…and I don’t know which possibility is the least worrying

  • BallShapedMan@lemmy.world
    191·
    2 months ago

    Don’t be fooled by randomness. Randomness comes in clumps. For example if you flipped a thousand coins every day for a year and measured how each one predicted the stock market, heads for up, tails for down, at the end of the year you’ll likely have one coin that far out performs the average. But would you use that coin to determine your investment strategy the next year?

    And yeah Boeing is now killing people outside of their planes.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
        18·
        2 months ago

        Not really. That is just a fact that there’s only 365 days, and the more samples you make increases the odds it’s a sample that overlaps with another (there are fewer unique options).

        What the OP is saying is that sometimes randomness can appear less random than other randomness. True randomness will occasionally give results that closely match something non-random. It’s why almost all music players don’t use true random for shuffle. True random you could have the same song play 15 times in a row. In fact, that is expected to happen eventually (assuming infinite time) just as all other sets of 15 songs are.

        • TheTetrapod@lemmy.world
          14·
          2 months ago

          My dream is for Spotify (and other music playing apps) to let you customize your shuffle algorithm. Minimum number of songs between repeating an artist or album, that sort of thing.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

        The birthday paradox derives from how the chance of somebody there having their birthday on a specific day is 1-in-365 (ish)/nr-of-people hence the chance of two people having their birthday on that specific day is 1-in-365^2/nr-of-people, but the chance of two people having their birthday in the same day out of any days of the year is quite different because it’s not a specific day anymore so it’s quite a different calculation (which I totally forgot ;)).

        In here the closest to that paradox would the chance of 2 whistleblowers of any company with whistleblowers dying within a few weeks of each other (which, depending on how many companies have whistleblowers, can be quite high) compared to the chance of 2 whistleblowers of Boeing dying within a few weeks of each other (which is statistically a lot lower unless there are thousands of Boeing whistleblowers).

        Edit: actually it’s more the chance of any 2 Boeing whistleblowers dying with a few weeks of each other at any point in time (so this includes long after they did it) vs the chance of any 2 Boeing whistleblowers dying with a few weeks of each other during the time they are blowing the whilstle.

        • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
          2·
          2 months ago

          The probability of 2 people having the same birthday is 1 in 365 because it’s the same as picking person A’s birthday as a specific day in the year and checking whether person B has their birthday on that date.

          Now, the reason the number is so low is that you are basically comparing pairs and with 23 people there are 253 different pairings (23 choose 2 or 22*23/2). With each pair having a 1/365 chance to have the same birthday and having 253 distinct pairs, you would have to fail a 1/365 check 253 times in a row. The formula you can use for the success rate is 1 - (1-p)^x with p being the probability and x the number of trials, so in this case

          1 - (1 - 1/365)^253 = 0.5004

          In essence, the unintuitive part of the “paradox” is how fast the number of possible pairs grows the more people you add.

    • RampageDon@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 months ago

      Idk if we have any NYJ fans in here, but 2 years ago the coin meme was born. One fan flipped the same quarter every game to predict a win or a loss. It was correct for like the first 7 or so games of the season. It was a pretty wild ride predicting some unpredictable upsets for the jets for both wins and loses.

    • HongoBongo@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 months ago

      Crunching the numbers in your example, there’s a 92% chance no coin does better than 55% correct. Randomness happens, but the law of large numbers usually refers to much larger numbers than 1000, and there aren’t 1000 huge companies being investigated right now. I think suspicion is warranted here

      • BallShapedMan@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

        You’re saying my intentionally over simplified example to get a point across wasn’t perfect? Amazing analysis…

        Do you go by the nickname Captain Obvious with your friends?

  • psycho_driver@lemmy.world
    37·
    2 months ago

    They definitely killed the first. Just learned about the second and hearing it was MRSA? So who knows. Maybe they’re borrowing some bioweapon tech from their pals at McDonnell Douglas.

    • Nightwatch Admin@feddit.nl
      6·
      2 months ago

      That is true, but let’s not forget big companies have been found guilty (rarely punished) of crimes with no respect for human lives or even rights whatsoever. It isn’t very smart to consider extermination a fact, however it is smart to assume it is a possibility, especially if you are an ethical Boeing employee.

    • neidu2@feddit.nlOP
      8·
      2 months ago

      Possibly. We’ll probably see eventually, either through a myriad of deaths, or a lawsuit with a lot of witnesses.

      • BreadOven@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 months ago

        The second was MRSA/pneumonia. Take off the tinfoil hat…for now anyways.

        Fuck Boeing, but at least wait until another “suicide”.

        Also any 2 points make a straight line with an r^2 of 1.000000. You can’t reliably determine anything with that.

  • rodneylives@lemmy.world
    5·
    2 months ago

    It’s still easily possible that it’s just a coincidence.

    B-U-T

    The fact that people are going to be very suspicious if whistleblowers die, even if it is purely accidental, is yet another reason not to do terrible corporate things. People will always wonder, and Boeing’s management deserves the dark cloud that will now hang over their heads.

  • esc27@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    Could it just be that whistleblowing is intensely stressful and difficult (reporters, lawyers, harassment from former coworkers and company fanboys, difficulty finding new employment, etc.) I imagine all of that makes whistleblowers far more susceptible to disease and mental issues.

    We need stronger whistleblower protection laws. Not just in case companies put out a hit, but also to help the whistleblowers endure and recover from doing the right thing…