The entireworldmedia seems to have had a mass rationality failure about the recent suicides at Foxconn. There have been 10 suicides there so far this year, at a company which employs more than 400,000 people. This is significantly lower than the base rate of suicide in China. However, everyone is up in arms about the ‘rash’, ‘spate’, ‘wave’/whatever of suicides going on there.
When I first read the story I was reading a plausible explanation of what causes these suicides by a guy who’s usually pretty on the ball. Partly due to the neatness of the explanation, it took me a while to realise that there was nothing to explain.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. It’s even harder to achieve this when the fiction comes ready-packaged with a plausible explanation (especially one which fits neatly with your political views).
That’s what I thought as well, until I read this post from “Fake Steve Jobs”. Not the most reliable source, obviously, but he does seem to have a point:
But, see, arguments about national averages are a smokescreen. Sure, people kill themselves all the time. But the Foxconn people all work for the same company, in the same place, and they’re all doing it in the same way, and that way happens to be a gruesome, public way that makes a spectacle of their death. They’re not pill-takers or wrist-slitters or hangers. … They’re jumpers. And jumpers, my friends, are a different breed. Ask any cop or shrink who deals with this stuff. Jumpers want to make a statement. Jumpers are trying to tell you something.
Now I’m not entirely sure of the details, but if it’s true that all the suicides in the recent cluster consisted of jumping off the Foxconn factory roof, that does seem to be more significant than just 15 employees committing suicide in unrelated incidents. In fact, it seems like it might even be the case that there are a lot more suicides than the ones we’ve heard about, and the cluster of 15 are just those who’ve killed themselves via this particular, highly visible, method (I’m just speculating here).
I’m not sure what to make of this—without knowing more of the details its probably impossible to say what’s going on. But the basic point seems sound: that the argument about being below national average suicide rates doesn’t really hold up if there’s something specific about a particular group of incidents that makes them non-independent. As an example, if the members of some cult commit suicide en masse, you can’t look at the region the event happened in and say “well the overall suicide rate for the region is still below the national average, so there’s nothing to see here”
I was surprised when I read a statistical analysis on national death rates. Whenever there was a suicide by a particular method published in newspapers or on television, deaths of that form spiked in the following weeks. This is despite the copycat deaths often being called ‘accidents’ (examples included crashed cars and aeroplanes). Scary stuff (or very impressive statistics-fu).
Yes, this is connected to the existence of suicide epidemics. The most famous example is the ongoing suicide epidemic over the last fifty years in Micronesia, where both the causes and methods of suicide have been the same (hanging). See for example this discussion.
If all the members of a cult committed suicide then the local rate is 100%.
The most local rate that we so far know of is 15⁄400,000 which is 4x below baseline. If these 15 people worked at, say, the same plant of 1,000 workers you may have a point. But we don’t know.
If all the members of a cult committed suicide then the local rate is 100%.
Fair enough—my example was poorly thought out in retrospect.
But I don’t think it’s correct that there’s nothing to explain. If it’s true that all 15 committed suicide by the same method—a fairly rare method frequently used by people who are trying to make a public statement with their death—then there seems to be something needing to be explained. As Fake Steve Jobs points out later in the cited article, if 15 employees of Walmart committed suicide within the span of a few months, all of them by way of jumping off the roof of their Walmart, wouldn’t you think that was odd? Don’t you think that would be more significant, and more deserving of an explanation, than the same 15 Walmart employees committing suicide in a variety of locations, by a variety of different methods?
I’m not committing to any particular explanation here (Douglas Knight’s suggestion, for one, sounds like a plausible explanation which doesn’t involve any wrongdoing on Foxconn’s part), I’m just saying that I do think there’s “something to explain”.
The first question that came to mind when I heard about this story was ‘what’s the base rate?’. I didn’t investigate further but a quick mental estimate made me doubt that this represented a statistically significant increase above the base rate. It’s disappointing yet unsurprising that few if any media reports even consider this point.
Wasn’t there a somewhat well-publicized “spate” of suicides at a large French telecom a while back? I remember the explanation being the same—the number observed was just about what you’d expect for an employer of that size.
