• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    Yes. What you are listing are coincidences.

    Also understand that it is pretty rare for a whistleblower to have any future in the industry they are blowing the whistle on. That is throwing away years of schooling and often decades of experience. People tend to not do that if they aren’t already ill and not expecting a long life.

    As for “if I die, it is not suicide”: Gonna get real dark for a moment. A lot of people are just looking for a way to make their life, or death, matter. Someone realizing they don’t want to put themselves and their family through a very long trial might very well use that as an excuse to take the easy way out.

    All that said: Obviously these need to be investigated. But there is a big difference between investigating a suspicious death and immediately jumping to conspiracy.

    • parpol@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      Even looking at it from a statistical perspective, these are low chances.

      Let’s do the numbers.

      Suicide rate is 14 / 100,000 (0.00014).

      Deaths from MRSA in the US in 2017 was 20,000 / 325,100,000 (0.000062).

      The chance of either happening to one person is 0.000202 (0.02%). The chance of it happening to 2/12 whistleblowers in the same year is:

      1-((1−(14÷100,000))×(1−(20,000÷325,100,000)))^6 =

      0.00120845658 (0.12%),

      1 out of 826 cases with 12 whistleblowers would have this outcome.

        • parpol@programming.dev
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          2 months ago

          You don’t compare the stats to the population in its entirety

          You do for disease and suicide as it can happen to literally anyone.

          If working for a specific company or being a whistleblower affects those statistics, the company should be held responsible anyway.

            • parpol@programming.dev
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              2 months ago

              From what is currently known about the two whistleblowers neither were particularly at higher risk of suicide or MRSA. The person who died of MRSA was healthy and active with no history of hospitalization whatsoever. Close friends of the first whistleblower claim that suicide was very unlike him, and his previous statement of “if anything happens, it wasn’t suicide” strengthens that.

              There are other commenters here speculating that being a whistleblower makes you at higher risk of suicide, but there are no official statistics on that, so it is at most speculation, therefore I need to use general statistics.

              All probabilistic models and datasets eventually get replaced with more accurate ones, but that doesn’t discredit them until then.