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Comment by frankmcsherry | Hacker News Reader

"... a quarter of all fired employees had been unpleasant players. Toxic players tended to be toxic employees, even if the reverse wasn't always true."

Isn't this saying the opposite?

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I don't think so. A = fired employees. B = unpleasant players. B is contained within A, so B implies A ("Toxic players tended to be toxic employees") but not the reverse.

We only have that P[B|A] = 1/4; we don't know anything about P[A|B] without more info.

It could totally be that all non-fired employees are toxic, and viciously went after their weaker colleagues by having them fired! I guess that would make them toxic, but whatever.

And to make it even more complex, we have no idea what portion of the fired employees were toxic. You can be fired for a lot of reasons.

I was just demonstrating that there was a consistent interpretation of the quote from the article.

Though that seems to be how the sentence is actually parsed, it seems odd that that would be true. That indicates that every toxic player worked there, and some of the horrible people who worked there were actually not horrible in the context of the game.

I think what it's trying to convey is that when an employee was a toxic gamer, they were also a toxic employee.

Yes, that's what it would seem like, because that makes sense, but what it actually says is the exact opposite of that - if you're a toxic player, you're also a toxic employee, but if you're a toxic employee, you're not necessarily a toxic player. Seems wrong.

How so?

Maybe Ted for fired for sexual harassment of a co-worker. Maybe he worked for HR and rarely, if ever, played LoL in the first place. He'd be fired as a toxic employee without anything in his LoL chat log to hint at it.

What they're saying is that if you have a toxic LoL chat log, you're likely to be a Ted. But the reverse isn't true: you can have a pristine chat log, and still be a Ted.

Their point is that while toxic players were DISPROPORTIONATELY toxic employees, it's not the case that a MAJORITY of toxic players were toxic employees.

Sorry, I see what you are saying, and I wasn't (intentionally) complaining that 1/4 isn't 1/2 or so. Rather, that the stat only tells us that when you look at toxic employees you find toxic players, rather than vice-versa.

The cited statistic doesn't tell you anything of the kind. It tells you that toxic employees are by and large (~75%) not toxic players, and the following sentence repeats that toxic employees aren't always toxic players.

That followup sentence also supplementally tells you that the sweep of toxic employees happened to catch most of the toxic players. That information is unrelated to the given statistic.

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