kodos96 comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Morendil 01 June 2010 06:04PM

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Comment author: kodos96 02 June 2010 06:23:18AM 3 points [-]

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".

Comment author: kodos96 02 June 2010 08:30:10PM 0 points [-]

Just curious: why the downvote? Was this just a case of downvote = disagree? If so, what do you disagree with specifically?

Comment author: SilasBarta 02 June 2010 08:58:08PM 1 point [-]

Strange. I thought it made a good point, so I just upvoted it.