3 ms·

I'd consider 35 people who felt that suicide was better than leaving is a pretty solid display of why that argument doesn't work.

• sokoloff 7y ago
  How does that 35 compare to the base population rate of suicide? If it’s within a small margin, I’d conclude that’s a pretty solid display that people are people and some decide to kill themselves.
  • capitol_ 7y ago
    If we start with the assumption that harrasment cause suicides then that argument means that it's ok to harras people as much as others do on average. Obviously there is other causes also. But the base principel is a very shaky foundation to build a legal framework on.
    • sokoloff 7y ago
      Why start with the assumption that harassment causes suicide? We could just as well start with the assumption that vaccines cause autism. We should use our intuition to ask questions rather than to answer them.
  • ridaj 7y ago
    This is, in essence, the argument that the CEO made, during the crisis and at the trial. He kept saying (paraphrasing here) that there was no statically significant increase in the rate of suicides, and because the company was so huge it was bound to have employees killing themselves from time to time, regardless of what management did or didn't do. According to him, the whole affair was a pure media campaign orchestrated by people who disagreed with his management of the company. The incredibly insensitive delivery of this argument cost the man his job years ago. The immense grief of families and coworkers, the fact that the suicides appeared to be work-related (and sometimes even happening at the workplace), the scathing reports by medical inspectors seemed all irrelevant to the dude, who basically just looked at this as a statistic to be managed. His lack of public displays of empathy or desire for introspection was pretty disturbing.
  • denzil_correa 7y ago
    You may want to look into Base rate fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy