardcore porn became easily available
And yet, mild sexual titillation is also more easily available than ever before: women dress for the gym in clothing that's only marginally less revealing than if they'd shown up in their underwear, and post "thirst trap" photos on Instagram that are indistinguishable from softcore pornography. More and more I think the outrage about video games objectifying women had less to do with the content in its own right and more to do with who was creating it. The game designers making money by making sexy video game characters are men, so it's bad; the people posting thirst trap photos are women, so it's good. Perhaps it all came down to who owns the means of production.
FtttG
2mo ago
Séamus Finnegan. I recently heard someone arguing in earnest that his name is a "reverse spoonerism" for Sinn Féin (I'm sorry, what?), and the running gag in the first book/movie of him accidentally causing small explosions is meant to make the reader think of the IRA.
I'm an Irish man who grew up when the Harry Potter books were all the rage. My friends and family literally queued up to buy them on publication day and devoured them over the course of a weekend. I don't recall ever hearing an Irish person contemporaneously suggesting that Séamus was a negative stereotype.
FtttG
2mo ago
Out of curiosity, was she also Indian? If so, was she from the same caste as you?
In exchange, please tell me something useful about places to visit in London today.
I hope it's not too late, but the Barbican is pretty cool.
Supposedly the goblins who run Gringotts bank are reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes. Your mileage may vary, I don't really see it.
Even if the accusation was well-founded, I imagine the Venn diagram of "people calling for JK Rowling's death" and "people enthusiastically celebrating the massacre of unarmed Israelis on October 7th" would show a great deal of overlap. Very few trans activists accusing JK Rowling of antisemitism actually care about antisemitism qua antisemitism: they just hate her because of her gender-critical opinions and are trying to tar her with as many other brushes as are available. See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.
(As an aside, there is at least one character who is canonically Jewish, a heroic Ravenclaw.)
I see your point. In my defense, when I use a word like "normie", I am certainly not thinking of board game fans or hardcore Harry Potter enthusiasts. Many moons ago I was part of a friend group with whom I'd meet up and play board and TTRPG games, a group which included (pseudonyms obviously):
- Robert, a trans man
- Robert's boyfriend Jesse, a cis man who seems to exclusively date trans men (after he and Robert broke up, he explored the world of polyamory for awhile, becoming embroiled in multiple concurrent relationships with trans men or non-binary women; eventually he settled down into a monogamous relationship with one of the former, whom he married)
- Oliver, a male person who claimed to be a trans woman (despite going by his birth name, not medically transitioning and making zero effort to pass)
- Celia, a bisexual woman
- Norbert, a bisexual man
Most of whom were, if not Extremely, then certainly Very Online. If such a composition is in any way representative of the broader board game/TTRPG enthusiast community, at a glance we can see they are a highly selected subculture with values and expectations very different from the mainstream - "bisexual trans person who owns a twelve-sided die and knows what Chaotic Neutral means" is not my idea of a "normie". I've no doubt that wokeness is still ascendant therein and that one could face cancellation for neglecting to mouth woke platitudes in the board gaming community (likewise in video game design, YA literature, knitting circles etc.). But there was a period in the 2010s (peaking in summer 2020) where it really looked like the social rules governing those intensely woke subcultures had a good chance of becoming the social rules governing every Anglophone community (explicitly conservative subcultures like churches and gun clubs excepted). And based on the reaction to this ad, I do think that specific cultural moment has decisively passed. Mainstream spaces are no longer obligatorily woke; caveat emptor for subcultures, many of which are just as woke as ever (if not more so, in light of evaporative cooling).
In the Anglophone world, the "racial reckoning" of 2020 was so widespread and omnipresent that even numerous people who had been thitherto wholly ignorant of politics (esp. identity politics) got swept up in it: everyone was expected to post black squares on Instagram. I feel confident that a plurality of Americans would know who George Floyd is and what he's "famous" for; even though I'd say a plurality of Americans would know what Harry Potter is, I don't know if JK Rowling herself would have quite that level of name recognition, and even of those people who do know who she is, I assume she's known as the creator of Harry Potter first and for her political opinions a distant second, if at all. In point of fact, we already sort of knew that the "JK Rowling is a bigoted genocidal TERF, don't offer her any financial support" thing didn't really have teeth, outside of TRA and nerd circles: despite an attempted boycott mentioned prominently in its Wikipedia lede (which also goes out of its way to smear Rowling as an antisemite), Hogwarts Legacy was the best-selling video game of 2023 and has grossed over $1 billion in revenue. I very much doubt that this is a "knowingly buying Hogwarts Legacy to own the libs" situation: I suspect that the overwhelmingly majority of people who bought a copy of the game were wholly unaware that any attempted boycott even existed. If they had been told that there had been an attempted boycotting, I imagine a significant number would have assumed that it had been organised by the religious right, in protest of the Harry Potter franchise promoting witchcraft - they literally aren't aware of the "JK Rowling is a TERF" meme. When I talk about "normies", that's who I'm talking about.
FtttG
2mo ago
I see your point, although my understanding is that the risk of contracting HIV from getting stuck with a contaminated needle is vanishingly low, and the risk of contracting it from a dirty scissor blade presumably lower still.
It's interesting that these people think it's perfectly legitimate to discriminate against prospective sexual partners on the basis of viruses of the mind; actual viruses, on the other hand, are off-limits.
FtttG
2mo ago
I honestly wonder how they'd react if I started saying various racist, sexist etc. things while getting my hair cut. They'd ask me to leave, of course, but I can't imagine they'd have much luck physically removing me from the premises.
A queer barbershop/salon opened near my flat recently. On the front window there's a mural listing all of the things which are forbidden inside:
- No homophobia
- No transphobia
- No sexism
- No racism
- No facism
- No xenophobia
- No pozphobia* (U=U)
The fifth one isn't a typo: it really says no facism. I'm assuming they meant to say "no fascism" but misspelled it (pretty embarrassing to misspell a word which is presumably one of the most commonly used in your vocabulary). But now I'm wondering: maybe they really did mean facism (as in, no discriminating on the basis of facial appearance)? I remarked to herself that I thought that was just called "dating".
FtttG
2mo ago
IIRC John Lydon of the Sex Pistols fame was making noises about this open secret in 1978.
I don't think the OP was referring to libel laws, but rather to laws that make it a criminal offense to mock police officers, criticise immigration policy or dispute that trans women are women.
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