In response to the claim that the reason for the general increase in suicides (in Japan) during covid was due to women being stuck at home with abusive men.

I asked, do they have data in that, or is that speculation? To which I received a very frosty glare and the rejoinder that people who work with the abuse victims have said that covid made things a lot worse for some people. Case closed. Which generated the following response.

The reason I wanted to ask, “Do they have data on that, or is that speculation?” is actually a good one. First, it’s a very serous allegation. If you have a huge rise in deaths, and you can lay the blame clearly at someone’s feet, “It’s because of a plague of abusive men,” then that’s a pretty big accusation. It’s a big problem, it’s a big indictment that justifies great intensity of judgment against men and significant action.

And since men aren’t a small subgroup of a society, they’re half the population, that means charges are being brought against a very large group. So it’s a big charge, not one to made casually or to be minimized or exaggerated. It calls for precision. When anything gets that big or that serious, involving death and a large sector of society, it requires precision and care.

I have no doubt that it is indeed one hundred percent the case that for those women dealing with abuse, that Coivd probably made it much, much worse, intolerable, inescapable. But if the assertion is that that for a lot of women being stuck at home with abusive men is the problem, if we’re generalizing, and that its a major factor causal in the increase in suicides, I would like to know more. We can gather data to back.up this claim.

How many more suicides overall occurred to previous years, how many of them were in shared homes, and how many of those cases were indicative of abuse? How do they compare to male suicides in the same period? How big is this actual problem, if it’s not just some specific women that were in that situation but if it was, instead, a lot of women, a general causal factor in this result of a generalized spike in suicides? If it truly was a global explanation.

Tell me more. How serious were the lockdowns In Japan? Were suicides up for the whole year or just for a specific period? Did coivd affect the total number of people who committed suicide or just when people committed suicide? How closely do male and female suicide rates track when charted over the last two years, and do the same explanations apply to both sexes? These are the things I wonder about, that probably matter, but might not make great headlines.

Stories that involve abusive men make for very compelling anecdotes. They elicit anger and disgust and pity and outrage. But as much as those anecdotes stand out, and they are certainly true, they might only be part of the whole truth. There might be a larger story. Does that matter? It might be the difference between saying that there’s a big new problem, and the cause of the problem is abusive men, or that there’s a big new problem and some of the problem is some abusive men, or that there’s a big new problem and this specific part of the problem is these specific abusive men. Since we’re taking about a very large group of people, and a relatively small number of cases, we probably need more information. Abuse is terrible. Suicide is terrible. But however emotionally harrowing they may be, that doesn’t give anyone the right to explain global phenomena and make sweeping generalizations about very serious matters without having to provide convincing proof. Existential immediacy isn’t a substitute for analysis.

Even completely true and powerful anecdotes don’t on their own make for an effective and accurate general analysis (but they’re likely to generate an impression of one). The problem is that we don’t know which of these three possibilities we face without some good data. And giving the impression that we do know which it is because we’ve tagged some very viscerally compelling examples doesn’t really help, and can create its own problems.

So it’s not wrong to ask how much good data there is, if only to find out the real extent of the problem, because it would be very helpful and important to know if this is a good general explanation. It’s risky to assume that it is based on a limited set of anecdotes that might have been selected specifically for their moral/emotional qualities (that drive newsworthiness).

I don’t know much about this story, so all I can do is ask for more information. At a guess, my limited knowledge of Japan suggests fewer people in Japan are entering into relationships, and many young people live alone. And so that could be (I don’t know, I would need more data) something that the covid shutdown would exacerbate, and that women deprived of their social networks would suffer more than men. That’s one alternative possibility to men. Eating women into suicide.

Coivd also might affect many other factors, i(ncluding abuse cases) and exaggerate and make them suddenly much worse and much less managable. It might make generalized fear and anxiety worse (something women already suffer from disproportionately, whereas men suffer more from aggression-regulation disorders, which might instead manifest in more crime). There might be cultural factors and incentives.

I assume that even with female suicide up that male suicide still tops it and has increased also, since men were probably affected by covid too and men are much better at effecting lethal means. And those deaths and stories and their causes, one assumes, matter just as much. Or do they, when it comes to making a good story? Does anyone care if male suicides go up if there isn’t anyone to blame or accuse over it, or if we don’t really care about or feel sympathy for men?

