The user known as Wylted should commit suicide.
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
After 2 votes and with 7 points ahead, the winner is...
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Standard
- Number of rounds
- 5
- Time for argument
- Three days
- Max argument characters
- 4,001
- Voting period
- Two weeks
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
This debate is about whether I should kill myself. I am pro, that I should kill myself, my opponent is against me doing so. I ask that voting is fair and based on who argued better. There is a temptation that because I am arguing in favor of killing myself, that voting against me will encourage me not to. I assure you, that you have no influence on my decision. Just vote fair. I'm also requesting that my opponent has an IQ of 120 or above (as officially tested) not by online tests pandering to you in an attempt to get you to buy your "full results".
Round 1:
Pros argument in the first round is that he is a terrible person, and it would be better for everyone else if he goes.
Cons response, is pretty clear: and is effectively that this may have been true up to now, but is not necessarily true: pro could be better and do better.
I felt this fully decided pros initial point.
1:0 con
The next round, pro focuses on his specific effects: his carbon footprint being a net negative, his fiancé not being able to replace him while he is alive, and that he isn’t helping starving children in Africa.
Con points out that pro is ignoring the positive impact of his life, and not providing an argument as to why one outweighs the other. While that is a good argument, as pro offered additional specific examples, I felt that con needed to give answers in return. But as he attacks the form of pros premise: that he is unfairly weighting life and not life - I can’t give pro the win on this round, and must score it a draw.
Con 2: 1
Round 3. Pro doesn’t seem to offer any additional argument or justification for the contention. He focuses on talking about himself, and poor decisions, and impact: but fails to explain why these events and actions necessitate or warrant him killing himself.
Con, having spent time being Pros counseller, despite saying not he wasn’t continues in this vein: despite pro making clear he is arguing whether he should, rather than whether he wanted to. However, after 90% of the round, he drops the killer argument again: this time phrasing it much better. The scenarios where suicide occurs are suboptimal as pro is measuring value based on past actions, not potential. That is a killer argument and wins this round.
Con 3:1
Round 4.
Pro again continues to throw the same argument out - that he’s done bad things without justifying the debate contention. Indeed it’s not clear how most of this fourth round is relevant to the debate topic at hand, and is more self-flaggelation for no debate purpose.
Con reiterates his position of suboptimality.
From this point on pro offers no new arguments and so con wins on arguments.
Conduct to con: this is a shitty troll topic, and the very debate contention denigrates this whole website, and is a childish attempt at attention. It shouldn’t even be up here - the very nature of this debate existing and the topic is so troll like that it warrants conduct loss to pro for posting it in the first place.
In his opening arguments, Pro takes a two pronged approach to building his argument. On the one hand, he argues that he is a bad person, citing his job in fast food as making people fat, a vehicular accident in which a thief was killed, the poor upbringing of himself and his siblings, and his estranged son. The second prong of his opening argument is the hypothetical benefits of dying, on which he mainly focuses on him being unable to cause anymore harm and the possibility that his fiance may receive an insurance pay-out as a result of his death if he is able to fake a murder or accident.
Con made a rebuttal of several of these points. In a generic response to all points, Con insists that the negative events experienced by Pro have made him a better person. In specific response to the fast food point, Con asserts that Pro's job is still better than an illegal job such as drug dealing, and provides a positive economic benefit to society. Most prominently however, Con emphasizes that Pro being hard on himself is a way in which he can excel and be a better person in the future.
Pro's round 2 rebuttal starts by asserting that Pro didn't give him any reason to stay alive and "dropped" the point about the wellness of his family. Pro infers that his family would be better if he were "replaced" by someone better, and again suggests killing himself for the insurance money. He cites a website about saving starving children and claims to be responsible for their death by not sending all his money to them. Then he cites an article about copycat suicides and suggests that he could fight global warming by convincing other people to kill themselves too. Pro seems not to notice the obvious contradiction here that you can't both fake an accidental death for insurance money and inspire copycat suicides at the same time.
