Joshe

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.

True.

@Jirh I see it as high Need for Cognition + relatively low identity fusion (perceiving thoughts as objects separate from the self). Ideas are much easier to work with when they aren't intertwined with the self. If you have this combo, disagreement is more like intellectual catnip than it is threatening/attacking, but it's easy to forget others aren't operating this way.

I suppose we can’t really show you in detail without seeming harsh or evil because to unveil the ego/identity is to attack the self/person the ego is operative in. I could point out specifics but none of it would land as evidence for you anyway. I can point you toward where I would look. Your ego seems organized around physical appearance, lifestyle aesthetics, and now, the intellect, as a means for attention and subtle superiority. I suspect you care more bout attention than superiority, but you care about both.

Listen mate, some people are beating around the bush and being nice with you and careful to not dose you too hard. What they really want to say is your ego is so strong that it’s on the nose - it’s so obvious, and yet you’re blind to it. But it’s all good. We all go through this. Especially in our 20s. It is a gift to have it pointed out, else you might carry your ego into the next few decades.

People looking for reasons to off themselves read past this and focus on this: I left it out because I don't want to have to explain how your little disclaimers are useless when your whole point is basically "suicide is okay if you're suffering enough". And obviously, most everyone contemplating suicide seriously will think that their suffering is enough. It's not that I've not thought about the truly stuck minority. It's that you have no way to target them specifically, which means your rhetoric is net-negative. Obviously.

You don't have to lie, you just don't have to contribute. And it's not about pleasing me. I'm pointing out your immaturity such that you might reconsider your position and see how your rhetoric contributes to the suicide of people in temporary suffering. But we do know the vast majority of suicides are not the rare cases your framing targets. The vast majority contemplating suicide are in temporary states of suffering that will pass. Maybe for every 1,000 people reading your suicide rhetoric, one of them fits your framing. But the other 999 are using your rhetoric just the same as the one. It's obviously a net-negative, and it's not even close.

By saying Leo has to self-censor because he's public, you're admitting you already know public speech about this carries serious consequences. You're writing in public right now and it will potentially be read by thousands of people, some of whom will be looking for reasons to justify killing themselves. When one of them finds twenty posts like yours, each one contributes. IDK how this isn't obvious.

Even if it's not true, the correct position on suicide is "It's always bad and you should never do it under any circumstances." Your need to demonstrate your sophisticated, nuanced philosophy or metaphysics matters so much that you'll broadcast tacit endorsement to susceptible people.