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Bo102010 comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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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).
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.