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Comment by carrolldunham | Hacker News Reader

I find no way to phrase it and it's always taken as an attack or troll, so I wonder if anyone knows a proper framework for this argument (whether you agree with it or not): "If you know someone committed suicide, it seems ill-advised to read their thinking. Whether or not it's "advice" and whether or not you read with detachment, what we take in, comes from someone's psyche, echoes and transforms and embeds in our own unconscious. And so we are, however subtly, taking on some part of a psyche - the logic, beliefs etc., that leads to seeing life as not worth living, regardless of how enlightening it seems on the face of it." Something to do with epistemological...something?

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People are not static, nor are their lives linear and moving along rails to a predetermined destination. If someone kills themselves one year, that doesn't mean that everything they did or thought in the previous year is an action or belief that causes people to kill themselves. It could be related, unrelated, maybe it was an effort that was moving them away from suicide but something else happened that pushed them the other way, who knows. It seems pretty naive to assume that every single thought and event in someone's life is directly related to the outcome.

I don't think there's a "proper framework" for that because it's not valid reasoning.

This viewpoint disregards the flux of the brain in favor of a vague, static "psyche". The brain is plastic, vulnerable, and swimming in a hormonal soup that it's also responsible for regulating. It can fall into feedback loops because of this.

E.g.: stress damages the hippocampus, the hippocampus loses some capacity to mitigate stress, leading to more stress that damages the hippocampus further.

In that hippocampus example, we know that SSRI drugs can reverse this damage. On the other hand, they can also lead some patients to experience increased thoughts of suicide. An anxious/depressed mind can become a suicidal mind or a healthy mind in reaction to the same stimulus. Things can happen to healthy minds that send it to those corners as well. We can't just assume that someone who died of suicide was on a fixed track to get there or that their advice from a healthy mind lead to an unhealthy mind.

Not a framework, but here's an extreme "counterexample": the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm is useful. But Fulkerson eventually committed suicide.

I think we can safely say that the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm is not some cursed object that we should not learn about. So clearly there's some spectrum of creations and the imprints left on them by their creators, and at one end of it, there's pretty much no imprint at all.

Garbage In, Garbage Out?

I don't think it is dangerous in itself to read his thinking, because everyone is coming at it from a different experience than DFW. But it would be dangerous to hold his thoughts up as some ideal to strive for, as opposed to hold his thoughts up as evidence that incredibly talented people can also be incredibly broken.

If someone killed themselves then they most likely experienced negative emotions very strongly. Not everyone does. The insight that can be gained about existence from someone with such an extreme phenomenological experience (i.e, someone who feels like everything is a kind of soulless torture, as he makes clear in the essay) might be useful for people on a more even keel. He talks about having to constantly remind himself that his negative outlook is only one way of looking at things. It didn’t seem to be enough for him, but it might still be helpful for me to think about. I highly doubt that many people have read his essays and were driven to suicide. I do think many people have read his essays and learned something about their own nature.

Other animals commit suicide too, in a state of despair. Scorpions sting themselves when you place them in a ring of embers. The prerequisite is not being able to see a way out of ones situation.

Depression tends to warp perception, not letting positive thoughs through or immediately shooting them down. Abraham Lincoln was depressed too, so much that the people surrounding him removed everything he could hurt himself with from his surroundings.

I think individuals with a sunny disposition or a well functioning, supportive social circle/family are unlikely to be dragged down by writings of depressed individuals.

I think this is related to the contagion heuristic:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_heuristic

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