You're getting downvoted because putting forward suicide as an explanation without any evidence is, well, "bad taste" doesn't really cut it. If you're going to speculate about it, at the very least give some justification.
A sincere question: Why is it bad to speculate that it was suicide? I assume there is some intention-guessing or social norm coming into play that I don't see. Could you explain your reasoning?
Edit: Is it that it is not considered okay to consider suicide a plausible explanation? Is suicide a taboo, or something that would make a person seem less?
Suicide is a very sensitive topic. There's issues of blame and justifiability and stuff (like what you mentioned in your edit) that are highly emotionally fraught. It's better not to open that can of worms without a good reason. To just casually toss out the idea in a low-effort content with no evidence appears to make light of suicide and the surrounding issues, and/or be insensitive to the stressful, unproductive discussion it's likely to trigger. That's not a great explanation, but it's the best I can do right now.
I think it is a great explanation. It makes the reactions understandable to me. Now it seems like an example of shooting the messenger of a disliked message (where the message here is not a fact, but a thought).
There is a certain emotional dryness to scientific curiosity, at least to me, social norms do not have a say. The boundary for me are ethics. I did not see unethical behaviour, so I do not sympethize with the silent/vague outrage.
I wish we could talk about suicide more freely. Why do we talk about breast cancer but not suicide? I think because the illusion of free will is still so prevalent, and psychological problems are fallout-causingly considered connected with the concept of guilt. These archaic ideas do not stand the test of time. Science and ethics supplant them.
I once read that reports about suicide increase the likelihood of others committing suicide. Is that reason enough to censor debate about it? That is a hard ethical question. I would say it depends on the medium where the discussion is held. HN seems acceptable to me, though I see arguments against it.
I wish we could talk about autism more freely. It's a terrible condition that seems to afflict many in these parts. It inhibits people's ability to judge the context rather than the content of social interaction, and causes them to misjudge and disregard others' contextual receptiveness to their own immediate needs.
The way you treat others' emotions is an ethical matter. For the rest, I agree. There are important discussions to be had about suicide. I'm mostly just saying cft's post was the wrong way to bring it up.
> The way you treat others' emotions is an ethical matter.
This is a fundamental conflict in ethics. Where does freedom end in the face of the freedom of others?
Now, in this case, there is framing going on. One could say that group A were playing with the emotions of group B and hurt them that way. I think, on the other hand, group A wanted to have a conversation about a topic, group B did not tolerate that discussion and tried to shut it up. I think group B acted unethical. If you don't like a topic of a debate, do not take part in it. After all, that is trivially easy here on HN. To me this seems to be an example of aggressive political correctness; a topic is identified as unwanted, and attacked with the aim to shut it down.
This critique is not against you. Others that have also commented here show this behaviour blatantly. You on the other hand gave constructive critique and insight, even though I disagree with the judgement. What is a "right" way to bring up a topic? The way it was brought up was literally a single word with a question mark. I don't think this is the optimal way to constructively bring a discussion forward, but it certainly does not deserve the reaction it got.
I doubt it's any more or less taboo than speculating whether he died from a car accident, FSB plot, or unrequited love of Kim Kardashian. Without substantiation, it's not very productive discussion, especially for those who are curious about his life's achievements. Otherwise, suicide and depression have been not uncommon topics of discussion:
It's from a text from a friend who knew him, if that matters. We all got PhDs from the same school. I have been here for 6.8 years and in the last two I find myself going back to Slashdot more and more.
Your first comment didn't say anything about having a personal connection or any first-hand knowledge of the situation, so it was reasonable for people to consider the comment as empty, insensitive speculation.
There are valid grounds for wishing that HN was better than it is, but this case doesn't epitomise anything that is fundamentally wrong with HN; you could have done better in your initial comment, and then done better than to use it as an opportunity to take a swipe at the entire community.
For HN to be better, it relies on all of us to do our bit to make it better.
I wonder if you're running into the problem of mixed cultural standards on HN. People here come from very different backgrounds but we interpret each other's statements without knowing that—a hard problem. I'm not assuming anything about you but I can imagine different pairs of backgrounds that would react quite differently to the simple, blunt question "was it suicide". Some would think "what's the problem it's a simple factual question" while others would wince and almost feel pain. This isn't an issue of PCness, but of the lossiness of channels across multiple cultures.
Different cultures also have different standards around speech vs. writing for such a question, as well as around public vs. private. And a small private conversation and a large public internet forum are miles apart even before bringing culture into it.
