Why do the "happiest places" have the most suicide?

A study of suicide rates across different countries and US states (PDF) concludes:

[T]he happiest places have the highest suicide rates. . . . [P]eople may find it particularly painful to be unhappy in a happy place, so that the decision to commit suicide is influenced by relative comparisons.

I found the study from this blog post, where the first comment says:

My new mission: Prevent suicides by making the world a more miserable place.

Overheard in a cafe in NYC

"Men are very single-minded. They only see what's right in front of them. Women are much more observant — they can see the world from different perspectives."

Isn't this rather paradoxical considering it was said by a man?

Paradoxical theories of language, knowledge, and the absurd

My mom points out "the paradox of 'insisting' that words have no 'fixed or stable set of meanings'":

If you really believed what you are insisting, you wouldn't be insisting, you'd be, perhaps, entertaining a suggestion or toying with a notion or musing about the possibility, now wouldn't you?

She's reacting to this description posted on a wall in the Art Institute of Chicago describing an artwork by Bruce Nauman:

Human Nature / Life Death . . . insists on language's inability to deliver a fixed or stable set of meanings, conveying a deep suspicion about what constitutes truth, especially in the public realm.

She adds a great detail:

[W]hen I voiced these thoughts (to Meade) the museum guard overheard, laughed, and nodded knowingly.

It reminds me of one of my philosophy professors from back when I attended the University of Wisconsin, Keith Yandell, who has a knack for devastatingly concise refutations of theories that contradict themselves. For instance, he defined empiricism as the theory that we can only gain knowledge through sensory experience. Then he pointed out that this theory itself is not known to be true through sensory experience.

Another example of this kind of paradox (is there a name for it?) is the problem of the absurd. It's supposed to be a profound problem that our lives are "absurd," in the philosophical sense. That is, you take your life very seriously from day to day, but you can also take a step back and wonder if the whole thing is ultimately pointless, meaningless.

Now, that problem -- the problem of the absurd -- is itself a paradox, but it's not the kind of paradox that this blog post is about. The paradox I want to focus on is one that Thomas Nagel pointed out in his wonderful book Mortal Questions. The problem of the absurd contains a couple of subtle internal contradictions. And if you grasp these contradictions, you may start to feel that the absurd is not such a problem at all -- or at least, not a deeply troubling one. Nagel explains:

[A]bsurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics. . . .

If . . . there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Who cares about blasphemy? Who'd want immortality?

I don't read novels anymore now that I'm not required to for school. So I'm grateful when people who do read them excerpt some of the good parts. Example:

She had always found a paradox in the crime of blasphemy, for it seemed to her that any God who could be discountenanced by the words of human beings was by definition not worthy of reverence.

That's from Michal Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, quoted by LemmusLemmus on his blog, The Church of Rationality. He gives the obvious solution:

[A]nti-blasphemy rules were not made by and for gods, but by and for believers.

Once you decide that it's OK to rationally scrutinize religion, the flaws become so obvious that, whether or not you're a believer, it feels a little embarrassing.

Another one:

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

That's from Susan Ertz's Anger in the Sky, excerpted in the Yale Book of Quotations, via AskMetafilter.

Here's what I don't understand about how Heaven fits in with Christianity: I thought Christians justify the existence of evil in the world by saying you need free will to allow for goodness, and free will leads to evil human behavior. If Heaven is free of evil, doesn't that also mean people in Heaven aren't free, and doesn't that mean Heaven isn't very good?

The philosopher paradox

"Philosophers should be people who think especially well, but to have decided upon a career in philosophy marks you as irrational. How do you deal with that raging incoherence?"

That's my mom responding to a report on the hard economic times for philosophers.

Based on that report, it seems that philosophers at the latest American Philosophical Association conference have gotten desperate for topics. Their papers and panels at the conference included the following:

Philosophical Perspectives on Female Sexuality

Depression, Infertility and Erectile Dysfunction: The Invisibility of Female Sexuality in Medicine

Analyzing Bias in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Orgasm

Can you detect the subtle theme?

I'm not sure what the point of philosophy is, if that's what it's become.

But then, I've never quite understood the point of philosophy anyway. In the early days of this blog, I wrote:

I agree with what John Searle says in an interview in What Philosophers Think: that skepticism about the existence of the-real-world-as-we-know-it is like Zeno's Paradox: an intriguing, mind-bending puzzle that smart people will mull over but then quickly move on from, to focus on more important philosophical problems. You don't let Zeno's Paradox reshape your whole view of what philosophers do -- they're not on a mission to explain how there can be motion. But that seems to be roughly what's happened with analytic philosophy, thanks largely to Descartes. (Thus, my philosophy professor felt the need to qualify the steps of an argument with, "Assuming you believe that tables and chairs really exist ...")

This is one problem with studying philosophy: you're constantly told that you need to see certain things as problems. But they're not "problems" like "How do we fix the health care system?" or "How do we reduce crime?" In other words, they're not things that a normal person who's completely unfamiliar with the field would perceive as problems in need of solutions.

Of course, you could find problems in other fields that wouldn't be understood on their face as problems because they're laden with jargon or esoteric concepts. If these are real problems, though, they can at least be "understood" insofar as an expert can patiently explain the goal to a layperson: "It's important for us to figure out ____ because it could help us find a cure for such-and-such a disease," or whatever it does.

Even after spending hours and hours studying the philosophy of language (to take another example), I'd be hard-pressed to make the case that it's important for anyone to devote their life to explaining how it is that we can mean things through words. If you're like 99+% of humankind, you just accept that we do this, and move on with your life. And it seems pretty clear that if there's an option -- a perfectly feasible, easy option -- of just saying, "Oh well!" and moving on with your life ... and if this isn't a mere luxury enjoyed by some of the people while other people have to worry about it, but in fact the world would be just fine if no one worried about it ... then it's just not much of a "problem" at all.

That's my anti-philosophy philosophy.

And it's another example of the paradox my mom identified: if you're so brilliant at analyzing the world,* then why haven't you done a utilitarian calculus to figure out the extremely low probability that your philosophizing is going to accomplish anything?

* And have no doubt that philosophers are at least implicitly purporting to be brilliant. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has even made it explicit, saying that you should be "supersmart" to be a philosopher.


UPDATE: Church of Rationality gives a shot at answering that last question, declaring it the "Snarl of the Month." Or is it the Snark of the Month?