Strongly agree. I think it was Rob Wiblin (or maybe Katja Grace) who wrote a post once about how they’d investigated the statistically-most-probable ways they could die in the next decade. And the answer (given various demographic facts) turned out to be suicide. Instead of dismissing this, they took seriously the fact that some people who haven’t previously considered suicide later do so (but in a bad moment, such that following through would definitively be a mistake). So they took steps to decrease their suicide risk, the way one might take steps to decrease any health risk.
This post recommends the opposite of that.
Increased suicide risk is almost certainly the main impact of following through with this policy. And even if that isn’t true for everyone, it is for enough people...
Optionality, to echo Nassim Taleb?
Yeah, exactly! This whole post is meant to suggest the idea of a gun license as a cheap way of being a specific kind of optionality.
Considering how frequent mental issues are around here, this post seems to buy entirely the wrong kinds of optionality.
EDIT: oh look what’s on the main page a day later
Strongly agree. I think it was Rob Wiblin (or maybe Katja Grace) who wrote a post once about how they’d investigated the statistically-most-probable ways they could die in the next decade. And the answer (given various demographic facts) turned out to be suicide. Instead of dismissing this, they took seriously the fact that some people who haven’t previously considered suicide later do so (but in a bad moment, such that following through would definitively be a mistake). So they took steps to decrease their suicide risk, the way one might take steps to decrease any health risk.
This post recommends the opposite of that.
Increased suicide risk is almost certainly the main impact of following through with this policy. And even if that isn’t true for everyone, it is for enough people...