On HN we're dealing with all that and more. Our way is to try to have a local culture in which people err on the side of posting thoughtful, substantive comments. These two factors—considerateness for others and solid information—compensate for packet loss in the channels, making it easier for real communication to occur, leading to more interesting conversations. But it comes at a cost: utterances can't be quite as sharp or colorful. We give up some expressive range. Things get more bland. It took me years to reconcile myself to this—I hate blandness and am a fan of the historical art of barbed wit—but eventually I realized that if you don't make this tradeoff then the smart people eventually leave, and that would be blander to say the least.
People do sometimes mistake this approach for political correctness—and then wonder how the author of "What You Can't Say" could have created both—but that's because they don't understand what HN is going for. (I feel annoyed sometimes when people accuse us of being champions of bourgeois politesse when they haven't the least idea, but what can you do.) We're trying to optimize the site for interestingness—intellectual curiosity. The HN guidelines are an engineering tradeoff to achieve a design goal: one we have to make to protect HN from the dynamics that make internet forums less interesting and then dead. This design decision goes back to the founding of the site: see https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.
If you don't want to put some effort in writing a substantive comment, probably you should go back to Slashdot. Your first comment showed no effort in justifying your speculation with relevant evidence. The reason why I like HN so much and why I gave up Slashdot and Reddit in favor of HN is how I don't have to scroll down a list of funny or low-effort comments to find a few substantively written comments. The low funny-to-substantive ratio of HN is what attracts me to HN and I am glad that low-effort comments like yours are quickly downvoted.
Speculation without justification is not part of science. The original post didn't add anything substantive to the discussion. Anyone seeing the age of the deceased would consider suicide as a possibility. It's completely obvious.
Now if the OP had said "possibly suicide because ...", that would have been a valuable contribution. As it stands, saying "suicide?" is no more a contribution than me saying "flying blue elephant landed on him?"
Is talking about the obvious explanation now taboo? Do we really want to pretend the emporer is wearing cloths? I certainly do not.
What is obvious to me might not be obvious to others. I learned that time and time again. That is why I'll tell the emporer that he is naked.
But besides that, speculation without evidence is part of science. The scientific method does not restrict how to come up with hypotheses to test. We may have heuristics, like intuition, but they are not required. Random guessing is sound, while it might not be efficient.
In this case, the speculation was ironically completely motiviated by reason.
> Is talking about the obvious explanation now taboo?
Except that's not what happened. Ridiculing a post for non-substantive content is not labeling that post taboo, it's labeling that post pointless.
> But besides that, speculation without evidence is part of science.
It's not. Speculation is still founded on reasons. No serious scientific paper, ever, just tossed out an idea without justifying why it might be true, for instance, by explaining why it's consistent with existing evidence, why it might in fact be a better explanation than alternatives, why it might provide a better foundation for future work, and what sort of predictions the idea might make if it were true.
There were literally no reasons given in the OP's post. This repeated appeal to science is beyond absurd, and is frankly indicative of people who seem to have no idea how science really works.
> In this case, the speculation was ironically completely motiviated by reason.
No it wasn't. Where is the reason why it might have been suicide in a post that consists entirely of the word "Suicide?"
It sounded like he was complaining that the downvotes were out of "PC", as if we were offended that suicide could be the cause. I downvoted him because I don't think speculation without evidence is useful.
Speculation without evidence is a fundamental tool to figure stuff out. You are given a situation you don't understand (He died young). You make a speculation that seems plausible (Maybe suicide). You look for evidence (They asked here). Seems naively fine to me.
This is someone whose cause of death is unknown because, as far as we know at this point, the revelation of his death is new, not because it's a scientific field of inquiry and experiment.
I disagree politely. Even the death of a beloved person is not above the scientific method. One may choose not to investigate, but that is a personal decision. I don't see a problem if someone far away speculates. Also, I don't see a problem talking about these speculation. As long as speculations stay speculations in the absence of evidence and are discarded in front of conflicting evidence, it seems sound to me.
That is an arrogant and aggressive appeal to emotion. But even following that non-logic, as soon as someone dies we are supposed to turn our head off and to shut up? I think quite the contrary, we should think even harder why it happened, and learn from that. After all, it is a significant event, and, in this case, a loss for all of us.
Ironically, your comment was putting fuel into the fire of speculation because here we weren't even conversing about the details and circmustances of the death. Now, a debate about the danger of alcohol, and, more interesting, the causes of alcoholism would be helpful. Alcoholism often has a cause, in my experience. Is that really so? Are these causes identifiable and fixable? That are questions that I wish we knew more about.
