But they may well be overreporting suicidal ideation...
I was asking a silly question about the toxicity of eating a pellet of Uranium, and ChatGPT responded with "... you don't have to go through this alone. You can find supportive resources here[link]"
My question had nothing to do with suicide, but ChatGPT assumed it did!
We don't know how that search was done. For example, "I don't feel my life is worth living." Is that potential suicidal intent?
Also these numbers are small enough that they can easily be driven by small groups interacting with ChatGPT in unexpected ways. For example if the song "Everything I Wanted" by Billie Eilish (2019) went viral in some group, the lyrics could easily show up in a search for suicidal ideation.
That said, I don't find the figure at all surprising. As has been pointed out, an estimated 5.3% of Americans report having struggled with suicidal ideation in the last 12 months. People who struggle with suicidal ideation, don't just go there once - it tends to be a recurring mental loop that hits over and over again for extended periods. So I would expect the percentage who struggled in a given week to be a large multiple of the simplistic 5.3% divided by 52 weeks.
In that light this statistic has to be a severe underestimate of actual prevalence. It says more about how much people open up to ChatGPT, than it does to how many are suicidal.
(Disclaimer. My views are influenced by personal experience. In the last week, my daughter has struggled with suicidal ideation. And has scars on her arm to show how she went to self-harm to try to hold the thoughts at bay. I try to remain neutral and grounded, but this is a topic that I have strong feelings about.)
High fructose corn syrup is very likely one of the reasons American's health is significantly worse than other nations. However the entire globe is suffering from the obesity epidemic, not just the USA.
There are regions of the world that are doing better than others, and a wide spectrum of reasons for that, but it is only comparative/relative improvement. Obesity is getting worse everywhere, across the board, as people are uplifted into middle class incomes and able to purchase and eat whatever they want & as much as they want.
> There are regions of the world that are doing better than others
It maps about 1:1 with the amount of sugary, fatty, addictive shit they're consuming. Across the globe. So do the trends. Prime example being the rising obesity rates in countries like Japan and Korea, rising at the exact same pace as the supply and consumption of above crap in those countries. They still have lower obesity rates than much of the West, at roughly the same relative difference of the amount of such crap consumed.
Obesity is rising everywhere except places experiencing war-torn famine. Even Bhutan has increasing waistlines. It's only a matter of how bad it is getting, how fast.
Then why do we have a growing obesity epidemic in countries that DON'T have nearly as many problems with ultra-processed food? Southern Europe, Japan, and India are usually held as exemplar countries with very good natural food culture. All of them are struggling with increasing obesity.
I'm not saying that ultra-processed foods are fine. They are bad and very much part of the story. But it is not the whole story either.
> Southern Europe, Japan, and India are usually held as exemplar countries with very good natural food culture. All of them are struggling with increasing obesity.
This is a great way to show you haven't visited those places in over a decade. They lagged behind in the takeover of addictive sugary crap. Now they're catching up in the same way. Korea is another great example that you didn't mention, the exact same has happened there.
The dissonance here is that your view of them being held up as such examples is from 2005, whereas your obesity statistics on them are from 2025. As soon as you update the former view to their situation as of 2025, you'll draw the exact opposite conclusion: an exact match.
What does "very good natural food culture" mean in a numerical sense, over time? Because I could imagine that label being applied to countries that are staying much more natural than average, but still have very significant changes in food makeup.
You haven't been to India, have you? The capitalist push to get every Indian eating addictive junk (most commonly with the use of sugar) is as aggressive as it is anywhere else in the world.
I think it is a bit intellectually lazy to pull the "capitalism bad" at every occasion.
I would blame our monkey brains instead. India has no shortage of traditional sweets that predate capitalism (Indians even knew sugar far before Europeans did), but in the previous crushing poverty that lasted millennia, only a tiny fragment of the Indian population had the opportunity to eat themselves to gout, diabetes, obesity etc. Now, almost every Indian can eat to satiety and beyond, for the first time in history. And the aftereffects show.
Capitalism is fairly efficient at providing people what they want. If our monkey brains crave sugar, sugary treats it will be.
We need to get our monkey brains under control, and not just with regard to sugar. At least some HNers are probably working on digitally addictive products, and then there are the old-fashioned drugs like alcohol and opiates, too.
This is really the worst situation to apply this logic to, as the "counterexample" he mentioned applies to every single one of the regions mentioned by GP.
Capitalism is how all of our shit works, so it’s lacking in specificity but also a pretty accurate thing to say in many situations.
Why is social media shit? Well, “the platforms are incentivized to demonstrate growth in profit to their investors, so they optimize their system for maximal engagement and retention over time, transferring the same incentive to creators, so many creators who would have made better work before desperately churn out poorly made material about whatever is popular and other, more interesting content is ultimately less common on the platform, with the root cause being the constant need for a growth in surplus in all areas of social production” is a better answer, but “it’s capitalism” is still an alright start.
But this is true: the Tragedy of commons (AKA «keep profits, externalize costs») is a common thing in unregulated capitalism. Regulated capitalism tries to solve it with rules, lot of rules. Socialism tries to solve it with bureaucracy, lot of bureaucracy. Communism (no profits) and monarchy (monarch eats the costs) are somewhat immune to this problem.
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
Feynman is one of the best ever at explaining complicated concepts in ways almost everyone can understand. That is a very rare skill for the super intelligent to have.
Agreed on Feynman, but not necessarily on the generalization that it being a rare skill to simplify things. When you understand a thing so well, you can simplify it enough.
I think it also takes a certain humility of character (which can coexist with tremendous self-esteem and even ego; see Feinman, Richard for an example).
I know plenty of smart people that know a topic well and are still not great at simplifying it in a way that can be understood well by laymen. Separate skill imo
> The laissez-faire approach gave people happy, low-stress, and materially rich lives.
The usual schtick conveniently ignoring the absolute marauding of resources from non-western countries and the effective slave labor extracted from Asia.
You can't wax poetic about the merits about turning your own workforce into "slave labor" (the entire OP point), and then complain about countries buying things produced by the slave labor.
> “Our algorithm right now is provably faster, in theory,” Ahmadi said. He’s hopeful, he added, that in 10 to 20 years, it will also be so in practice.
Huge pretending going on though that we are doing this. We are not throwing away the baby.
There is nuance and people are pretending there is not. I support trans people but also support safety for all people. There are some nuanced details when you get to reality, and we can’t just pretend those away.
The symptoms or pretending are things like not finishing the essay, or not even reading far enough to uncover PG’s definition near the beginning, so it had to become a footnote later when someone told them about it.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the article, but I find it baffling that they don’t mention the simple fact that the “best” professors have access to the “best” students. Especially early in career students. Never mind the fact that great schools -> employ great researchers -> enroll great students, even within one cohort this is clear. The top 5% of a class can do their undergraduate research everywhere they please and are in fact often scouted out by top chairs.
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