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by enoch_r 15 days ago
Conspiracy theorists don't understand base rates and denominators. They make a list of deaths of people who seem vaguely STEM/"government secret" adjacent and forget to think about what their denominator is. Implicitly, it's "all employees (at all levels) of government labs, plus associate-director-and-up employees at STEM companies, plus all academics working in STEM fields, plus anyone who was formerly in one of these categories."

When you write it out like that, it's obvious that the denominator is ridiculously large and that it would be much more difficult to explain a lack of deaths in such a pool over a ~3 year period.

The missing worker here is typically included in the lists of "suspicious deaths" because she was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos (a government lab).
1 comments
baobabKoodaa 15 days ago
I don't know if you accidentally replied to my comment or not, but my comment was a question. I asked what's the implication? You replied here with a long text that seems to continue implying that something nefarious is going on, without specifying what the implication is (which is what I asked).
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enoch_r 15 days ago
Sorry for the lack of clarity.

1. some people argue that the implication of this (along with other deaths of science-adjacent people) is that there's a murder campaign against scientists

2. but this "implication" is actually completely innumerate, and in reality the implication is something like "within a large population, you would expect some people to be murdered or commit suicide."

I looked at the whole context of responses to the post before my post, so (1) seemed obvious to me, and I was mostly following on with (2), but I see that it was confusing. :)

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cyanydeez 15 days ago
you have to have paid attention to a bunch of other news articles and their conspiracy theory dirivatives. This isn't a new item of any significant note unless you're into conspiracy theories.

You got the response you did because it sounds identical to naive-pivot conspiracy theorists who just 'ask questions' to try and expound upon the conspiracy theory.

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