A man, a boat, a storm. The man, Mike Lynch, a ‘tech’ billionaire. The boat, a ‘super-yacht’. (All these words one did know ten years ago.) The storm, a ‘waterspout’. The boat was called Bayesian. Ah, well, our modern ‘tech’ people like to be scientifically literate. Musk with his ‘Tesla’. And now Lynch with his ‘Bayesian’.
There are three levels of interest about the sinking of the Bayesian.
The first thing that makes the story of the Bayesian interesting is obvious: we have a story of the rich in a yacht in a storm, a story which ends not tragically but sadly. Not tragically, because it was apparently uncaused by the acts of Lynch and his friends and family and their crew. Sadly, because it was unexpected: an ‘act of God’, as we might say, or simply a sign of the arbitrariness of the goddess Fortuna. It is very sad: no one can hear of the story without regretting the accident. The fate of the daughter, due to go to Oxford, is a particularly poignant element.
The second thing is the mystery of what exactly caused it: what caused this yacht to go down so spectacularly. There is something of a miniature Titanic about the story: the privileged going down as a consequence of a natural event. But there are other speculations: that, perhaps, it was caused by human error; or, even more beguilingly, that it was caused by natural events as caused by human error – and here we have to sadly notice the Guardian article which argued that the “climate crisis fuelled the storm that sank the yacht” – “say experts”, of course.
But I’d say that there is a third and deeper enigma about this story and it is found in the name of the boat. Bayesian. There is something sinister about that name. At first it made me think of the Shakespearian word Bezonian, and the Miltonian word Serbonian: associations of choosing your king carefully when talking to a king (political dangers), and of armies drowned in the depths (natural dangers). Some commentators have noticed the name, Bayesian. Charles Moore made a wry comment on it in his Spectator piece. (He was due to meet Lynch for lunch next month.) The Guardian observed that the boat was named after Thomas Bayes, clergyman responsible for a theory which inspired Lynch’s work. I wonder what proportion of its readers looked a bit further into the subject.
Well, the enigma, the oddity, here is that Lunch named his boat Bayesian but that the boat Bayesian behaved in what seems to have been a desperately unbayesian way. This is what I would suggest is an almost tragic irony: and why it is the name that drags the whole story to a darker, more tragic, possibility.
For the death of Lynch might have been tragic. The boat presented a challenge to the same YHWH – that’s God to me and you – who dealt briskly with the Nimrod who built the Tower of Babel. Pride comes before a fall, and all that. Lynch, in naming his boat Bayesian, appeared to be building the strangest of all babels, one which floated, like an ark, like the Titanic, but which was kept in the pleasurable waters of the Mediterranean, and which had the second tallest mast in the world. (75 metres on a 56 metre boat.) Building tall objects always risks angering a thunder god, does it not?. And Lynch called this Babel Bayesian.
Not even ‘Bayes’, signifying, “I admire a man”, but ‘Bayesian’, as if not only exalting but embodying the very theorem of Bayes.
What is the theorem of Bayes?
Well, here, almost immediately, I come to an abyss where knowledge appears to exist and I am not the master of it. But anyone with eyes to see can observe an irony.
Tom Chivers this year published Everything is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World. The tagline of the book is, “Can you predict the future? Yes of course you can!” (Also, and of some interest to us: “Why are conspiracy theories effective and how can you combat them?”) Well, of course, the owner of the Bayesian, alas, failed to predict the future.
Bayesian probability is highly technical. It depends on a formula:
- P(AB) = (P(BA)(P(A))/(P(B))
or “the probability of A given B” is “the probability of B given A” multiplied by “the probability of A” all divided by “the probability of B”. This means very little to me, but the salient point seems to be that in the 18th Century Bayes originated one of two major ways of explaining probability. It is the lesser one, the minority report.
The majority report way of explaining probability, the non-Bayesian one, is objective. It ignores what people believe. It deals only in the facts, the ‘hard’ facts, we might say. This is sometimes called frequentist probability: it involves looking at how often something has happened in the past and then claiming to know what probability there is that it will happen again in the future. It treats probability as a property of the world.
