[icandoit]

Suicide rates are higher in rural America than in urban America.

https://www.cdc.gov/ruralhealth/Suicide.html

Why imagine what is true when you can take a second and find out what is true? The truth is external to you, look for it. I don't want to be a jerk, but you have generated a hypothesis(great), why not test it against the facts available to you? Maybe you owe it to yourself.

According to this, it is also true of Germany:

https://ij-healthgeographics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...

Let me know if you have better data. (I am aware that Indian Reservation tilt the scales big time toward rural areas, but do not think that removing them as outliers changes the balance)

[kazagistar]

That seems like it's likely mostly just conflated with one of the well known causes of suicide, financial instability and generally being poor. The better data would be studies that try to compare similar socioeconomic classes, age ranges, etc.

I wish it took only a second to find out what is true, but data is complicated and has lots of confounding variables, and it's too easy to not account for them and get totally untrue information out of the data.

[icandoit]

Why insist on causality depending on a single variable? This is very strange to me. Of course the trust is confounded, the truth is multi-variable.

The algorithm to pursue truth:

    1. Find out how you personally differ from happy and healthy people.
    2. Reduce those differences however you can.
    3. Watch yourself become happier and healthier.
    4. That's the whole thing.

Does being poor suck? Yes. Reduce it's likelihood and it's impact.

Don't demand that information conform to your assumption before you can take action. Take action and document your assumptions and challenge them along your journey to improvement.

A neural network does not make demands of its data set. It changes itself to better match the limited truth that it does see.

Uncertainty and doubt are your enemies. Challenge them with data don't reduce yourself to paralysis. Look up "Epistemic learned helplessness".

An example: Will flossing improve my health? Be the kind of person that wants to improve their health and tries to improve their health. Try flossing as matter of character, not based on whether it does independent of the social class of other flossers. If successful people think that other successful people floss, then they will too. There is no isolation among the variables. Don't demand that of reality.

[drderidder]

That's a fair and valid point. I should have expanded on the list of possible factors to include living in a "bad" environment in general, where "bad" can be defined by a huge number of things, including poverty, hopelessness, and a million other things to numerous to mention... other than the one single factor of "air pollution" that this article suggests is the reason for depression and suicide. That was, after all, the point of my comment, in case you missed it; that idea which the article seems to promote - that air pollution causes suicide - is highly questionable.