Joshe

Damn brah, I thought you were my age. I'm 40. Even though I don't act like, lol.

This has nothing to do with my personal metaphysical views or feelings. I'm making a logical argument for harm reduction in a community that often deals with suicidal desire. I believe rhetoric around death and suicide in such a community should be highly controlled. And I believe that anything that even hints of suicide permission shouldn't be allowed, which is why I said the default position should be "it's always bad" or it shouldn't be spoken of at all. I'm not trying to optimize for what is philosophically true. I believe some suffering suicidal humans going through a rough patch are better off not having access to thousands of pages of text that glorify death, because I think that leads to more harm than good. If it led to more good than harm, I'd be for it. I'd have a different opinion if this community wasn't filled with suicidal people. If you found a way to keep all suicidal people out and if your metaphysical discussions involving showing interest in death were kept behind a wall, where only mentally healthy members could view it, I think it's totally fine to discuss whatever you want. But of course that's not possible and you don't want to cut suicidal people out of your community. So the only way to handle it is to moderate it. There's a reason why WHO and every major news organization has strict protocols around how they report on suicide. They never put it on the front page of a newspaper because if you do that, you increase suicide rates. It's called the Werther effect. They follow protocols like this: They don't avoid this shit because they're "woke". They do it because otherwise, they'd contribute to suicide and suffering.

Good point. I wasn't around during that time so IDK the dynamics around it.

100%. You got it. Although I disagree with "to him, that is compassion". It reads more to me like a post-hoc rationalization to skirt accountability so you can be free to toss your truths out where ever you want. Leo loves to generate ideas and to see things. And to him, "hard truths" are especially interesting. What is the most common response a person who loves to generate and share ideas would have if people told them their idea generation and sharing was having a detrimental impact? If the person was compassionate, they'd probably want to know about it and adjust. If there weren't, they'd probably find justifications. "Sharing my truths is my compassion" is quiet convenient. If my read is right, then this is false. He's consistently said things like "I'm not going to be your sweet guru just because you can't handle these truths.” He's pressed this matter quite firmly many times. When people ask for a change of posture to reduce harm, it seems to usually be met with something like this.

😂

I agree. I'm saying the existence of positive or permissive suicide messaging increases suicide rate. This is absurd (best term I could find, not trying to be insulting). Is a 14 year old having a temper tantrum and who wants to kill themself experiencing unbearable suffering? Have you heard of the Werther Effect? I didn't know about the name until I started engaging on this topic, but I already understood it. Maybe this is something fundamental you need to understand about this topic. The opposite of the Werther Effect is the Papageno effect, which shows that creating space to acknowledge and discuss suicide while emphasizing coping and making it through is associated with lower suicide rates. But that's not what's going on here. Also, if "permission" helps, then it also harms. You can't say permissive messaging doesn't emotionally impact the majority (because if someone is going to do it, they're going to do it anyway) and then say it does impact the minority. Everyone already knows there's an end. It's just a matter of making the decision. Of all the people who are contemplating the decision, a very small minority should hear the permissive messaging, because to broadcast permissive messaging to the majority is common-sense reckless, and there's no paradox to resolve here.

I agree, but we're dealing with some complex mental gymnastics and self-deception here. Leo's and his supporters on this claim not tightening up on the death/suicide rhetoric makes space and provides compassion for the stuck minority. This is their justification. My thinking was that by highlighting the prevalence of the majority, the cost-benefit would become clear, because it's just common sense. But Leo's supporters on this can't see it. I've since realized no argument would work to change Leo's behavior because this isn't really about making space for the stuck minority. It's about being free to make any statement you want. Figured this out from my armchair, lol. If it were truly about compassion, you'd be like "oh shit, yeah, that makes sense, I definitely shouldn't be saying things like this: "Only one way to find out" in a forum post titled "suicide consequences" where members are venting frustration and desire to suicide and asking questions about the afterlife. Everyone here should be able to look at this and call it reckless and irresponsible. And given the patterns, deduce his rhetoric on this topic is not about compassion. A compassionate person would not act like this.

And a new logical fallacy is born. "The Armchair Fallacy: dismissing a conclusion by reclassifying the reasoning that produced it as an inferior epistemic category—"mere" inference, unsourced, armchair—without demonstrating any flaw in the inputs or the inference itself."

