Cocktail Napkin Math - Let's Estimate The Odds Of Two Boeing Whistleblowers Randomly Dying In A Two-Month Span
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. Set your feet on the foot rail, sit down, and sink into position from the natural hydrualic release of the fake leather cushion. Enjoy the soft jazz, dim lit ambiance and the little candle giving you just enough to read the uncapitalized typewriter font spelling out ingredients the bartender 100 percent made up to fuck with us.
What's your poison? Classic Old Fashioned? Gin Fizz? Whistleboeing of Death?
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. Long story short, two of - what this article says - 30 or so total Boeing whistleblowers have died in the past two months from reported reasons totally not affiliated with nefarious actors. What on earth are the odds of something like this happening randomly?
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That's where I come in. I think I can take a shot here, but I'm going to spell everything out for full falsifiability of my logic. It's important to know that as a lover of statistics who's good enough at it to be employed as a Barstool Sports stats blogger... 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, some 39,000 males committed suicide in 2022. With 165 million males in the US that gives a .02% chance any one of them would commit suicide in a given year. 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. 45-year old Joshua Dean who died of a terribly gruesome bacterial infection that quickly spread over the course of a couple weeks. Statista shows males between the ages of 45-54 died by any means in 2020 at a rate of 601.5 per 100,000 (.6%). As Boeing is accustomed to, we're going to give them a break here and not consider the fact that Dean just made this grouping band and not the 325 deaths per 100,000 for males aged 35-44.
Alright. Napkin time.
Maybe Francis can ask Dana if this all checks out in their next tutor session but let's get started. If .02% equals a decimal of .0002 and .6% equals a decimal of .006, then we can figure the odds of randomly selecting someone who will commit suicide and another who will die of any means from a sample of 165 million males in the US with just two random selections.
Here's the work.
Or roughly 1:833,333.
But we're not done yet. This all happened in a span of two months and we've been working with annual figures. So let's divide that by six, since 12 months in a year divided by two months = 6.
We're now looking at 1 in 5,000,000.
Boeing (jumping behind the bar to interrupt):
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Boeing's right. We've gone too far down the runway. We forgot to consider the approximately 30 total whistleblowers. This matters. A lot. 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.
Here's the formula for the percent chance of any two guys from a group of 30 dying as they did in a given year. (I know it's probably not likely all the whistleblowers are guys but remember… cocktail math)
Now let's adjust this for a two-month span by dividing it by six.
.0159%. That's my professional (barstool sports blogger) estimate of the odds at least two whistleblowers from a set of 30 randomly die in a two-month span as reported. To fully wrap your head around what that figure means, that's roughly a 1:6,289 chance, or the equivalent to winning a bet at +1,200,000 without the vig. Hell of a parlay hit.
To be honest though, you probably would have bought the 1:5,000,000 figure we got carried away with as 1:6,289 seems kinda low for both these deaths to occur in this situation. But it's a good example of the birthday paradox in the wild. At least, that would be the argument I'd make if I were Boeing's lawyer to detract from the fact that it's STILL 1 IN FRICKING 6,289!!!!
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. I laughed until I thought about it perhaps a bit too much and started becoming the Alonza Mourning on the bench meme.
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. Who knows? Unfortunately, even with the numbers being what they are, it's still circumstancial. Wonder what O.J. would have thought on all this.
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What do I think?
…
I think I need another drink.