Even if the suicide rate was somewhat higher than average it still doesn’t necessarily tell you much. You should really be looking at the probability of that number of suicides occurring in some distinct subset of the population—given all the subsets of a population that you can identify you will expect some to have higher than suicide rates than for the population as a whole. The relevant question is ‘what is the probability that you would observe this number of suicides by chance in some randomly selected subset of this size?’
Incidentally the rate appears to be below that of Cambridge University students:
RESULTS: We identified 157 student deaths during academic years 1970-1996, of which 36 appeared to be suicides. The overall suicide rate was 11.3/100,000 person years at risk. Suicide rates were similar to those seen amongst 15- to 24-year-olds in the general population. There were non-significant trends for male postgraduates to be over-represented and first-year undergraduates under-represented. Examination times were not associated with excess suicide. CONCLUSIONS: Suicide rates in University of Cambridge students do not appear to be unduly high.
Yes, this is my counter-counter-criticism as well. ‘Sure, the overall China rate may be the same, but what’s the suicide rate for young, employed workers employed by a technical company with bright prospects? I’ll bet it’s lower than the overall rate...’
Agreed. Also, I think what got the suicides in China in the news was that the victim attributed the suicide specifically to some weird policy or rule the company adhered to. It could be that the “normal” suicides at the company are being ignored, and the ones being reported are the suicides on top of this, justifying that concern that this is abnormal.
This was why I went looking for stats on suicides amongst university students. I remembered some talk when I was at Cambridge of a high suicide rate, which you might see as somewhat similarly counter-intuitive to a high suicide rate for ‘young, employed workers employed by a technical company with bright prospects’.
Actually, there are a number of reasons to expect a somewhat elevated suicide rate in a relatively high pressure environment where large numbers of young people have left home for the first time and are living in close proximity to large numbers of strangers their own age. Stories about high suicide rates at elite universities tend to take a very different tack to stories about Chinese workers however.
There’s a recreation centre, but the engineers I was training told me they had never been there. Then I saw on TV that there’s a stress room full of these dolls that look like Japanese warriors. You get a bat and you beat them. That’s how they are encouraged to relieve the stress.
Ya, I can see how something like this could happen. By the way, a few statistics don’t exactly prove anything. Was there 10 deaths last year? The year before? Do other factories have similiar problems? Etc. To many variables.
Incidentally, note that the evidence strongly suggests that actively taking out your aggression actually increases rather than decreases stress and aggression levels. See for example, Berkowitz’s 1970 paper “Experimental investigation of hostility catharsis” in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
The entire world media seems to have had a mass rationality failure about the recent suicides at Foxconn. There have been 10 suicides there so far this year, at a company which employs more than 400,000 people. This is significantly lower than the base rate of suicide in China. However, everyone is up in arms about the ‘rash’, ‘spate’, ‘wave’/whatever of suicides going on there.
When I first read the story I was reading a plausible explanation of what causes these suicides by a guy who’s usually pretty on the ball. Partly due to the neatness of the explanation, it took me a while to realise that there was nothing to explain.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. It’s even harder to achieve this when the fiction comes ready-packaged with a plausible explanation (especially one which fits neatly with your political views).
That’s what I thought as well, until I read this post from “Fake Steve Jobs”. Not the most reliable source, obviously, but he does seem to have a point:
Now I’m not entirely sure of the details, but if it’s true that all the suicides in the recent cluster consisted of jumping off the Foxconn factory roof, that does seem to be more significant than just 15 employees committing suicide in unrelated incidents. In fact, it seems like it might even be the case that there are a lot more suicides than the ones we’ve heard about, and the cluster of 15 are just those who’ve killed themselves via this particular, highly visible, method (I’m just speculating here).
I’m not sure what to make of this—without knowing more of the details its probably impossible to say what’s going on. But the basic point seems sound: that the argument about being below national average suicide rates doesn’t really hold up if there’s something specific about a particular group of incidents that makes them non-independent. As an example, if the members of some cult commit suicide en masse, you can’t look at the region the event happened in and say “well the overall suicide rate for the region is still below the national average, so there’s nothing to see here”
Suicide and methods of suicide are contagious, FWIW.
keyword = “werther effect”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werther_effect
I was surprised when I read a statistical analysis on national death rates. Whenever there was a suicide by a particular method published in newspapers or on television, deaths of that form spiked in the following weeks. This is despite the copycat deaths often being called ‘accidents’ (examples included crashed cars and aeroplanes). Scary stuff (or very impressive statistics-fu).