The second reason it’s worth asking about for more information in a case like this is that some blanket explanations are just too easy to give. Or rather, some very good particular explanations are too easy to turn into large, general explanations that drown out other (just as important but less arresting) explanations. They have an inherently compelling structure, a hook. In this case: bad effect happens, women affected more, bad men responsible. It fits the cultural narrative and reinforces the cultural mythology. There’s little social cost to making it, and a lot of empowering social currency to it. It’s a popular explanation for problems (regardless of its status, very good or more marginal, as an explanation for any particular situation).

Combine those two causes for concern, and at the least, even if it this explanation is perfectly true, it’s not the sort of thing you should just toss out as a general explanation casually, or decide upon as established without some due process. You should provide more information than mere assertion to back it up.

The idea of asking for more information isn’t to suppress true stories. It’s to be careful that certain kinds of advantaged stories don’t overwhelm and suppress other equally true stories. And unfortunately this happens quite often. Within the science of fear, certain types of stories are given more and others given less weight. So the process is very important.

For example, let’s say that you have a problem, say, low black enrollment in a medical school, and someone asserts, “Well, it’s because Asian people are taking all the good spots.” That might be a very appealing explanation to some people. It might even be true. But it might not be the whole truth. It might have lower total explanatory power than its appeal indicates. And people who like that explanation might be very upset if anyone tries to question that explanation, that you’re denying the injustice being perpetrated on behalf of Asians against blacks.

Similarly, you might notice a problem like high rates of black incarceration. And within certain circles (for whom it aligns with their narrative), you could offer the explanation, “It’s because of the excessive criminality of the black race.” Now, that fact may actually be true as a factual reality. But the degree to which it is accepted readily as true, and as fully explanatory of the problem, needing no further interrogation, can depend very heavily on how it fits into and is amenable to your grand narrative.

How something contradicts your grand narrative (if it does) can also play a large role in whether you think it’s a completely unacceptable explanation to consider, one that needs nothing but interrogation and refutation. There’s a strong negative selection as well as a positive one. And both are a problem. One makes you too easily accept an explanation, one too easily makes you reject it.

In reality, if you want to deal with a problem, not merely reinforce narratives, especially in very charged and weighty cases, you need to be very cautious and specific and take the time to go through the dialogue and make Damone all the facta. It’s likely that all of the explanations I mentioned do have some explanatory power or causal weight in those situations. But the question is, how much? Can you clearly establish it? What else does? Is this factor a final cause or is this also itself an effect? How can we properly target the problem without inciting an indictment of a whole group? It’s very easy to look at a problem and just say “it’s the immigrants” or “it’s the jews” or “it’s rhe men”, and have it feel like it’s a good explanation if it fits your narrative. And it might even be right. You can’t rule that out. The important thing is just to take care and ask for details and not rule out or rule in any explanation in any greater proportion than it truly deserves, and to not establish it as a more total explanation than it really covers.

The question, “What portion of the total outcomes does this factor actually explain?” is one that’s worth asking, if it’s a very serious outcome and a very serious accusation that might require serious personal judgements and collective actions. Are there any other significant factors at play? Are there other more consistent and universal factors at work? Is the story overall just a much more complex and varied organism? Is it possible that this causal factor is just more agreeable and sensational and simple (in that it clearly makes you feel like the issue is explained because it identifies a clear villain and a clear victim), so that it makes us naturally favor it as an explanation? Does it make us feel like we’ve psychologically extracted the lesson that needed to be learned from the situation? It may in fact be the correct lesson. I’m not saying that such preferential selection of explanations is what’s happening, but that large, simple, and psychologically easy explanations carry this as a risk, and so when they have large potential consequences, they deserve to be given proper consideration.

And so it’s worth asking, what’s the data on that? Unfortunately, in today’s climate, simply asking such questions can be seen as a failure to support legitimate victims and siding with the enemy. If, in this case, the story really is that simple, then it should be known. And simply that the result shouldn’t be predetermined, that large scale indictments with large consequences should be made with caution, not casually, and that the process should be open to inquiry. That isn’t the same thing as being predetermined in favor of an alternative answer (and thus being on the side of the enemy). It’s a reluctance to repeat or take certain large assertions for granted and a desire for a dialogue that allows proper evaluation, so problems can be accurately assessed and addressed.

