Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by djt 4902 days ago
Two is a pretty low sample for it to be statistically significant.

Anecdotaly, a friend of mine committed suicide and I later found out he was going to jail for robbery.

2 comments

As I said in the original comment, it could just be a coincidence. However, if the bodies continue to pile up over the years (or more likely, that there are far more suicides already on the guy's resume that we simply haven't heard about), that will become less and less likely.
Two is not a sample size. The sample size here is the number of defendants prosecuted.

Two events can be very significant if the prior probability of the event is very low.