Con's next rebuttal directly targets the insurance issue, citing an article which highlights the safeguards used by insurance companies to prevent exactly the type of scheme Pro has suggested. Con also cites one of Pro's own comments from outside the debate, paired with an article on poker strategy, to build an argument that killing oneself is a poorer strategy than attempting to live as a better person.
Next round, Pro again claims some of his points were dropped, although this seems to be mainly due to the very small character limit which strictly limits how much can actually be said each round. Pro's main argument during this round is to argue that he is such a failure in life that he can't help anyone else, because his own advice has gotten him nothing but bad results, so it would get other people bad results as well.
Con's next rebuttal focuses on the contradictory nature of some of Pro's arguments, pointing out that he can't both be angry at himself over not being successful enough, supposedly doing too much harm to the world through his gainful employment and want to give away all his money (of which, he supposedly has little) to save starving children all at the same time, then somehow conclude that being dead and solving none of these problems would be any better than the current scenario. Con again asserts that Can cannot solve the stated problems by killing himself and would be more effective by staying alive and actually addressing the problems.
Round 4 opens with Pro insisting that he won the debate already. Huh? Pro then proceeds to tell the story of how he worked two jobs when he was 16 to provide for his siblings, which appears to contradict the earlier version of events he gave in the first round where he claimed to have ruined their lives with his bad example. Many of Pro's other statements during this round also seem contradictory of points raised elsewhere. Pro also describes his state of hyper-awareness and the manner in which he always has a plan to kill people around him. In a military context, this would actually be a positive benefit, not a particularly good reason to kill yourself, again contradicting much of his own argument.
Pro says one very important thing in this round;
"I don't care about winning this debate. I care about working through a math problem. The problem of whether society is better off with me dead or alive."
This statement really clenched the outcome of the debate for me.
If this really is a "math problem" for Pro, then the burden of proof shifts to him to prove that he could actually make the world a better place by dying, and he failed to do that. You can't make the world better by killing the general manager of a fast food restaurant, because that job will just be filled by someone else. You can't feed starving children by dying. You can't erase past events with a corpse. Although Pro gives a lot of reasons why his life is bad, none of them can be fixed by dying. His insurance scheme was rebutted effectively by Con, while his "global warming" take was never hashed out enough to be taken seriously.
Also, I literally ignored every part of his argument where he was pleading with you and rambling about you not killing yourself - I literally said as much.
From my vote:
“The next round, pro focuses on his specific effects: his carbon footprint being a net negative, his fiancé not being able to replace him while he is alive, and that he isn’t helping starving children in Africa.
Con points out that pro is ignoring the positive impact of his life, and not providing an argument as to why one outweighs the other. While that is a good argument, as pro offered additional specific examples, I felt that con needed to give answers in return. But as he attacks the form of pros premise: that he is unfairly weighting life and not life - I can’t give pro the win on this round, and must score it a draw.”
Or, to clarify:: you raised a good point. Con countered it with a generic argument about how you weighted the value of your past and future lives - and how it is possible to mitigate ongoing negatives, which for me was convincing, but I scored this round as a draw because he didn’t counter your specifics with other specific examples.
I literally dealt explicitly with this part of your argument in my vote: and weight it more I’m your favour than others
Cons argument that you were weighting your future actions based on your past actions was killer - and is why you lost. If con had said something along the lines “you can mitigate your footprint by planting a few trees a year”, it would have been a total one sided victory. That’s what I was explaining in my vote.
Please show me the part of the debate where con said I can completely eliminate my carbon footprint.
he Just rambled on about not killing myself because I could be a better person, and ignored my negative impacts on the world such as environmental and ignored the fact that even if I improve people who are better than me can still fill my spot better than I could.
I did do an “impact” analysis. It’s just in that analysis was that the impact was in itself irrelevant. As I said in my vote:, your first round argument was that you had a specific negative impact on people - which was uncontested - cons whole argument was that you were implicitly conflating past impact with future impact. This was compounded by the fact that you yourself don’t really provide any compelling why the negative impacts necessitate your death as opposed to anything else.
So it seems you’re mostly butthurt because I didn’t view the implicit nature of the argument and the approach you presented the way you wanted me to in the context of the debate - mainly because con did much better at framing the difference between your claims and his in respect to context.
I took the debate off topic on purpose so he would continue to say the same shit and ignore my impact statements. No impact analysis was done by the boters so far though.
Almost everything you did was a mistake. There is no impact analysis here just awarding each side a mystery point for each argument. The conduct point was absurd, you literally should almost never award a point for anything but arguments. But there are some isolated examples of shitty logic such as : "The scenarios where suicide occurs are suboptimal as pro is measuring value based on past actions, not potential. That is a killer argument and wins this round."
You never did the math did you, killing myself would cause me to have no negative impact on the environment. If I lived I would definitely continue to harm the environment. I also said it could start off a chain of suicides that would also help the environment and my opponent never refuted the point so it should beaccepted. I also argued that I am not capable of eliminating my actions from causing any pain or suffering to anybody. He merely states I can reduce the pain I cause, he never argues that I can eliminate all negative conssequences of my actions occurring. He never even states it is okay to have some negative results if the good outwieghs it, no rebuttal. Please challenge me to a debate on whether that vote was shitty.
Also - it is incredibly hard for you to be honest as to why my vote sucked, when you have yet to provide any actual explanation as to what part of my vote you feel was incorrect, invalid, or otherwise “sucky”.
The Drafterman vote was saying exactly the same thing as my vote - literally the same thing - except I went into more detail to break down the individual arguments.
I literally mentioned a good vote against me. So it is more likely I am just being honest about why yours sucks.
Gotta love mature, reasonable adults who are capable of emotionally dealing with people voting against them.
No, I thought drafter's vote was decent. You're just biased and too low IQ to know how to adjust for that
I think your phone autocorrected “a vote that happened to go against my position”, to “shitty vote”.
Damned iPhones.
I deny that their votes here are bad at all. I also deny that, overall, either is a net-bad voter relative to the norm.
The earlier voting was shitty, I'm not sure it was biased but that was before my time
Anyway don't deny ralter and sham are shitty voters
Go back to the beginning of their won debates (not all debates, let's only look at won) and observe the RFD quality even after vote-modding was introduced.
Mikal and bluesteel were such close friends that bluesteel as vote mod led to Mikal being able to easily slip past the radar so he lasted far longer with the BS votes in his favour whereas the others had to earn earlier on (3 years ago or so) but there's a reason why the top are form 'way back' it's because they are from the gang-voting era.
Mikal is a piece of shit and literally begged people for votes, but others in the top ten deserved it such as thett, danielle bsh1 roy latham, whiteflame etc.
He's talking about where the core community of this site came from. He is missing out (intentionally) how it used to be gang-voting mentality and shit. Mikal climbed by literally having a voting ring that to this day people half admit was really arranged.
https://www.debate.org/people/leaders/
I don't know what that answer means... so I think that means you win.
At least the debate with bsh1 will get voters who are competent. All the votes on the debates in the voting period I have are stupid, with the exception of the vote drafterman placed
Every remaining top 20 elo member of DDO
There is no funny reply I could give to that, that wouldn't abuse him given the resolution. ;)
Who will you get to judge?
Note: not mentioned in the RFD, there is a lot of content that was not mentioned intentionally. A substantial fraction of this debate had little to do with the debate contention on both sides - these arguments were ignored as irrelevant.
Last time I don't do a judge debate. You are all morons
Oh, good point! I'll have to remember that for next time.
You are always welcome to say RFD in comments and post a comment-split RFD
I wish the character limit on this debate had been higher, because there were a lot of topics in here that could have been hashed out and examined in a lot more depth. The global warming suicide chain idea is something that could have been attacked or promoted a lot of different ways and there just wasn't room in this debate for it.
Either way though, I hope Wylted is still happy with the outcome of the debate, because he likes interesting topics and this one was surely interesting at the least!
