• bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    No, the whole point is you don’t unless you’re specifically asking “how likely is it for anyone” which is not applicable here. That’s like me trying to figure out how likely I am to die of diabetes within 24hrs when I don’t have diabetes. The answer is 0%, because I don’t have diabetes. So including me in a stat about likelihood of death when discussing diabetes is bad math unless you are trying to calculate the likelihood of it happening to literally anyone, which is not useful beyond answering that specific question.

    You’re also denying the existence of more at-risk groups for things like suicide and illnesses. Different groups are more at risk than others. Imagine calculating how likely someone is to be an alcoholic without considering family history, their social and economic realities, etc. all of which increase or decrease the % chance they will develop alcoholism. Literally 0 experts will agree with your assessment if you leave those risk factors out.

    You don’t include people who aren’t at risk of MRSA. You and I right now discussing this have a near-0% chance of catching it. So near that it functionally is 0%. We are not useful information. We should not be included in calculating the probability because he is more at risk by a large margin. We are not part of the data set.

    • parpol@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      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.