Other limits and dangers of explanations, and the need to inquire for more detail, can be seen in the case of white supremacy, when it’s advanced as a broad explanation for the inferior outcomes of the black population (as a whole, not in particular) compared to whites.

The obvious first question to ask is, what do you mean by white supremacy? And when you find out that the answer is not “deliberate and conscious actions of prejudice by whites against blacks to maintain unjust supremacy” but rather “the ability of whites, and in fact other white-adjacent races, to use things like math, science, social conformity (manners), family structure, and liberal government to produce artificial supremacy (because there is nothing inherent in certain government or family or social or even intellectual structures that is fundamentally better or more true, they’re all just arbitrary social constructions), then you have to pause.

We have to consider that we might not agree on our underlying assumptions and definitions of what white supremacy is, or what exactly it is that you want me to fight and confront. Because it sounds like you think the nuclear family, math, science, logic, manners, liberal government, and so on are white supremacy.

And in fact that is exactly what a lot of people do think. And so when they identify a problem and ask you to confront it, there’s a whole lot under the hood that they’re actually asking you to assent to, ideologically, and quite a project they’re asking you to embark on. You could be using the same terms as an explanation, terms that legitimately arouse great concern. But you might need to make sure that we’re actually talking about the same things.

This is the kind of thing, especially when people are asking you to get on board with a really big conclusion or course of action that affects a really large group of people, where a little inquiry is really helpful. If you just feel the desire to help black people, and feel a great moral weight to prove your support and prove that you truly care, you might be willing to go along with people’s assurances without further questioning. In fact, any interrogation might actually make people suspect you of being a racist, someone who is against black people, who is on the side of white supremacy.

And, upon further investigation into their real definitions of that term, for some people you might indeed be on the side of white supremacy (for example, if you hold that logic and manners and liberal government aren’t simply tools of white supremacy but are universally available and objectively valuable strategies that have nothing to do inherently with whiteness but have been useful for many people and cultures and could be useful for black people as well as whites, and would be so whether whites existed or not).

These theorists completely reject the idea of such “objective” value structures entirely. Your endorsement of them is white supremacy. But you might not even realize that you’re a white supremacist (on their terms) if you didn’t bother really checking into what they meant by it. And most people, because they obviously don’t want to be white supremacists, wouldn’t bother doing so (especially if such interrogation is likely to get you labeled as one).

Most people, in a show of good will and good moral instinct, want to help black people and will openly repudiate white supremacy without asking a lot of probing questions. Unfortunately, that agreeable and commendable positive instinct can be a vulnerability. And if the people who do go to the trouble of questioning things often fall into the categories of being somewhat disagreeable (and so less willing to easily go along with things and seeming less sympathetic and caring and willing to help), or if they’re people who are already prejudiced in favor of some other alternative position (for example, thinking that white supremacy isn’t bad), you will probably be very suspicious of that camp and want to avoid it.

And the small amount of people who might try to argue “Wait, white supremacy as they’re defining it isn’t bad, and I’m not sure that that’s really white supremacy. It’s the traditional conception of white supremacy that’s bad, this version isn’t remotely the same thing. ” Those people likely won’t be heard by either side, as it gets in the way of both of their projects. These days all the advantage is in favor of someone who primary goal is to build goodwill with one side or the other. People who genuinely want to find out the truth and develop solutions, regardless of how the chips fall, are the enemies of everyone.

This is just a followup, but I looked up the actual story in a Japanese newspaper, which had more raw data and fewer anecdotes and speculation. And although it makes a great headline that female suicides were up by a massive percentage, the statistical reality is that, that was only in October, and during the actual lockdown in the spring the rates were lower.

So for the overall year of covid, a very hard year, suicide rates were only up 2% overall. It’s significant because it’s the first annual increase in the suicide rate there in years. But this spring was actually a record low. A graph showing suicide rates for the last two years, as well as one listing multiple decades, showed male suicide rates always far above females, and the rates of both following the same general year to year and even month to month trends. Male female data tracked one another, showing no difference in trends over time, except that of male suicide being far more common.

