Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the “Foxconn suicides” story... sure the absolute numbers were high, but Foxconn has like a million employees, so the suicide rate was actually completely “normal”.

> 25 people have been killed since May

So 150 people per year, or 0.000015% of India’s population. Sure, it’s a problem, but I’m pretty sure there are bigger problems that are easier to solve (rape and acid attacks come to mind).

View on HN

I couldn't find more historic data points, but extrapolating from 25 since May to 150 per year is a bad approach. There's a difference between: it's been always happening, and this is the most recent summary -vs- April 0, May 1, June 4, July 20.

What would be a better approach, inabsence of other data points?

Don't do analysis which assumes you can extrapolate.

A farmer in India commits suicide about every 30 minutes.

But that's still a tiny fraction of India's population.

India's population is so big any problem short of a rampaging plague epidemic can be dismissed with that logic.

According to the article, it's 25 people having being killed since the beginning of the year because of misinformation spread through whatsapp. It seems like it should be a big deal for the company.

there are always bigger problem to solve. your point? I really don't get how "bigger problem to solve" is ever a valid argument.

Effort/time is limited so you have to prioritise what problems to solve.

Similarly, one could ask if this is something new? Or have WhatsApp merely replaced another media platform.

It has replaced SMS. These issues have existed for a while.

These issues have existed for a while. WhatsApp, unfortunately, accelerated the pace. Messaging a person or a group of persons earlier was expensive and required a lot of effort (selecting individual people to message and each message had a price) and there was no guarantee of message delivery or even timely delivery. WhatsApp made it free and almost instantaneous to inform a much larger set of people reliably.

This is a lynching for flips sake this is a crime several orders of magnitude greater than a crime of passion. presumably you would have told Lady Day that singing strange fruit isn't important as well not that many negros got lynched that year.

Also it looks like a lot of these lynching's are sectarian which is a threat to the good order of the state.

> So 150 people per year, or 0.000015% of India’s population.

This is an enormous and completely baseless leap. Why would you ever assume that the rate of killings is constant? What makes you think these killings aren't part of a rapidly growing phenomenon of social-media driven violence?

Not everything is a trend/signal.

What is rapidly growing is the rate of these events which are reported.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com