One Mechanism for Rational Suicide

Here is one reason you might rationally commit suicide for selfish reasons.

Suppose you care about some other peoples’ perception of you after you die (this can be rationally justified – for example, caring about other peoples’ perception of you after you die is a shortcut that allows other people to more easily predict that you will help them, and this makes it easier to make teammates). You also think that other peoples’ perception of you is better than who you really are. Here are some reasons this might happen:

• You try to present yourself well to other people
• You have impostor syndrome
• You are being issued a private punishment
  • If someone or something is punishing you and no one else knows it, then other people won’t factor in the punishment when calculating their expectation for future you, and there’s a good chance they won’t even after the punishment has taken effect.
  • If someone is privately punishing you, regardless of whether that person reveals that he or she was punishing you or not after you die, people’s perception of you won’t go down. It may even go up if such a thing is revealed, if it shows that you were previously operating under punishment.
• From a slightly different direction, you think you won’t be criticized after your death. This doesn’t mean that others’ current perception of you is better than your perception of yourself, but it does suggest that others’ perception of you after you die will be higher.

If you keep living longer, then you think that your own perception of yourself with manifest, which will lower everyone else’s perception of you, but if you commit suicide then no one will find out.

In other words, your future reality is like a random variable that will realize a value that everyone will observe some time in the future, but if you commit suicide then everyone will observe it as their current prediction of that value, which you think is higher than what would have been realized. An additional plus is that this removes all variance.

If this is someone’s reason for committing suicide, the ways you can try to prevent that person from committing suicide include:

• Convincing him/her that peoples’ perception of him in the future will be higher than he thinks; I have 2 mechanisms for this:
  • Convincing him/her that something he thinks will be perceived negatively won’t actually be perceived as negatively, or perhaps positively; similarly, convincing him/her that he is underestimating how positively something will be perceived
    • For example, you might tell him/her “I bet you can’t do X” where X is some task that most people wouldn’t expect him or her to be able to do but he or she knows him/herself to be able to, especially if you talk about how being able to do X could easily lead to a lot more things (though depending on how hard it is, it might be best left to him/her to figure out by him/herself).
  • Convincing him/her that his/her current perception of his/her future self is too low
    • For example, you might remind him/her of a project he/she is working on that no one else knows about right now, but could become known in the future. Since no one else knows about it, they aren’t taking it into account for estimating their perception of him/her in the future, thereby underestimating him/her.
• Convincing him/her that peoples’ current perception of him are lower than he thinks
• Introducing him/her to new people who don’t yet have an expectation of who he/she is, although this would depend on how he thinks he compares to those peoples’ priors of a random human. The point is that you want him/her to care about more peoples’ perception of him by people who underestimate him.