Bayesian probability, if I understand it right, treats probability as a property of the mind. In other words, it deals not with hard facts, but with the world as affected by our beliefs. It includes subjectivity. Interestingly, it involves the view that our expectation of what will happen is an element in whether it happens or not. It is, I am told, not that common in science, but is important for risk assessment, and the statistical analysis of dynamic systems.
The question is, is probability a property of reality or a property of our awareness of reality? In other words, is it objective, or subjective: it is to do with our minds, or not?
Difficult questions. But it brings us back to an essential point which is that whatever view we take of science, and whether scientific probability should be objective or include subjectivity, there is no question that politics is where we find muddy realities, with no clarity, no ‘solutions’, only guesses, proposals, compromises and bits of force. Life is more like politics than science. Could Lynch predict the future? No. Obviously not. And even with his admiration for Bayesian logic and statistics, he was no wiser than any of us about what was in store for him.
“Science,” writes Chivers, “is explicitly about making predictions – hypotheses ¬– and testing them. The problem is that in science, we like to think that there is an objective truth out there, and the Bayesian model of perception is explicitly subjective. A probability estimate isn’t some fact about the world, but my best guess of the world, given the information I have.”
Lynch not only made his best guess, but pinned that standard to the mast by naming his super-yacht after a theorem about making best guesses. He claimed that probabilities were not properties of the world, and, like Nimrod, challenged YHWH to prove him wrong. He was proved wrong.
There is more to this story. A detail mentioned sometimes, but not always, is that Lynch was celebrating his acquittal in a vast U.S. fraud case: and that his co-defendant in the case, Stephen Chamberlain, was killed in Cambridgeshire on Saturday 17th: hit by a car near Ely while out running. One defendant was fatally struck on Saturday, and his death was announced late on Monday the 19th; after the sinking of the Bayesian on the same day, Monday, though Lynch’s death was only confirmed on Friday. What are the odds? Such a remarkable coincidence seems to have something about it: not conspiratorial, there is no need for that, but certainly tragic, as if it were destined. Lynch apparently told a friend that the acquittal, in June of this year, had given him a “second life”. Well!
The only other writer I have seen who has noticed all of this is Rowan Pelling of Perspective Media: I found her piece after writing most of the above. She was so surprised by the coincidence that she wrote to the novelist D.B.C. Pierre, who replied: “It is the stuff of novels, to be freshly acquitted along with a partner in a 10-year fraud trial and then each be nailed in a one-in-a-million act of God on the same day. But even Putin couldn’t pull that off, especially the water spout.” Pelling speculates that we are seeing the return of the pagan gods. Well, whoever: YHWH, Homeric gods, the goddess Fortuna. It is a sobering story.
Bayesian probabilities might be better than the other sort, but the boat called Bayesian still rests on the floor of the Mediterranean.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Purely on the basis of mathematical probability none of us should exist today. But we do.
Purely on the basis of mathematical probability the Bayesian should have had an infinitely small, albeit nonzero probability of sinking.
But it did sink.
“When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?” John Maynard Keynes. Sounds like a Bayesian to me, updating his beliefs with new information.
As to the frequentists dealing only in facts, hard facts. Poppycock, as the Dutch would say. The Law of Large Numbers says that if only you had more frequent sampling then you might converge to the right answer however you may still need even more data.
If you want actual facts then you must dismiss these mere Statisticians and consult the Mathematicians. Probability theorists look down on frequentists and Bayesians alike.
Probability is the likeliness that the outcome a random selection experiment will have a certain value or set of values. Eg, the probability of getting an even number when throwing a dice is 0.5 (50%). In practice, this means the number of even numbers selected by rolling a dice for a long time will converge to half the number of times the dice was being rolled.
This calculation is based on something called relative frequency. Given a set of n values, the relative frequency of a certain value x is the number of times x occurs in the set divided by the number of values in the set (n, multiplying the result with 100 yields a so-called percentage).
