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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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This is a stat that should not be increasing in a healthy nation.

4 extra lives per 100k, just gone. With all the various second-order effects, especially on friends and family, that must imply.

And consider that this stat is just successful suicide attempts, so doesn't capture all the people who might be contemplating or having made unsuccessful attempts.

I defy anyone to explain this as a positive or neutral indicator.

I defy anyone to explain this as a positive or neutral indicator.

While the loss of life is tragic, in the long term we're optimizing for mental resilience.

Interesting point if only because it brings us into a debate over whether it requires greater mental fortitude to actually commit a suicide or to continue living with whatever pain lead to the ideation in the first place. Is suicide, in most cases, actually a case of mental 'weakness?'

Pointing out, perhaps, that women have higher rates of (many) mental illnesses and yet a lower suicide rate than men, which is usually ascribed to men choosing much more effective means of killing themselves and, likewise, actually doing it with full intent of succeeding.

While an interesting debate, I'm instead going to rephrase:

While the loss of life is tragic, in the long term we're optimizing for not being stressed to the point of suicide by the demands of modern society. Whether that's through us becoming stronger or us becoming weaker is, I think, immaterial to the widely-agreed on fact that it's better if your population isn't suiciding in droves.

Ah! That is an excellent clarification.

I can agree that the goal here should be to examine exactly what about our prosperous modern economy is still so intolerable or otherwise lacking that we have people choosing to end it.

No. We're not selecting for that. Because modern society is changing too fast for selection pressures to react.

I defy anyone to explain this as a positive or neutral indicator.

Don't tempt the devil.

Given the preponderance of Utilitarians, Aeithiests, and Accelerationists on theMotte there is a very real possibility that someone will take you up on that.

Would love to hear it, and would listen in good faith.

Gonna rip any logic gaps apart though.

And if their argument is good then it would presumably be their position that we should increase the suicide rate, so interested to see if they bite that bullet or try to dodge.

Sure, let me try.

Assumption A: A life can be so bad as to be of negative value to the person themselves.

Assumption B: Because of self-preservation artifacts, not all whose lives are negative in value are determined to end them.

Assumption C: Your desire to kill yourself generally increases as your life value drops further into the negatives.

Conclusion: More suicides means more people were pushed from the margins of worse-than-worthless lives into making a correct decision. Of course it would be better if they were raised from those margins, but apparently we can't all have nice things.

Of course it would be better if they were raised from those margins, but apparently we can't all have nice things.

This would be a stronger conclusion if we actually examined the problem to figure out what was pushing them into the decision. I don't think the majority of suicides are people who are actually suffering from material deprivation. The problem is fundamentally an emotional/mental one where people feel that life is not worth living. And in theory helping people find reasons to live and instilling purpose should be doable!

Suicide rate doesn't seem to correlate with GDP-per-capita, just ask Japan and South Korea.