> it’s probably a smaller percentage vs. doctors doing un-doctor things

There's roughly 200 doctors convicted every year in the U.S. alone of criminal 'patient abuse or neglect', for data compiled between 1988 and 2026 [1]. While I'd prefer to cite the 'patient abuse' figure since 'patient harmer' is the most equivalent behavior to 'firefighter arsonist' (both cause the problem they treat), I think it's worth remembering that human beings — regardless of their profession — have a slim but non-zero chance of deciding to create problems that give them professional satisfaction to solve.

[1] https://plaindiscipline.com/action-type/conviction-patient-a... —

This may also be subject to survivorship bias, and there may be a portion of firefighter arsonists who escape prosecution or conviction

> all of them are serial arsonists, which means three or more fires

So, the number '100', has to wildly low, as some arsonists will not have been caught, or only started one or two fires.

I don't think you can extrapolate it to every profession lol. Even in your example, doctors and cops face much more scrutiny and doing an "undoctor" thing can mean your career is gone. It is far easier for them to comit arson tbh than do the equivalent opposite of their profession's general aims

> Australia gets very dry and pretty severe bush fires. We have the same unfortunate phenomena, 2019

2019 was an American right wing/Facebook/Twitter job to downplay climate change and instead push the narrative that it was all done by arsonists

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-08/fires-misinformation-...

He said the topic appeared to be attracting a "suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts".

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Sad to see that American narrative about Australia still being spread

Creating problems that can only be solved by writing software! It's a subset of the 'expert user PEBCAK' category — a term any long-term IT help desk professional will recognize immediately, even if they've never encountered it before.

Experts create the worst problems and when experts bring the help desk those worst problems, sometimes the reply must be "You caused it, you fix it; or, we can restore your device to an IT-supported state after you backup whatever data you don't want to lose". So, what problems have you created that require you to engineer solutions for them? Did you create those problems intentionally? A lot of us do so in our 'home lab environments', and that's what they're for. But doing so intentionally at work — not accidentally — is called 'making work for yourself so you get paid by someone to fix problems you created', and that is a perfect match for 'firefighter arsonist'.

(None of this is accusation, this is just analogy-building; both 'software' and 'you' are swappably generics for any profession and any engineer, respectively.)

You're secretly a robot.

For fun, I'll say. You're trying to apply reason to emotion, not realising emotion drives everything. Consequently you think it's acceptable to force everyone to accept (your) superior reasoning, for their own good, whether they want it or not. Think Vulcan.

20y ago in Poland there was a huge story where the ER responders were killing people to sell hints to a funeral house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_Hunters

Maybe politicians. They try to stage violent attacks against themselves and then accuse other parties for their own political gain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

Cybersecurity researchers who let loose worms or ransomware?

Car mechanics who break things so you come back for more business?

Airline pilots who... hijack their own flight?... Hm

Tire dealers that go around puncturing tires has been a urban legend for decades

> Developers who insert bugs

I knew it was the developers!

Garbageman comes to mind

There is nearly a 100% conviction rate of the closest family member if the spouse/child/parent dies soon after a life insurance policy is created

My theory is that there is at least one serial killer that is a life insurance agent or someone that can see all the new policies

Why will developers insert bugs and make their own work harder? there is no extra recognition there, which is primarily a reason why they are doing it. But if you are regularly shipping bugs because you feel good at then fixing it and expect people to appreciate you for it, how long do you think that dev will last at a role?

Your stats sent me into sobering-thoughts-mode...

More sobering thought: conviction rates are typically a small percentage of the people who do the foul deed. The definition of "arsonist", for example. What if someone started "just one" fire?

A more sobering thought: of the total fires fought each year, how many are started by those rogue firefighters?

A most sobering thought: why is it that there is so much fallow time, that they get bored?

This is the fact that’s literally a .0001% chance

> There are 349 million people in the US, so the number of arsonists is 0.0001% of the general population. The number of firefighters that are arsonists (100/65,795) is 0.0015%, so I suppose it's slightly higher that the general population.

You comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists. That’s the wrong comparison. You should be comparing arsonists/pop with firefighter-arsonists/firefighters. Or firefighters/pop with firefighter-arsonists/arsonists.

(On top of that, mixing numbers from different sources can be problematic. For example, how are repeat convictions treated in the different sources? Who counts as a firefighter?)

This 'article' (its a blog post if anything) is based on this this CBC article.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fires-set-by-firefig...

The article refers to a report that 404s.

Both the OPs post and the CBC article say records aren't detailed for this so unless theres some studies (lol funding in current political era) you prob will never have real percents.

But i think its fair to say yea firefighters are more likely to be arsonists i guess.

> the number of arsonists is 0.0001% of the general population. The number of firefighters that are arsonists (100/65,795) is 0.0015%, so I suppose it's slightly higher that the general population.

Trying to imagine being really into math and seeing one number that’s fifteen times bigger than another number and posting “that’s slightly higher”

Excellent point. We absolutely should not care that the people we hire to protect are are sometimes convicted of harming us. It's only a few hundred victims a year so we should utterly ignore that it's happening. That traditionally solves all issues.