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631 points xbryanx | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.746s | source | bottom
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mike_hearn ◴[] No.44531351[source]
To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details of what happened by making it sound like a natural disaster.

Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up. Therac-25 injured/killed six people, Horizon has ruined hundreds of lives and ended dozens. And the horrifying thing is, Horizon wasn't something anyone would have previously identified as safety-critical software. It was just an ordinary point-of-sale and accounting system. The suicides weren't directly caused by the software, but from an out of control justice and social system in which people blindly believed in public institutions that were actually engaged in a massive deep state cover-up.

It is reasonable to blame the suicides on the legal and political system that allowed the Post Office to act in that way, and which put such low quality people in charge. Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't. But this is HN, so from a software engineering perspective what can be learned?

Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight. But most were bugs due to loss of transactionality or lack of proper auditing controls. Think message replays lacking proper idempotency, things like that. Transactions were logged that never really occurred, and when the cash was counted some appeared to be missing, so the Post Office accused the postmasters of stealing from the business. They hadn't done so, but this took place over decades, and decades ago people had more faith in institutions than they do now. And these post offices were often in small villages where the post office was the center of the community, so the false allegations against postmasters were devastating to their social and business lives.

Put simply - check your transactions! And make sure developers can't rewrite databases in prod.

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xbryanx ◴[] No.44531521[source]
> please don't say they died by suicide

I encourage you to read the current thinking on this evolving language, which offers some explanation as to why we're moving away from damaging language like "committing" suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_terminology#%22Committ... https://www.iasp.info/languageguidelines/

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1. lanfeust6 ◴[] No.44531828[source]
"damaging", in no quantifiable way whatsoever. It's just the euphemism treadmill at work, nothing more.
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2. tweetle_beetle ◴[] No.44531982[source]
I would say it's not the treadmill at work in this case. It's not simply a replacement.

The article linked by the parent comment explains it well and references plenty of considered material. But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.

Consider how people would like your death, or the death of a loved one, described by others. And if you can't, maybe consider how others might be affected.

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3. xbryanx ◴[] No.44533426[source]
> in no quantifiable way whatsoever

You may disagree with my assertion, but there has been considerable research into the role of media and reporting in suicide, indicating that contagion is real and that words matter when reporting on these issues.

Source: https://reportingonsuicide.org/research/

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4. lanfeust6 ◴[] No.44535069[source]
> But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.

The projections are doing the work here. Colloquially today what's understood is that "commit" merely means they did the deed. People can judge that to be immoral or not regardless; most people don't, except through the lens of religion.

They might judge it to be the wrong choice, as I surely do, and I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following any given circumstance.

5. lanfeust6 ◴[] No.44535103[source]
That words matter is why I'm in opposition, as this diminishes agency in people.

Today I would say that framing suicide as "immoral" in secular society is banal and has no traction, but most, excepting certain circumstances, would suggest it is a bad choice. That surely follows if you as well as I would try to talk an able person out of suicide.

I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following tough circumstances. That's the message I am getting from the euphemism treadmill game, and I reject it.

The message should be that you can go through hell and recover, and you still have a choice. And granted there's always nature vs nurture; just as we are not entirely the product of our environment, the environment does shape us. But it's not all-or-nothing.

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6. Hercuros ◴[] No.44536420{3}[source]
The person you are replying to shared some research by experts on the topic giving recommendations. You can argue for or against anything, but it’s useful to at least engage with the evidence being presented.