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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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This is an incredibly callous response. Maybe you really are a Tleilaxu Ghola.

People kill themselves for all kinds of reasons, many of them wildly insufficient, and nearly all of them inconsistent. There are virtually no life events that consistently lead to suicide, in the sense that there are more people who have the same experience and don't kill themselves, from even the most traumatic events. Most suicides are for much less.

When we attribute one person's suicide to another, we are engaging in an extreme form of eggshell plaintiff.

What do you think the suicide rate is among the subjects of viral MFA-type short stories?

There are virtually no life events that consistently lead to suicide, in the sense that there are more people who have the same experience and don't kill themselves, from even the most traumatic events.

I mean, there are two big ones throughout most of history - "being marooned" and "being in a situation where suicide is considered the honourable course". Not 100% of people in those situations commit suicide, but my understanding is that it is in fact over 50%.

We're pretty low on those two in the modern West, although certain places are starting to re-invent the second one (Canada and MAID most notably).

I don't think that you can produce any data showing an over 50% suicide rate for those situations without engaging in a tautological definition of the situations at hand, where you assume if they didn't commit suicide than it wasn't that bad and exclude it from the dataset.

And at any rate, "hopelessly doomed to starvation" and "kill yourself honorably or we'll kill you and probably your family dishonorably" are so far afield from "LMAO this short story author said you can't get it up" that we're talking about entirely different things.

I didn't mean "hopelessly doomed to starvation". I mean, the survival rule of threes goes "three minutes without air, three hours without heat, three days without water, three weeks without food, three months without love". That is, assuming you have solved all your physical needs, after months of zero social interaction you will usually develop severe depression and (without a "get me out of here" button like on reality TV shows) kill yourself. Bug in the firmware which evolution didn't patch out because it's barely ever relevant in the EEA (you're not going to make babies by yourself, so unless you're rescued your survival is evolutionarily meaningless). I don't have data to hand, but my understanding is that this is fairly-settled science (if very loose in timescale and, as noted, not inevitable). Related to why a bunch of humanitarian organisations consider long-term solitary confinement torture, although obviously prisons can usually prevent suicides if they want to.

I also didn't necessarily mean "commit suicide or you'll be executed". I also meant "commit suicide or you'll be considered a pariah". You're right regarding the potential for tautology, though.

we're talking about entirely different things.

I agree; I didn't claim otherwise.

There are virtually no life events that consistently lead to suicide, in the sense that there are more people who have the same experience and don't kill themselves, from even the most traumatic events.

I say this only half joking but does smoking count? People that smoke aren’t trying to kill themselves unless they’re probably smoking a carton a day, but you know nonetheless you’re slowly killing yourself every time you light up.

I would call smoking a method of suicide rather than a life event within my model. You might as well say "putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger" is a life event that leads to suicide. Certainly, if we're accepting drug addiction, heroin would be the better example.

The latest stats on smoking I saw said something on the order of 1/8 chance of getting lung cancer if you smoke a pack a day. Of course, there are many other ways that smoking can kill you, including other cancers and heart disease, but I don't think all of those amount to significantly more than lung cancer, to the extent that the odds are better than not that, if you smoke a pack a day, smoking won't be the thing to kill you. As such, I don't think it's correct to call it a slow form of suicide.

It's less that I disagree with the premise, more that the way he said it was over the top and cruel about a subject I find distasteful to be so flippant with.

Is your distaste rooted in some actual lived experience with suicide, or is it based on some abstract sympathy for suicides as an abstract, theoretical class of people? If it's not the former, I would recommend thinking twice about casting judgement on how others react to it.

Flippant is defined as "not showing a serious or respectful attitude." I assure you that I was quite serious about what I said. I was not mocking his death, I was saying that it was a pity, a shame, a sad and grave mistake, completely and utterly unnecessary (assuming the article caused it). And I afford suicides the respect they are due, which outside of extreme circumstances, is IMHO not very much, as it is often a quite self-absorbed act.

If you disagree, I'd be interested in hearing why. I don't claim to be the sole authority on the subject, I'm on The Motte to have my opinions challenged after all.