If you're good at generating and evaluating inputs, inference is fun. If you're not so good at it, maybe you're reluctant. Maybe I can lift your fear (jab + hypothesis + genuinely wanting you to see something you don't) around being wrong and improve your epistemology: "Inference" is not a bad word. It's the most natural thing a mind does. You can label "this is inference, this is not" all you want. But it's not making you any more rigorous. At the end of the day, what matters is not an inference label, but: is the reasoning sound? Being able to generate inputs and objectively evaluate them is what matters. These are two different faculties. You need both. And what is the point of doing all this anyway? To arrive somewhere. To upgrade a hypothesis into a conclusion you'll actually stand on such that it can be acted from. That's the whole point. I didn't give you my entire method for arriving at the 99% ballpark. I gave you something that I thought you might be able to use to generate more questions or ideas that which, upon verification, could lead you somewhere. Here's more what my process actually looked like: First, I ask myself "how prevalent does the majority seem to me?" And I realize that I've encountered the truly stuck minority maybe once or twice and the majority hundreds or thousands of times (direct experience). This generates a hypothesis: the stuck group is a very small minority. It's not proven, but now I have an input to work with. From here, I considered the prevalence of pharma TV commercials that name suicide as a side effect of medications a large share of the population is on, rising suicides across several demographics - including kids, addiction, marital misery, financial and legal crisis, and a few other things I'm forgetting. These are all people NOT in the minority, and their prevalence is massive. So, this is where convergence starts to take shape. Then, I try to resolve it: If I picked 10 suicidal people, how likely is one to be in the stuck group? Not likely. 20? No. 50? Maybe one. That puts me at 98%. Then, I consider the sheer volume of the majority some more and realize it's possible the number is 1 in 500, 1 in 1000, or even 1 in 10,000, but I stay conservative and keep the ballpark estimate at 99% because I don't need the exact decimal to prove my point. As long as the majority significantly outnumbers the stuck minority, then broadcasting permission-messaging at volume to a receptive audience harms more than it helps. Notice I didn't reference any studies here, yet I was still able to arrive at the right answer on my own. You can verify it yourself by having your AI tools attempt to come up with a ballpark number. They'll arrive very close to mine but likely through a different method. If you're going to criticize someone's method, you should probably have one of your own that you can use to point exactly to where their reasoning breaks. And to save people from having to explicate their entire sense-making process, how bout you come in good faith and do some of the verification process yourself, rather than just claim their processes are shit. Also, it would be super cool if you'd stop peacocking epistemic virtue. You love letting people know when they're making "assumptions and inferences", which is fine if they're not backed by much, but it's annoying and comes across like social positioning when you sidestep their reasoning while offering nothing and calling their processes shit while not being able to explain why. I've laid my entire process bare here. If you can show me how it generated a false conclusion, I'd love to hear it. Gonna be hard to do since I'm not wrong, lol.

That's an interesting one. I like it. My plan would be to organize a bunch of people like you (in various fields), and get them all working on projects that can actually move the needle of influence. Imagine something like The Heritage Foundation, except comprised of high-conscious individuals. I'd be grooming and installing high conscious mother fuckers in government, lol. We'd definitely need some hackers.

I can relate to that. I actually lost a lifelong friend a few years back due to misunderstandings on both our parts, and I chalked it up to him just not being willing to accept the truth of things due to his lack of development. There's a mismatch between the things my mind wants to engage with and what most others want to engage with, which introduces friction with people. My mind likes to figure stuff out and solve problems and important implications and plans for them - shit like that. So when I go around a group of guys discussing football, I can't sit through that easily and I don't want any part of it. It feels like hell to endure because I can't fake sincere engagement, so I just end up being quiet and coming off as weird, which I could solve by faking engagement, but I'm not willing to do that because it's not authentic and I value authenticity more than I do social harmony and belonging, so I just accept the cost of being the weirdo/different one in those situations. Since you're Fe-dominant, you'd be much more bothered by this than I would be, so I understand the dilemma. I used to hold a view that people are just shallow, foolish, lacking knowledge, wasting time on bullshit, etc. And these things are true as a partial perspective. But this partial perspective is heavy to carry. I found a better one that's actually more aligned with what is true, which is: they're shallow and foolish and all that because they're optimizing for something different than I'm optimizing for. If they actually optimized for the same things as me, they would be no more a fool or shallow than me. And I realized that it's immature (for lack of a better term), to insist that people optimize for what I'm optimizing for. If people want to optimize for social harmony, light-hearted connection, or whatever, and if they don't want to optimize for accurate reality tracking and understanding or whatever other thing I value, that's totally fine and I've been an absolute prick for thinking they should optimize for what I optimize for. This new perspective took time to form, but once it did it made it so that I don't get pissy or expect people to meet me where I prefer to be met, and if I want to connect with them, the most reliable way is to go to where they are and engage them there. And the issue about women being shallow: they're quite adaptable and malleable if you get one who isn't a total trainwreck or a vain dimwit. If they like you, they will naturally model your mind and will come to understand how you see things over time, and that itself grows them and aligns them to you. I'm not sure I would like a woman who engages with intellectual things as much as I do. Seems like it would be weird. I could possibly get into it, but not sure.

Nice! Setting is cool as hell. Never could get into Jazz though. There's something about it that lures me in, and then I'm just "I gotta get away from this", lol. I like blues.