Relative frequencies can obviously also be calculated for sets whose members weren’t selected randomly. That’s the trade of
duplicitous activistssocial scientists: They take a miniscule number of observations about the real world, say 13 of 15 people who were jailed last Tuesday were black, calculate the relative frequency of an event they’re interested in and then fraudulently claim this would be the probability of the event occuring despite it isn’t. In this case, this would work as follows: There are 2,485,724 black people living in the UK (2021/22 census). 13 of them were jailed last Tuesday, relative frequency 0.000005. These represent 3.7% of the total population which is thus 67,181,729. 2 of non-black people were jailed last Tuesday, relative frequency 0.00000003. Now, the headline generator is turned on:Extreme structual racism in the UK judical system! Study shows blacks 166¹ times more likely to be jailed!!
That’s contrived exampe I just made up. But it demonstrates how such claims are justified.
¹ 0.000005 / 0.00000003 = 166 ⅔.
Only if the die is fair (edit: and has an even number of sides).
It also depends what numbers are placed on those sides.
This also depends on gravity neither suddenly stopping nor fluctuating in unpredictble ways, say, because this happens on an irregularly rotating space station. Also on a numbering system which includes even numbers. And a lot of other implicit assumptions someone could dream up here. But these escape vents for the poor creativity of people who can only come up with nonsense when being asked to come up with anything notwithstanding, people who read the text will have understood what was meant.
I am a complete dunce when it comes to mathematics.
I can only wonder about strange things others with seafaring experience have pointed out: why the whole crew and the captain survived and were first into the lifeboat, why the crew didn’t raise the alarm when the ship started dragging its anchor, why didn’t they close all the wide-open windows and make other preparations for the storm, why didn’t the captain make sure that someone was on “anchor watch” 24/7, why didn’t they heed the weather warnings of the storm, like all the fishermen who kept their own boats safely in harbour that night, and what are the statistical chances of both of the acquitted defendants in that fraud case being killed almost on the same day, a thousand miles apart, one on land and the other at sea?
Is someone bearing a grudge? It certainly isn’t Yahweh, or more correctly “E-a weh”, though He always gets the blame for the things that Satan does.
Or in this case, things that Satan’s human agents do.
I completely agree. I saw the extraordinary ‘coincidence’ at once and it immediately prompted me to question what had happened or what we were being told. Satan’s agents, not Yahweh. And certainly not pure chance or simply human error!
Yes, and I forgot to mention the keel which seafarers said had been retracted, when it should have been fully lowered for stability.
Yet another interesting point. Thank you.
Same here. The “coincidences” smell very fishy. I am inclined to think that Lynch and his co-defendant weren’t supposed to win the court case.
I was wondering about that, too. Or maybe if they had lost and been imprisoned, they couldn’t have been dispatched without suspicion, like Epstein, so they were allowed to win and be released, in order to make them easier targets for revenge.
Maybe the real coincidence was his name ?
A friend of Lynch did a TV interview today and who has written a fresh obituary which includes how Lynch started in the Industry – through music and not it seems through science or engineering.
He mentioned the technology the US has been developing for over three decades called HAARP.
It is the most powerful atmospheric heater in the world.
HAARP, the most powerful ionosphere heater on Earth
Whether or not it applies to HAARP, he was suggesting that over the past three decades technology may have been developed which could cause severe local weather conditions.
All of this is denied by the US – with claims that it is for use in investigating the upper atmosphere.
But the HAARP project was initiated by the US military and developed in Alaska away from centres of population, industrial and farming activities.
Those activities are of course carried out on the ground and not in the upper atmosphere.
Wow— That’s scary stuff! You may be onto something there, because no one could actually see a “waterspout” in the pitch-blackness of four o’clock in the morning out over the sea. News reports are now saying “wind gust” instead of “waterspout”. If you watch the videos of the Bayesian’s mast lit up against the total darkness, then being obscured by lashing rain, tipping slightly before the lights went out, and remember that the nearby Dutch ship that rescued the survivors also managed to weather the same “wind gust”, it makes you wonder if it really is possible for humans to deliberately “cause severe local weather conditions”, as Lynch’s friend said.
