Go ahead and read Dante’s blog above first if you didn’t catch it the other day.
You’ll be back in need of a drink afterwards.
Now grab yourself a seat at the bar.
What’s your poison?
Let’s stick with the Old Fashioned.
Don’t forget the Luxardo maraschino cherry.
But to be honest, we really just need the napkin.
Because today, we’re going to crunch some math.
What on earth are the odds of something like this happening randomly?
That’s where I come in.
I’m good enough at it to be employed as a Barstool Sports stats blogger.
What we have now is a man that reportedly committed suicide a couple months ago.
According to the CDC, some39,000 males committed suicide in 2022.
This probably doesn’t weed out small children much less likely to commit suicide, but whatever.
This is cocktail napkin math.
Now let’s consider the latest convenient death.
Here’s the work.
But we’re not done yet.
This all happened in a span of two months and we’ve been working with annual figures.
We’re now looking at 1 in 5,000,000.
Boeing (jumping behind the bar to interrupt):
Boeing’s right.
We’ve gone too far down the runway.
We forgot to consider the approximately 30 total whistleblowers.
It introduces 435 different possible combinations of two whistleblowers randomly dying with the respective rates described already.
The irony is the more whistleblowers, the more likely things like this can occur randomly.
Time for a new napkin.
Probably a new drink too.
Hell of a parlay hit.
But it’s a good example of the birthday paradox in the wild.
This whole thing is pretty wild.
To play devils advocate, (perhaps literally) there are explanations that can’t be calculated.
Maybe those who are suicidal are more likely to decide to whistleblow.
“Death by whistleblowing is the new death by police” as someone joked on Twitter.
Or maybe the stress of whistleblowing increases chances of self-harm or infection from a stress-induced immune system.
Shit, maybe some other company that rhymes with Fairbus framed Boeing.
Unfortunately, even with the numbers being what they are, it’s still circumstancial.
would have thought on all this.
What do I think?
I think I need another drink.