Yes, this is connected to the existence of suicide epidemics. The most famous example is the ongoing suicide epidemic over the last fifty years in Micronesia, where both the causes and methods of suicide have been the same (hanging). See for example this discussion.
If all the members of a cult committed suicide then the local rate is 100%.
The most local rate that we so far know of is 15⁄400,000 which is 4x below baseline. If these 15 people worked at, say, the same plant of 1,000 workers you may have a point. But we don’t know.
At this point there is nothing to explain.
Fair enough—my example was poorly thought out in retrospect.
But I don’t think it’s correct that there’s nothing to explain. If it’s true that all 15 committed suicide by the same method—a fairly rare method frequently used by people who are trying to make a public statement with their death—then there seems to be something needing to be explained. As Fake Steve Jobs points out later in the cited article, if 15 employees of Walmart committed suicide within the span of a few months, all of them by way of jumping off the roof of their Walmart, wouldn’t you think that was odd? Don’t you think that would be more significant, and more deserving of an explanation, than the same 15 Walmart employees committing suicide in a variety of locations, by a variety of different methods?
I’m not committing to any particular explanation here (Douglas Knight’s suggestion, for one, sounds like a plausible explanation which doesn’t involve any wrongdoing on Foxconn’s part), I’m just saying that I do think there’s “something to explain”.
Just curious: why the downvote? Was this just a case of downvote = disagree? If so, what do you disagree with specifically?
Strange. I thought it made a good point, so I just upvoted it.
The first question that came to mind when I heard about this story was ‘what’s the base rate?’. I didn’t investigate further but a quick mental estimate made me doubt that this represented a statistically significant increase above the base rate. It’s disappointing yet unsurprising that few if any media reports even consider this point.
Wasn’t there a somewhat well-publicized “spate” of suicides at a large French telecom a while back? I remember the explanation being the same—the number observed was just about what you’d expect for an employer of that size.
ETA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Telecom
Even if the suicide rate was somewhat higher than average it still doesn’t necessarily tell you much. You should really be looking at the probability of that number of suicides occurring in some distinct subset of the population—given all the subsets of a population that you can identify you will expect some to have higher than suicide rates than for the population as a whole. The relevant question is ‘what is the probability that you would observe this number of suicides by chance in some randomly selected subset of this size?’
Incidentally the rate appears to be below that of Cambridge University students:
Yes, this is my counter-counter-criticism as well. ‘Sure, the overall China rate may be the same, but what’s the suicide rate for young, employed workers employed by a technical company with bright prospects? I’ll bet it’s lower than the overall rate...’
Agreed. Also, I think what got the suicides in China in the news was that the victim attributed the suicide specifically to some weird policy or rule the company adhered to. It could be that the “normal” suicides at the company are being ignored, and the ones being reported are the suicides on top of this, justifying that concern that this is abnormal.
This was why I went looking for stats on suicides amongst university students. I remembered some talk when I was at Cambridge of a high suicide rate, which you might see as somewhat similarly counter-intuitive to a high suicide rate for ‘young, employed workers employed by a technical company with bright prospects’.
Actually, there are a number of reasons to expect a somewhat elevated suicide rate in a relatively high pressure environment where large numbers of young people have left home for the first time and are living in close proximity to large numbers of strangers their own age. Stories about high suicide rates at elite universities tend to take a very different tack to stories about Chinese workers however.
Ya, I can see how something like this could happen. By the way, a few statistics don’t exactly prove anything. Was there 10 deaths last year? The year before? Do other factories have similiar problems? Etc. To many variables.
Incidentally, note that the evidence strongly suggests that actively taking out your aggression actually increases rather than decreases stress and aggression levels. See for example, Berkowitz’s 1970 paper “Experimental investigation of hostility catharsis” in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.