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”.
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.