Can they really pinpoint their weather weapon so precisely? Maybe they can, like the strange “D.E.W.” pinpointing of the Californian, Hawaiian and Australian wildfires that melted cars, dissolved houses to the ground, but left green trees standing all around.
If you do a search you will find in the US and in China people have been colouring the roofs of their houses blue.
Why?
Because unlike all the other colours, blue will not absorb radiation from non-visible Directed Energy Weapons [DEAs] which can also be used to affect local weather conditions.
It is of course all described as conspiracy theory and the like.
The problem with that is what the authorities like to describe as the conspiracy theory of yesterday becomes the conspiracy fact of today, like the Wuhan gain of function research funded by the US with the help of Dr Anthony Fauci.
Thanks for that important point about the colour blue, which I’d forgotten, but now that you mention it, I remember some saying that Hollywood celebrities like Oprah Winfrey had painted their roofs blue, and those houses survived the Hawaiian fires.
Well here are a few interesting snippets.
Who lost this fraud case against Mike Lynch? Hewlett-Packard.
And who owns Hewlett-Packard?
Vanguard, Black Rock & State Street.
And who has been in charge of Black Rock and then Vanguard?
Someone named after an Ottoman Sultan.
And where has Hewlett-Packard been heavily investing for years?
Turkey.
And who did the Captain of the Bayesian work for before joining the Bayesian?
A Turkish millionaire/billionaire.
I’m sure there’s no connection at all, just sayin’ it’s interesting…
Maybe instead of blaming God, Professor Alexander might look closer to where he lives and works now.
CIA?
Maybe , all the crew surviving surely gives the game away !
The cook died
Maybe he wasn’t in on it. “Collateral damage”.
The semi-official version is that the crew were working and so on upper decks which accounts for their survival.
The problem with that theory is it was 4am and the boat was at anchor so pretty much everyone would have been in their cabins but strangely the crew were not:
The 16 minutes that plunged the Bayesian yacht into a deadly spiral
If this was an assassination, someone may be working overtime reading all the speculation about it and developing embellishments to the cover story(s) to cover them.
Like the crew were up late darning their socks because it was sock darning night.
Nice one!
You are spot on again. The crew should have been tucked up in bed asleep at 4 o’clock in the morning, except for the watchmen. What were they all doing up on deck, ready for the off?
Was there only one cook?
There were a lot of people to feed on that boat.
The menu might have been less popular than desirable.
From the link for Chamberlain’s death “The driver of the car, a 49-year-old woman from Haddenham, remained at the scene and is assisting with enquiries.”
If it was an assassination there will always be a patsy and cover story which does not even have to be a good one but enough to muddy the water in news reports – standard operating procedure.
We have JFK assassination for the classic patsy – Lee Harvey Oswald and the Warren investigation and report to cover it all up.
The mortality rate among key eye witnesses was way above statistical averages.
All doctors in attendance on Kennedy after the assassination in a recent documentary – Fall 2023 – admitted they were told to change their evidence if they knew what was good for them.
I’m not sure what connection any intelligence services would have with this, since they didn’t lose any money from the court case.
Our security services do what they are told to do.
Its the people doing the telling and the people telling the people who do the telling and the people who tell them to do the telling whose interests and motives one needs to understand.
But sadly, how can any ordinary member of the public find out?
After all, a secret intelligence service ain’t much good if it cain’t keep a secret is it?
Very Interesting snippets indeed and all go to confirm me in my supposition that the deaths are extremely fishy!
They certainly are !
You could win the case with that info , best not go Jogging or sailing for a while !
I trust the Italians and their British colleagues will thoroughly investigate the whole thing, and discover the truth.
Winning the Lottery is unlikely as well but someone does win it, and sometimes individual boats will sink and individual planes will crash, even if this is mostly unlikely for boats and planes as a whole.
Could it be foul play? The sinking of the yacht is certainly very suspicious. Wait until there is a bad weather forecast, then either send a diver or bribe a crew member to sabotage the yacht. Meanwhile, someone is watching the other defendant, and pushes him into the path of a car.
So very many suggesting foul play.