Missing worker at Los Alamos National Laboratory found dead in remote forest
latimes.com
latimes.com
About five or six follow the 'went with nothing or just a handgun to the woods [or lake] and never came back' pattern. Those which fit that pattern are all 2025/2026.
- Anthony Chavez was a foreman supervising construction at Los Alamos. Retired in 2017.
- Melissa Casias (from this article) was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos.
- Steven Garcia was a "property custodian at KCNSC."
- Jason Thomas was associate directory of chemical biology at Novartis (pharma company) on cancer treatment.
- McCasland retired 13 years before he went missing.
- Nuno Loureiro was a plasma physicist at MIT.
So the denominator here has to include:
- current and former employees (at all levels, including clerical positions like Melissa Casias or construction workers like Anthony Chavez) of government research facilities
- management at pharmaceutical companies (or presumably, other STEM companies as well?).
- academics working in STEM fields (MIT plasma physicist Nuno Loureiro)
So you have to ask yourself two questions:
- how big is the pool that we're drawing these deaths from? and
- given a pool of this size, how many people in it would you expect to die in a ~3 year period?
To me the answer is really boring - this number of deaths is just utterly unsurprising. It honestly doesn't even rise to the level of being a "coincidence." It's a complete non-event.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/its-not-ju...
"It's not just America, China's top scientists are dying and nobody's talking about it."
In the scheme of things, scientists are a lot less common in any society than, say, waiting staff or groundskeepers. Nuclear physicists are not common – I have met one or two in my time, and they were clearly way above the average in terms of personal intelligence, mathematical ability etc. I've met far more medical researchers. The same would apply to certain other scientific fields.
Lab assistants are more common than experts in any scientific field, and the main questions we should be asking here are which areas of scientific research etc they worked in, and how technically qualified they were.
When you write it out like that, it's obvious that the denominator is ridiculously large and that it would be much more difficult to explain a lack of deaths in such a pool over a ~3 year period.
The missing worker here is typically included in the lists of "suspicious deaths" because she was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos (a government lab).
1. some people argue that the implication of this (along with other deaths of science-adjacent people) is that there's a murder campaign against scientists
2. but this "implication" is actually completely innumerate, and in reality the implication is something like "within a large population, you would expect some people to be murdered or commit suicide."
I looked at the whole context of responses to the post before my post, so (1) seemed obvious to me, and I was mostly following on with (2), but I see that it was confusing. :)
You got the response you did because it sounds identical to naive-pivot conspiracy theorists who just 'ask questions' to try and expound upon the conspiracy theory.
Personally, I’m finding it roughly equivalent to ‘aliens!’