Sorry I still think you aren’t taking the selection effects seriously enough. By selection effects I’m mostly thinking that a relatively small fraction of people will be selected out from the population, and then aggregate suicide rates will drop. Put another way, if you haven’t killed yourself in 200 years of good health, would be weird to start now.
There’s at least two lines of reasoning for this:
rational suicide hypothesis. If people kill themselves for rational reasons, that is, because they correctly estimate that the net pleasure vs suffering balance in their future isn’t worth it, you might expect the people who correctly believe this for idiosyncratic reasons (eg their brain chemistry/neural circuits are unusually predisposed to ennui or depression) to self-select out of the population via suicide first, and the people remaining to have more stable preference for life.
irrational suicide. To the extent that people kill themselves for irrational reasons (eg impulsivity, cognitive distortions that limit rational estimations of future well-being), you might also expect those factors to be concentrated in a relatively small fraction of the population, such that after several hundred years of age, the (living) people remaining will on average be less impulsive and more rational about affective judgments.
I would not be surprised if there are similar things going on for homicide. Certainly people’s proclivities to homicide varies with age today.
CW: Frank discussion of suicide
Sorry I still think you aren’t taking the selection effects seriously enough. By selection effects I’m mostly thinking that a relatively small fraction of people will be selected out from the population, and then aggregate suicide rates will drop. Put another way, if you haven’t killed yourself in 200 years of good health, would be weird to start now.
There’s at least two lines of reasoning for this:
rational suicide hypothesis. If people kill themselves for rational reasons, that is, because they correctly estimate that the net pleasure vs suffering balance in their future isn’t worth it, you might expect the people who correctly believe this for idiosyncratic reasons (eg their brain chemistry/neural circuits are unusually predisposed to ennui or depression) to self-select out of the population via suicide first, and the people remaining to have more stable preference for life.
irrational suicide. To the extent that people kill themselves for irrational reasons (eg impulsivity, cognitive distortions that limit rational estimations of future well-being), you might also expect those factors to be concentrated in a relatively small fraction of the population, such that after several hundred years of age, the (living) people remaining will on average be less impulsive and more rational about affective judgments.
I would not be surprised if there are similar things going on for homicide. Certainly people’s proclivities to homicide varies with age today.