Hacker News Reader

Comment by boodleboodle | Hacker News Reader

This "fan-death-to-cover-up-suicide" is ABSOLUTELY false and is my greatest pet peeve with the English internet. Someone heard East Asians like to save face and came up with this dehumanizing and derogatory theory. Misconceptions of "fan death" predates any suicidal trends in Korea and if there was any connection to suicides we koreans would be the ones talking about it non-stop.

> Most likely the do know the real cause but chose not to release it

NO!!!! we are regular people with regular emotions, too. Stereotypes you see on the internet are often outdated by decades. In this case it was never even true in the first place.

View on HN

Tangentially related, but a lot of the discourse about societies that people are not a part of end up being similar to the discourse around corporations people are not a part of. Folks come up with reasons for why things are the case, and if you are actually part of the thing under discussion it is a mystifying and frustrating experience to see basically everyone is wrong, all the time.

This process really harmed my view of the utility of public discussion of anything. In quality it is about as bad as the average newspaper article. As you are perhaps aware, if the article is about something you know you will realise nearly every article is entirely fabricated. Lots of research papers (at least in the computer science domain) are the same: fabrications that can't be reproduced. Either the algorithm is not published so you can't validate the data or the algorithm is published and the data is just entirely unrelated to it.

Thinking about it, it's kind of a miracle humanity gets anywhere at all. Almost every public resource is aggressively ignorant.

Fan death predating the rise in suicide trends makes it seem more likely to me that fan death was used to obscure a suicide.

What is your perspective on what it is?

All we know is people were already talking about this in 1910.

So why do you think it is offensive to suggest it’s a polite way of obscuring a suicide?

That feels like the most charitable way to interpret people claiming fans are a lethal hazard?

I once asked a Korean MD/PhD about fan deaths. I was expecting her to say, "Oh, people don't really believe in that. It's just something a few grandmas worry about." What she actually said was, "Oh yeah, that's really dangerous."

I hope that's not a sign of the general state of MD/PhD thinking in Korean society, considering how, you know, absurdly, obviously, stupidly mistaken the notion of fans suffocating people in closed rooms is.

I'd definitely not want a doctor with such a belief coming within a mile of treating me for anything.

Yeah nobody believes it now but back then everybody did. We treated it exactly like how we believe airplanes fly. Some air flow and fluid dynamics. Airplanes fly so why not fan deaths? I guess doctors passed it off as physics and physicians passed it off as physiology.

Whenever someone jumped off a building at my engineering school, they were Korean.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com