| I think this is a case of flawed human pattern recognition. Even in the article, it lumps everything together as “in recent years,” but over the span of several years, people across a large country can die for all sorts of unrelated reasons. That’s just how basic mortality statistics work. Also, the category “scientists” is far too broad. Unless we’re talking about the same organization, the same field of research, and the same timeframe, it’s hard to justify treating these cases as connected. The scope is too wide and the professions too varied. It feels like people are constructing conspiracy theories out of weak patterns because those narratives are more stimulating. If we applied the same logic, we could take annual industrial accident deaths in the U.S. and claim they’re part of some coordinated assassination plan by capitalists. That obviously doesn’t make sense. (Although, to be fair, one could argue that industrial accidents reflect structural issues tied to capital, but that’s a different kind of argument entirely.) What I’m really trying to say is that this kind of article feels like a product of the internet’s incentive structure — framing loosely related events as something suspicious in order to attract clicks and attention. |