Hacker News Reader

Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

Mother nature does seem to roll the dice more when it comes to men. People then look at the outliers to the right and scream sexism while completely ignoring all the outliers to the left. There are many more profoundly stupid men than women. Men are incarcerated at a higher rate. Men kill themselves at 3x the rate of women. Yet this is quietly accepted.

View on HN

Women have a much higher level of attempted suicide, possibly 3x as often as men. [1] I once heard a theory that women don't die from suicide as often because they tend to use less violent means of suicide. For example, if you swallow a bottle of pills you could survive or change your mind a few minutes later and get your stomach pumped, but this rarely applies to shooting yourself in the head.

1. https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

"While males are 4 times more likely than females to die by suicide, females attempt suicide 3 times as often as males."

So a suicide attempt by a man is 12x more likely to succeed than one by a woman.

That is sexist! Are you suggesting that women are less skilled than men ??!!??

(/s, obviously. Sorry I have to point it out.)

I get /s :) And maybe they're more skilled. In that they get the message across without actually dying.

I suspect that many "suicide attempts" are more like emphatic communication ("See! I really care about this!") than intention to die.

When I've felt suicidal, it's always helped to imagine how one does it reliably. Then I've thought about how irreversible that would be. And then I've realized that I don't really want to die.

This implies suicide and homicide are done primarily by stupid people by rhetoric?

Yes. Committing homicide is an irrational and maladaptive (i.e. stupid) thing to do in a peaceful 21st century society. Committing suicide is an irrational and maladaptive thing to do in almost all situations in history.

Maybe one has a temporary problem (depression) that pushes them to commit suicide. That doesn't mean they're stupid. Robin Williams was definitely not stupid, yet he commited suicide. Terry Pratchett was also diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and had contemplated the idea of assisted suicide in a country where this is legal (Switzerland).

Robin Williams had Lewy body dementia [0], which almost certainly contributed to his choice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_with_Lewy_bodies

Alternative reading: being stupid, getting incarcerated and committing suicide are all consequences of being an outlier at the negative end of the bell curve, where men are overrepresented due to higher variance of the respective trait.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com