Looking at this data set, it isn’t clear where the headline story about women is, unless you restrict your data set to just that one month of October and ignore everything else. Rates are down or mostly similar overall in the long term, men’s rates are much higher (but aren’t worth exploring), both sex’s rates track very closely (meaning the underlying pattern shows no sex specificity over any period larger than a month), the overall increase in suicide in 2020 isn’t that large (considering what the world has been through), and of that 2% increase there is no further causal data provided (what fraction of that 2% were women living with men, much less women living with men suffering abuse).

So how do we get to the conclusions behind the headline? How do we know that men, as a class, caused those suicides? Are we supposed to assume that any woman living with a man was likely to be suffering abuse, and a lot of those women who committed suicide were living with men? The Japanese press notes that the suicides took place largely among the young, and that they live alone at far higher rates than other groups (and more than any previous generation of young people). So being alone may by itself be a significant causal factor, and also means that cohabitation with men is less likely to be the common explanatory factor among the suicide victims. Surely some of them did live with men, but it’s less likely to be the thing that unites them and explains the outcomes.

Maybe the female suicide rate will continue to be elevated beyond just a single month. But at the moment that hasn’t been established. Male rates are up somewhat too. But as a population with far higher rates overall (but not one that makes a good story as a vulnerable population) maybe trends among both aren’t as comparable when it comes to single monthly variations, because men’s rates are subject to more variation overall. Male suicides shot up in early 2019 for a few months, and again in early 2020 (a difference comparable to that which occurred for women in October), but there’s no story in those sharp increases that only affected them.

So where in all that data do we get to the headline about the shocking increase in women’s suicides being caused by abusive men?

One headline I saw read “suicide rates for young women are increasing”. The BBC article introduced the crisis with the words “In one month, October, the female suicide rate in Japan leaped by more than 70%, compared with the same month in the previous year. What is going on? And why does the Covid pandemic appear to be hitting women so much worse than men?”

The article then immediately went on to spend the next twelve paragraphs (short ones, admittedly, dramatically structured) quoting the stories of two women suffering physical and sexual abuse from men, whose suffering has been exacerbated as result of coivd. This implies, if it does not establish, a logical causal link between the two. The question is raised, and this is the bulk of the explanation provided. Abusive men. Vulnerable women.

So that’s the meat of the story. That’s as far as most people will read. Down below all this, there are some quotes from researchers about how the increase in rates was very unusual, and also a bit about how there are increased suicides among women in the periods shortly after a celebrity commits suicide. And then the article ends. That’s it.

So there have been some very specific choices about how Western media chose to frame this news story and what direction to take with the article, based on the information available. Possibly, it has this particular structure because the writer knows that it will appeal most in this way as a dramatic human interest story. The information provided is accurate. But does it convey a false impression? Is the story all that they are selling it as? What is the real headline, and does it fit the data?

The entire article can be summed up like this I think: shocking sudden increase in female suicides, shocking stories about women being abused by men, researchers agree the increase is odd, celebrity imitation has an influence when it happens (only one actual case for this year is cited), draw your own conclusions. What would your takeaway from the story be? Women are a vulnerable class, and abusive men are making them kill themselves. That seems to be the implication.

I had noticed this sort of writing creeping into the BBC a while ago. A strong editorial slant. A desire not just to report the news but to dramatize it. To sell certain types of stories. Juicy I es. To make use of and reinforce popular narratives. So I sent them a letter of concern. Things seemed to be getting worse, and I realized I couldn’t trust them any more.

That’s when a news site stops becoming useful. When they’re just selling you a viewpoint and a story, instead of the news. So I dropped them from my feed about six months ago, and I was sad to do it. This article just reinforces my concerns. They’re making hay, profitable hay, from whatever they can. And it’s not that the stories they recorded of those girls weren’t true or important. They were. But they framed the story and drew wide-ranging conclusions in a way that reveals extreme editorial prejudice. They’re not really interested in answering the question they raised, or they would have included some of the data that the Japanese newspapers did include. Instead, they brought in their own anecdotes as a substitute. They sold a broad conclusion with a narrative, and sold the narrative with a powerful (and carefully selected, and quite true) personal story. It’s not that it isn’t tru, it’s that the general mechanisms for abstraction (which are based on taking a general sample of the most common data) have been subverted by excessive selection, skewing their operation.