Research Article Analyzing SN use on SaSu

[daley]

I hope this hasn't been posted before.
It should come as no surprise that SaSu is a source for internet research.

Here is an article:
Emerging Trends of Self-Harm Using Sodium Nitrite in an Online Suicide Community: Observational Study Using Natural Language Processing Analysis,
published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research on May 2024.

They show how to detect the popularity of methods, the countries from which SN is sold and purchased, etc.

The article describes in detail the way they collect the data and how they analyze it.
It includes an appendix with lists of words that were used for detecting suicide methods and purchasing of substances.
This could (perhaps) be very interesting if we wanted to avoid future analysis.

Here is the github code: https://github.com/das-sudeshna/sodium-nitrite .

 

[a time in time]

Super interesting and thanks for posting this....

 

[astr4]

feels so icky knowing we're just being watched like that lol

 

[ms_beaverhousen]

*Whips head around sharply, looks out into the distance with wide eyes, and whispers...*

"They're coming."


(jkk)

 

[pthnrdnojvsc]

from the monsters article : "There is growing concern around the use of sodium nitrite (SN) as an emerging means of suicide"

concern? why are these monsters concerned with that strangers do with their own lives ?why is it the business of another ape if i or others want to exit this prison ?

to me it's not logical or rational to be concerned with what strangers are doing with their own lives especially since they are not bothering anyone else.

don't these pos know that we all die anyway. so they are concerned strangers don't want to prolong the suffering .

maybe they should do all my to do lists, work 15 hours per day a job chores for decades so i can stay alive then die anyway in pain in old age.

they're supposed to be scientists . shouldn't they know a human is just cells a machine ?

they are using a lot of money from gov grants to fund this study.

 

[lionetta12]

from the monsters article : "There is growing concern around the use of sodium nitrite (SN) as an emerging means of suicide"

concern? why are these monsters concerned with that strangers do with their own lives ?why is it the business of another ape if i or others want to exit this prison ?

to me it's not logical or rational to be concerned with what strangers are doing with their own lives especially since they are not bothering anyone else.

don't these pos know that we all die anyway. so they are concerned strangers don't want to prolong the suffering .

maybe they should do all my to do lists, work 15 hours per day a job chores for decades so i can stay alive then die anyway in pain in old age.

they're supposed to be scientists . shouldn't they know a human is just cells a machine ?

they are using a lot of money from gov grants to fund this study.

I believe that the "scientists" behind this study have some different views and opinions on life, suicide and humans than other modern scientists might have because they are all from a very religious/christian private university in Georgia, USA. I had some professors who got their degrees from this university, and they were also very devoted to their religion and brought that into our studies for some reason, even though our studies were on non-religious topics.

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

Alright then fine. I hope you researchers and journalists out there are happy. I'm about to blow the SN operation wide open with what I have to share. I'm sure the rest of the forum will be talking about it for years to come. You're all not gonna wanna miss these deep scientific advancements either if it's a method you plan to use. Pay attention.

Spoiler: Watch closely

Seriously.

Spoiler: This is going to change things forever

Ok keep going

Spoiler: Not for the faint of heart

You're getting warmer

Spoiler: Almost there

It's not too late to turn back

Spoiler: Okay here it is

 

[swankysoup]

How horrible, a bunch of privileged idiots preying on the members of their own species. What is their solution, lock us up in cages and pump us full of neurotoxins until we stop thinking about solutions to our struggles? That seems to be the standard psychiatric approach.

 

[Emeralds]

The article was interesting. They really put a lot of work into their research. The results aren't a surprise.

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

I believe that the "scientists" behind this study have some different views and opinions on life, suicide and humans than other modern scientists might have because they are all from a very religious/christian private university in Georgia, USA. I had some professors who got their degrees from this university, and they were also very devoted to their religion and brought that into our studies for some reason, even though our studies were on non-religious topics.

You weren't wrong about some of these author's affiliations and past work being... interesting. What else could one expect from Georgia, USA?

I looked into some of the other papers these authors contributed to, which ranged from scraping social media posts to try and track prescription drug users who are not taking their meds exactly as prescribed, making AI chat bots for young children, gems like bashing chronic pain patients who need opioids, a la "...and the detrimental public health consequences of its treatment with opioids", to one of them having a weird fixation about bad actors of islam and having multiple papers about "islamic state communication strategies".

The public health field is already full of so much toss, imo, because trying to strong arm people into doing procedures or acts "for their own good" rather than respecting bodily autonomy and informed consent in one's medical decisions, or attempting to take away one's freedom to drink, smoke, or take drugs of their own violition, has never sat right with me. But whatever is going on at this university department seems like a total waste of funding money.

It seems like this institution doesnt actually care about drug users, suicidal people, or those with debilitating chronic pain, they just want these individuals to "stop doing the bad thing" for the sake of public health. There is so much emotional bias in some of these papers to appeal to idiots in the USA who seem to think doctors hand out percocet and morphine to everyone without blinking, and that you can use AI to spy on people and make them behave a certain way.

What a bleak universe we are living in. With all the money wasted on this type of research, I wonder how much could have been invested into actually studying factors that make people seek out suicide resources in the first place, or god forbid, actual fucking help.

