I agree that it doesn't make much sense to kill someone after they've testified, but that 1.6% figure (I think you inadvertently omitted a decimal point) doesn't account for age. Joshua Dean was 45 (0.4% chance of a 45 year old male dying in a given year). John Barnett was 62 (1.5% chance).
Yeah I was way off on the death figure, but the point is relevant: the risk of a large population and a low probability event is that the low probability event can become a near certainty due to normal causes.
~30 whisteblowers[1] over 3 years is a fair number of people in your chance pool - not guaranteed, but there's confounding factors (i.e. stress, disruption to work and family life etc.)
My point was meant to be that saying "there's a chilling effect" is also creating the chilling effect by implying it's there, when in reality it can just be something more akin to the Birthday Paradox.
> ~30 whisteblowers[1] over 3 years is a fair number of people in your chance pool - not guaranteed, but there's confounding factors (i.e. stress, disruption to work and family life etc.)
People who already feel like they have nothing to lose (which I imagine would be correlated with higher chance of death, with causation in either direction) might also be more willing to become whistleblowers in the first place. Doesn't seem a factor in this case though.
The issue is that becoming a Boeing whisteblower is a 1-way gate: once you are one, you're a member of that group for the rest of your life.
Which means if you have a lot of whistleblowers, because you've got a lot of problems, then you have this ever-expanding pool of people who are "Boeing whistleblowers". Which means the probability a Boeing whistleblower dies in any given year goes up as the pool expands.
Which is fine and normal, unless the narrative question we're answering is: "is Boeing killing whistleblowers to deter future whistleblowers?"
And one conclusion is: "no, but they're being deterred anyway, because everyone is insisting they were intentionally killed". Basically the "chilling effect" is the conspiracy theory, not any actual action.
Though I would note a better way to see if they were doing it would be to look at the death rate of current Boeing employees, since if you were killing whistleblowers that's what it would presumably look like - people presently employed by Boeing dying under explainable circumstances without ever taking any action.
> Though I would note a better way to see if they were doing it would be to look at the death rate of current Boeing employees, since if you were killing whistleblowers that's what it would presumably look like - people presently employed by Boeing dying under explainable circumstances without ever taking any action.
Well, that wouldn't have much deterrent effect. I don't think it's likely that Boeing is knocking off whistleblowers, but if they were, it would be more effective as a deterrent for them to do it once the person became well-known.