Oh, and I did want to try to cram all the points into my RFD, but like I said, character limit bit me there too. Hopefully I didn't glaze over anything critical.
Thanks for the vote though, it was accurate. I didn't even understand his global warming point and you're correct that he can't inspire said chain-suicides with his hiding of the suicide scam.
MY rebuttal to his scheme is that after a long enough time with a life insurance company killing yourself is also insured against, just with a lower payout. The only exception is if you actively hid clinically diagnosed mental illness beforehand from them.
My RFD would have been even longer, but apparently even RFD's have a character limit.
This was a completely fair vote. If the question is legitimately intended to be "would society be better if Wylted was dead" then Pro failed to prove that it would be. Con had effective rebuttals for the insurance money scam idea at the very least, and cast sufficient doubt on everything else to make the overall claim come up short.
Sorry, I just can't bring myself to fairly vote on whether a person should end their life. Regardless of the soundness of the arguments on either side, my vote would remain the same.
You can have fun topics without it being a troll debate. I Don't do troll debates
No it's not.
I can’t figure out whether is considered a troll debate or not.
wrote it in Libre office and the site added quotes, and my time is very limited at the moment so I just had to live with it. I do apologize for it making the debate less readable
Okay. I figured it was probably something like that and wanted to be sure I understood everything correctly.
I think he didn't realise what he was doing. He was pressing enter and it wasn't deleting the quotes.
I'll definitely look everything over one more time and vote when I can. One quick question though; In the last round Pro put his whole argument in a quote? Was all of that quoted from elsewhere or...?
Feel free to vote, ty.
An academic abstraction as in a purely conceptual talking point, like everything else we debate here. This is your life. It's not rhetoric.
When you're depressed you always think the wool's been pulled off from over your eyes and you're finally seeing things as they really are -- the cold, hard, hopeless truth. But I don't really know you. If you think you'll get something out of this debate, it's certainly your right to have it. But I think you've already found the reason why you shouldn't take your life.
What do you mean "Acedemic abstraction"? I wouldn't call myself an academic. My highest level of education is the 9th grade, and by extension I certainly don't engage in anything dealing with acedemia.
I'm more logical when I'm depressed. When I feel good, sometimes I suspect that I'm Jesus or the antichrist. I hear things that aren't there and sometimes see things that don't exist. Even in more sane moments of not being depressed, I'm usually less accurate in my reasoning. Many studies have shown that pessimists make more accurate predictions than optimists.
The fate and value of a human life should not be debated in a win/lose contest like some academic abstraction.
What do you expect this debate to accomplish? By the time you're suicidal, you are beyond the reach of logic. Reasons, arguments -- meaningless. The feeling is all that's truly real; to contemplate anything else is to contemplate the unreal. It has all blurred into a sourceless gray fog without beginning or end, and you are conscious of nothing but the desire to reach a place where you simply cannot think or feel anymore.
You would think that after surviving the traumatic events and having none of that stuff to hold you back, you'd be okay, but it's not true. Some habits I formed then helped me to literally survive, but those same habits don't seem useful now.
I just realized I probably shouldn't have brought up the emotional damage I could do to her, RM may use it against me.
"you said you're not sure if you can make it through this debate without blowing your head off. I'm concerned. Is that true?"
I feel like that some days, or months. Sometimes I can not even get out of bed. I usually need diet pills or some sort of amphetimine during my depressed periods to keep from losing my job and destroying my life by becoming catatonic, but even the stimulants just push back the inevitable and I just end up depressed for long periods. The last 9 months were bad. I almost gave up, but was scared to. I also was afraid of the emotional damage I would do to my fiance. She seems sensitive. Hopefully I can keep my shit together for a while now, and the depressed phases don't come back.
Wyl, you said you're not sure if you can make it through this debate without blowing your head off. I'm concerned. Is that true?
I'm debating over whether I should commit suicide, I'm not threatening to commit suicide. There are a ton of things I should do, that I frequently neglect to.