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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15413 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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There's probably a double digit number of grad students staring into a glass of whiskey tonight and thinking of hanging themselves.

I mean, maybe, but only because the news hasn't hit everyone yet.

I'd expect four digits in a week.

I'd bet on <5 in a week. At least using the standard where they explicitly blame their obsolescence in writing before killing themselves.

To be pedantic:

  • Completed suicides
  • Mathematics majors
  • Explicit reference to AI
  • I'm willing to allow for other methods of suicide

Yeah, if we're taking about actual suicides rather than mere ideation that drops the numbers a lot. I'm not sure we have a disagreement here.

I’m not generally a fan of reading the tea leaves of suicide notes but I think it’s best to interpret these - even if we literally accept their reasons for suicide as true (and I think generally this is the case when intelligent people kill themselves, that is to say that their stated reasons are usually their actual reasons even if they are bad reasons) - as borne of fear rather than existential crisis, and that fear is ultimately tied to material circumstances. There is a lot society can and will need to do, if it survives, to repair our sense of meaning as it’s redirected away from work.

If a four digit number of graduate students are thinking about hanging themselves in a week's time, that would be a dramatic improvement in graduate student mental health. (The US graduates about 60,000 PhDs a year, multiply by the number of years the average PhD-bound graduate student spends in a suicidal state).

Not everybody drinks whiskey or picks hanging.

A rigorous mathematician would atleast explore the potential of hanging

Indeed, they even have a whole journal dedicated to the subject

Although Dr D'Eath (an actual maths lecturer at Cambridge) eschewed all forms of ligature maths, preferring a more direct approach - he lectured on Killing's equations.

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