No. If you want to act like you haven't heard it multiple times on here before, go right ahead.

I did. It's not a difficult position to understand. TBH, it's actually more coherent than I initially gave him credit for before this convo even took place, because initially I just thought he had no reason behind saying these things other some philosophical musing, but now I understand that he's saying he does it because it's the compassionate thing to do for the truly stuck minority. I'll take him at his word that that's the reason. Does this demonstrate to you that I understand? I'm not arguing Leo's intent is bad or anything like that. I'm saying, what about the compassion for the families who lose their loved ones because some influencer they respect implied permission? Do those people deserve compassion too. There's more of them than the small suffering minority Leo is catering to. If you care about the truth, you'll stop playing games with it and look at the cost-benefit objectively.

I just showed you how to ballpark it yourself. My primary way of understanding reality is through my own thinking, not studies. If you're interested in trying, you can ask yourself questions like "what have I observed about suicidal ideation prevalence?" and many more questions like that, then collect all the answers and put them together and see what emerges or converges.

Excuse me? You're telling me I'm lying? I've witnessed it on multiple occasions, and I don't even follow Leo. After about the 6th time I noticed it, it occurred to me how irresponsible it was. And since this thread popped up, I figured I could add some perspective. If Leo only ever did it once or twice, I wouldn't be talking right now bro.

I never said it does. And I never implied it did. How could I even have implied that when I don't even think it? There is a lot of interesting mental gymnastics going on here. This is a different thing. Although it looks like the reasoning is trying to prop up the position I'm arguing against. I'm talking about the megaphone and prevalence of suicide-permission messaging. Would you agree that suicide-permission messaging broadcast at volume to a receptive audience pushes the number up? Because this is mostly what I'm talking about. If you agree with that, then you mostly agree with my position and then it just comes down to a cost-benefit weighting. (Normally I would use the term "analysis" but I don't want to get berated for not running this thing through an actual peer-reviewed process.) Of course it would be helpful for suicidal people to discuss it. Keeping that sort of thing bottled up isn't good. If Leo or anyone else wants to have a one-on-one with a suicidal person and let them discuss it, that's great. I've done it several times myself. I've never told anyone confiding in me about suicide not to do it because I have enough wits to know that's useless. I work it out with them. But yes, I agree, one-on-one interpersonal exchanges where you take the taboo out of it is very healthy. Do the cost-benefit honestly and let me know what you think.

I mean that if you understand my argument, which demonstrates why it's a terrible idea for an influential person to make a habit out of saying things like "Humans have the right to commit suicide.", then you'd see you're contributing to the harm of far more than you're helping. Someone actually concerned with compassion would take this seriously and would need to either say how my argument (which to me seems like common sense) is flawed, or would need to call for an adjustment - realize the error.

By this, I meant that they're receptive to reasons for or against. If they're weighing suicide daily, or once a week, or once a month, when they come across Leo or any other influencer who gives them reasons for or against, they're "receptive" to suicidal messaging. The looking can be active or passive.

It was an adjacent hypothetical. I've not confused it. I'm seeing clearly what you think is compassion and understanding. Actual compassion weighs harm and adjusts.

Imagine 100 people contemplating suicide. Roughly how many are in the exceptional-cases category? Possibly not even 1. You might have to go up to 1000 before you even get one. I myself have seen more than 100 cases of people contemplating suicide and not a single one of them fit the exceptional-cases category. So yes, it wasn't meant to be precise number, but it wasn't pulled out of thin air either. I'd say the 99% is a reasonable ballpark. 95 seems too low. Given the size difference, it doesn't make sense to publicly cater to the exceptional-cases category because you'd do more harm than good, which people seem to be having a difficult time grasping. --- There's too much variation/uniqueness for me to conceptualize suicidal ideation on a spectrum. But nonetheless, the examples you highlighted wouldn't fit in the exceptional-cases category.

Who's the best and longest friendship you've had, and what do you credit for why it worked out so well? Also, what would you say are the main reasons why most friendships didn't last?

I agree with you. My point is about communication. 99% of the time, people contemplating suicide are not the people you described - they're just people going through a rough patch and looking for reasons to go through with it or not. Imagine someone pops up a thread saying they want to off themselves and then a bunch of people are like "don't do it bruh, suicide is never the answer" and then some epistemic genius chimes in "well, actually, if the person is suffering enough, it can be the right answer." How is that not reckless and weird? Also, imagine a respected leader said "suicide is sometimes the right answer" 225 times to a community that regularly deals with suicidal thoughts. How is this not reckless and weird? The alternative is to just never say it - keep it to yourself to avoid inadvertently contributing to immense suffering.

Let's hear it bro!

This thing is fun as hell: You can start making music that actually sounds good without having to practice for years.