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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38810 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Eyeballing it, it looks like it went from 14/100k to 18/100k. 30%, yes, but doesn't seem that big overall.

Note that those are per-year, not per-lifetime risk of suicide. The 2016 numbers per-lifetime sum to something like 1%.

Add the slow-acting methods (excessive drugs/alcohol) and 'accidentally on purpose' ODs and it's getting pretty big.

Shit dude i didn't know i committed suicide back in my 20s. Also why don't we include people who dont wear seatbelts as suicides, and anyone who goes into a high risk job.

"Excessive" is of course somewhat open to interpretation -- I'm talking about the levels which will very likely kill you by fifty if you don't cut it out. I'm guessing you didn't OD in your 20s, and also that you don't have much experience with people who did. If you had, you'd know that it's very rarely quite an accident. (Less rare these days because there really is a non-negligible chance of getting a hot shot with more fentanyl in than you'd like, but still pretty unusual)

Don't mistake me for one of the reddit no-fun millenials -- I did tonnes of drugs in my 20s and beyond too; enough to know that it's all fun & games up to a certain point. More people than ever are crossing this line nowadays.

This but unironically. I've theorized that suicide as a specific act is less important to consider than a spectrum of self-preservation----self-destruction. There are a lot of guys today who kill themselves by gun or OD who in my dad's generation drove dangerous cars and motorcycles too fast too often until a crash got them, who in my grandad's generation joined the Marines and didn't duck fast enough, who in my great-great-great-grandad's generation joined a merchant ship crew and went off to tropical parts unknown and were never heard from again. It's just that today, you have to really try to get yourself killed, where in the past you could do fairly normal things (drive cars, join the merchant marine or the Marines) and probably get yourself killed if you didn't try to keep yourself alive hard enough. Young men deciding they have nothing to live for is a universal phenomenon, how it is expressed is different.

I get what you are saying, that risk taking behavior is common in young men and the risks available these days might have less reward associated, but its still unreasonable to compare a risky yet possibly rewarding strategy (striking out on your own to make a new life out on the frontier) to literally just killing yourself. Likewise, some people use drugs to escape their reality, this is not the same as permanently giving up on reality by ending your interactions with it.

Young men deciding they have nothing to live for is a universal phenomenon, how it is expressed is different

I think theres a few different "nothing"s being bundled here, the threshold for "i have nothing going for me in this town, i'm out of here even if it means joining the circuis" is pretty far away from "i have nothing to gain in this world that i can possibly reach and i would rather die than make any further attempt"

The two attitudes look identical from the outside if the way you deal with them is the same. "I'm going to join the Navy to get out of this nowhere town and see the world" and "I'm going to join the Navy and hopefully I'll die and end this stupid life" both look like "He joined the Navy and died in a storm or a fever somewhere East of Suez" to everyone but the man himself.

If the bottom 1% of men who just can't fit into normal life (and today become your school shooters, drug addicts, incels etc) existed before the 20th centure, their existence would have been hidden by just dying in ways that were written off as a normal cost of doing business back then. This article claims that during certain periods a fifth of British soldiers stationed to Jamaica died every year, while a third stationed in West Africa kicked the bucket. Merchant numbers weren't a whole lot better.

Sure, but the onus isn't on me to prove that they didn't want to commit suicide, whoever wants to add those numbers to the suicide stat needs to prove they belong there, which i am skeptical of.

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.

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