 

[kat6]

I would like to contribute to their study:
sodium nitrite is NaNO2. tin is SN. Yeah, like a tin can. People use made up abbreviations and slangs informally but maybe on your PhD medical research article you should use the accurate name instead of analyzing the disturbing trends of tin purchase. You are welcome, no need to cite me as a reference. I can't take it seriously when I'm picturing the tin man from wizard of oz…

 

[daley]

I looked into some of the other papers these authors contributed to, which ranged from scraping social media posts to try and track prescription drug users who are not taking their meds exactly as prescribed, making AI chat bots for young children, gems like bashing chronic pain patients who need opioids, a la "...and the detrimental public health consequences of its treatment with opioids", to one of them having a weird fixation about bad actors of islam and having multiple papers about "islamic state communication strategies".

Not all of these researches are limiting their research to health. And it doesn't seem that most of them specialize in suicide.
This paper is mostly technical, and the issues that bother us are simply not on their radar.

The public health field is already full of so much toss, imo, because trying to strong arm people into doing procedures or acts "for their own good" rather than respecting bodily autonomy and informed consent in one's medical decisions, or attempting to take away one's freedom to drink, smoke, or take drugs of their own violition, has never sat right with me. But whatever is going on at this university department seems like a total waste of funding money.

I don't think this university department is atypical.

It seems like this institution doesnt actually care about drug users, suicidal people, or those with debilitating chronic pain, they just want these individuals to "stop doing the bad thing" for the sake of public health. There is so much emotional bias in some of these papers to appeal to idiots in the USA who seem to think doctors hand out percocet and morphine to everyone without blinking, and that you can use AI to spy on people and make them behave a certain way.

I am far from an expert, but I think the way research topics are decided on is far from what you imagine.
Universities have researches who are pretty much independent and decide on what they want to research.
So the universities don't decide directly what the researchers will research.

However, researchers are under pressure to publish papers in respectable conferences and journals,
because that is how their worth is measured, and how they are promoted. It seems likely to me
that the way such a research would materialize is that somebody thought of using SaSu as a
data source, and only later decided exactly what could be extracted form it, that might
be interesting for a respectable journal to publish. Getting accepted to be published
by a journal is no easy task, since the papers are peer reviewed, and the more
prestigious the journal, the more difficult it is to get accepted. A medical journal would
likely be interested in ways to forecast the rise of method popularity, so that's the
analysis the authors decided to go with.

It is upsetting, but nobody here is evil. It's just how the system works.

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

Not all of these researches are limiting their research to health. And it doesn't seem that most of them specialize in suicide.
This paper is mostly technical, and the issues that bother us are simply not on their radar.



I don't think this university department is atypical.


I am far from an expert, but I think the way research topics are decided on is far from what you imagine.
Universities have researches who are pretty much independent and decide on what they want to research.
So the universities don't decide directly what the researchers will research.

However, researchers are under pressure to publish papers in respectable conferences and journals,
because that is how their worth is measured, and how they are promoted. It seems likely to me
that the way such a research would materialize is that somebody thought of using SaSu as a
data source, and only later decided exactly what could be extracted form it, that might
be interesting for a respectable journal to publish. Getting accepted to be published
by a journal is no easy task, since the papers are peer reviewed, and the more
prestigious the journal, the more difficult it is to get accepted. A medical journal would
likely be interested in ways to forecast the rise of method popularity, so that's the
analysis the authors decided to go with.

It is upsetting, but nobody here is evil. It's just how the system works.

It is disappointing, the way the system works. While I do not know how it works at this university and didn't do my degrees in the US, where I studied you have to apply for grants from external bodies, and your university may also have a pool of money from previous grants that you might be able to dip from if your proposed area is relevant to that grant. Since this is a large private university they likely have more money than most especially for such projects, but ultimately a faculty member of the university would need to approve a project and agree to supervise the PhD students.

Ultimately, what is researched is determined by investors at the organisations, not really the individuals as many proposals get rejected every year if they are not deemed groundbreaking or impactful enough. I did not get a choice what I studied in my graduate degree, because it was determined by the funding given to PIs. In both my bachelor's and masters I was trained to write about, not what is of interest to you necessarily, but what is convincing to someone else that it is worthy of investment and doesn't come off as superfluous. So I can imagine to a lot of donors that restricting access to methods is seen as a good justification for funding.

The system is very publish or perish, you are very right about that. A lot of research from the US will be seen as higher quality inherently and publishable, often times US conferences don't even let people from developing countries enter even if they have done amazing work. Though the faculty at my university always told me that people will go for high and low impact journals until they find one willing to accept their work, since there are so many of them.

I wonder if this sort of research topic would gain as much traction in other countries, or be seen as intrusive and unnecessary, especially as more and more people do not consent to their data being harvested to train AI machine learning models. I do not think this study would be approved in an EU country because there are much stricter regulations on the management of user data and privacy due to GDPR, though I am uncertain.

I just question the motivation of people willing to work on such research, from a technical standpoint it is impressive but also so dystopian, to use AI for such purposes. Who knows how many of these people have accounts on here and roleplay out of sick curiosity. As someone who spent years training to be a researcher myself, it's just sad to see. In many other fields you would want consent before obtaining sensitive data like this.