Not Thomas, but I felt your post was callous and flippant, and this is because I regard suicidal impulses as a mental illness, not an action which it is worth criticizing at the level of rational debate. It's a "stop hitting yourself!"-level error - suicidality is an altered state of consciousness, and suicide survivors coming out of it very often testify that they're immediately aghast at what they experienced. ("What was I thinking?") You may as well tell a schizophrenic that hearing voices is irrational, or a junkie that whatever he ingested he should just stop tripping, as a pure exercise of will, because rationally, he knows fnords don't exist.

I regard suicidal impulses as a mental illness, not an action which it is worth criticizing at the level of rational debate. It's a "stop hitting yourself!"-level error - suicidality is an altered state of consciousness, and suicide survivors coming out of it very often testify that they're immediately aghast at what they experienced.

Eh, sometimes. My most recent suicide attempt was pure* "bad intel"; I remained suicidal until sufficiently-convinced that I'd been wrong about the legal practicalities (for like a decade; it just hadn't become relevant until then), and then immediately stopped. One of the others was closer.

*Unless you count "high scrupulosity" as a mental illness, which I would object to on moral grounds.

Part of the reason that this topic is hard to discuss is that suicide is the end of a wide variety of behaviors, such as:

  1. Suicide to avoid certain torture and death at the hands of genocidaires

  2. Suicide to escape chronic pain that cannot be alleviated

  3. Suicide due to a chronic mental illness

  4. Suicide due to pain from deep and profound tragedy (wartime PTSD, death of ones spouse or children, etc)

These are clearly all sympathetic cases, and I think you would have to be extremely callous indeed to condemn those decisions.

But then there are other reasons:

  1. "Suicide" to regain control (often only attempted but sometimes accidentally? completed) -- your BPD ex saying "Goodbye, it was nice while it lasted" via text after you fight

  2. Suicide due to loss of prestige or wealth -- the guy who kills himself after blowing it all in Vegas, leaving a grieving wife and kids; the guy who is outed as gay despite being and ardent anti-gay activist

  3. "Suicide" by recklessness -- I'm super depressed and I don't care what happens to me; I'm not going to blow my brains out but maybe I'll drink a 12 pack and then speed down the highway at 120mph just to FEEL something

These IMO are less sympathetic. If (and as I keep saying -- it's a big if! We don't know why this guy really died!) he really did commit suicide because someone wrote a mean story, that is pretty weak. If (again, as I stated in my original post) he had other stuff going on like a congenital mental illness or something, his (alleged) suicide is a lot more sympathetic.

Maybe you really are a Tleilaxu Ghola.

Please don't tell anyone.

This is an incredibly callous response.

Why? Does committing suicide mean you are automatically relieved of accountability for all of your actions? I don't think my response is callous at all, on the contratry, it's the the performative sympathy strangers display for the the person who commits suicide that is insincere, Machiavellian, and callous. I feel more sympathy for his parents and siblings (if any) who have live with that gaping hole in their life, wondering if they could have done something, wonder where they went wrong. FWIW, that is an experience I have personally lived and to some degree will live every day for the rest of my life. He could've chosen differently. He could've chosen not to let some dumb story cut his life short (again, assuming it even has anything to do with it -- he could have had other issues we know nothing about, in which case I may have more sympathy, as I stated above).

The "it made him kill himself!" sympathy mongering drives me mad. I don't take a strict view here--I think people can bear moral blame for someone else's suicide. But in this particular case, based on what we know and plausible inferences, his (hypothetical) suicide is all on him. Maybe if the story was published, and all his family and friends and workplace spontaneously disowned him, there'd be moral blame to share around. (Mostly on those people, though, not the story writer.) But that seems unlikely to be the case.

Despite the framing of the comment, where I share Thomas's objection, I don't believe for a moment that this story caused his suicide or meaningfully contributed to it. If it did, someone would bring receipts, if only for the scandal-click value. It really smells like a classic j*urnalist sensationalism-by-implication play.

Agreed

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