Machine learning of neural representations of emotion identifies suicidal youth

Suicide is an epiphenomenon of larger socio-economic issues. Among OECD countries the U.S. comes in the middle of the pack. If guns were a causative factor, then considering how prevalent they are (by a ridiculous factor!) our rates should be much higher:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/... http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/03/how-does-americas-suicid... http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/01/...

Any correlation between guns and suicide in the U.S. is easily understood in terms of modeling--guns are how Americans kill themselves. Take away the guns and, yes, there'll be a dip in suicide rates, until Americans learn how people kill themselves elsewhere around the world. Heck, they're already learning that with opioids.

Let's go back to what I said about Australia. I claimed that the change in Australian suicide rates is better understood in terms of the unemployment rate. Now let's test that hypothesis. [... google google google ... ] Here we go:

  Suicide has reached a 10-year high in Australia as 3027
  people killed themselves last year, the largest cause of
  death among 15 to 44-year-olds.

  Last year, 12.6 people in every 100,000 killed themselves
  compared to 12 the year before, 11.4 in 2012 and a low of
  10.4 in 2006.

  -- http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/suicide-rate-in-australia-reaches-10year-high/news-story/cb5d8384aadb571778775bda236f3c35

So suicides were at their lowest the very same year that unemployment was at its lowest (2006)? Check! And they rose as unemployment rose? Check! To the point where they're back at the pre-law level? Check!

I won't deny that there's some nuance here that we can tease out, but if you read the actual papers that link guns to suicide, they do a much worse job at nuance. In fact, not a single one of the papers I've read even considered the unemployment rate. Which is patently bad science.

Correlation is not causation. All the gun suicide papers do is point out specious correlations. But you don't need a degree in statistics to know this. And you don't need a science degree to be able to see the gargantuan holes in these arguments--that the correlations have simpler explanations.

I'm not denying that gun control could appreciably effect suicide rates. Imitation and modeling have huge effects--much more well-established than the supposed gun effect. So huge that even news media abstain from reporting suicides, especially methods of suicide. Saving thousands of lives with gun control, even if it's an ephemeral gain, is an absolute benefit that's worth debating about. But let's just be honest about this stuff.

Effect size is very important in this. To continue your grad student murder example, it's completely trivial to determine which plant a student was given, based on whether they are dead or not. It becomes trickier if you measured something a bit less cut-and-dry, such as the incidence of headaches, or variance in a few voxels of a noisy MRI.