Bayesian Yacht Sinks; Connected Man Run Over By Car: A Working Coincidence

So a 184-foot yacht named Bayesian sank while anchored in a freak windstorm off Sicily. Its billionaire owner now sleeps with the fishes. The name of the boat naturally brings it to our attention.

Firstly for the opportunity for rich black humor. Somebody on line, commenting on the headline announcing the bizarre sinking, said something like “I wonder what his prior for this was.” But I said, and you should learn this lesson well, that it was the posterior that always matters.

Well. That’s one joke. In the Too Soon category, no doubt. There are others.

What makes the story even more interesting, and why we are bothering to bother about it, is that the dead billionaire was one Mike Lynch, who had just won the last of his trials over accusations he had over-valued his AI properties. This source has the details. Lynch, a Brit, had to be extradited to the USA for his criminal trial.

The AI software (Autonomy) was sold to HP. The software supposedly had a way to conduct surveillance over live streams (like in video games), among other places. AI, as I have reminded us many times, is only a model, and all models only say what they are told to say. Which means we do not have to fear models taking over the world. But we do have to worry, as I have also said many times, about increasing surveillance. Did we not, for example, just read that “nearly everybody’s” social security number was just “stolen”?

Anyway, ignoring the precise details of his criminal trial, Lynch beat the rap.

Now what makes all this fascinating to us is the following coincidence. Lynch was set free a few weeks ago. And then died on 19 August. Lynch had a co-defendant, one Stephen Chamberlin, who ran the finances of Autonomy. This Chamberlin was not on the yacht. But he was on the side of the road in England, jogging, where he was runned over by a car, and kilt dead. On 17 August.

At the time of this killing, Chamberlin was running a surveillance-cyber-security company called Darktrace. Ian Carrol (owner of a magnificent moustache) brings us the details in a short video.

All but one of the crew survived the sinking, as did Lynch’s wife and most of his guests. Source:

Those reported missing are British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah; Morgan Stanley International Chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, charity trustee Judy Bloomer; and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, jewelry designer Neda Morvillo.

This dual-death is our coincidence. Recall there are two meanings of coincidence (blog/Substack): where there is or is not a meta-cause behind the events. In the Was-Not category, the two deaths, Lynch’s and Chamberlin’s, had nothing to do with one another, a “mere” coincidence. In the Was category, the two deaths share a meta-cause, somebody or some bodies were responsible for killing Lynch and Chamberlin, for reasons known best to him or them.

The reason it is a coincidence of interest is the unusual nature of the deaths, their closeness in time, and the importance of the characters and what they were up to. But notice we only become interested in coincidences like this one after they occur, and not before. This should put the prior (to continue the joke) heavily on the Was-Not category for any coincidence to consider.

Somebody posted a purported video of the storm (another shot), and if this is it, it looked particularly nasty. Boats can sink at anchor as well as at sea. A fellow on Twitter said (make of this what you will):

Talked to my kid (NavArch/Marine Engineer) last night about this. Told me depending on the keel type-likely retractable and at anchor with hatches open a blow down on the beams highly likely. Those “sailing” yachts have very high center of gravity. Not self righting w/keel up.

Now it’s easy to suppose our most loving Regime (Brit or American) can despatch a car to dispatch a man. Such things must be fairly common at this level of society. Think of what they can do to undersea pipelines. Taking out one small man is nothing.

But how could this supposed meta-cause have worked the storm trick? That meta-cause had to be responsible for it. Carrol of the moustache gave a wink to HAARP. This is the high-frequency active auroral research program. It aims a handful of antennas at the sky to probe and examine the ionosphere and thermosphere. Some claim HAARP has the power to change the weather.

I am friends with the guy who ran HAARP at one time (he has moved onto greater things), and have some experience with radio myself (and have done work in space weather forecasting). I don’t want to disappoint my more imaginative readers, but HAARP cannot change the weather. And, even if it could, it cannot from Alaska create a waterspout with such intense pinpoint accuracy in the Mediterranean as to be able, with certainty, to kill a floating target.

But, maybe I’m a dupe—or I’m in on it. Or maybe there’s another way Yours Truly doesn’t know about that can make custom killer storms. It has to be something if this is a meta-cause coincidence. I brought this up with The Conspiritore, the infamous person known to be able to create a conspiracy out of anything. The Conspiritore, reluctantly accepting my knowledge of HAARP, said that the storm itself may have been in the mere-coincidence category, but that the entities seeking Lynch’s death made quick use of it. They were already on his trail, they saw the storm coming, and so also saw their chance. Conspiritore also suggested that Lynch himself, and his onboard pal, might have used the storm as an opportunity for escape, thinking they were on the same death list as Chamberline.

Well, maybe. But also maybe it shows how easy it is to tell a story after-the-fact. That’s the difficulty in coincidences. There is rarely conclusive proof one way or the other. So where we go is often where we want to go.

And if you think it’s only one side of the spectrum that does this, gander at this Reuters propaganda headline, “Global warming may be factor in deadly Italian shipwreck, climatologist says“.Good money says that same climatologist would claim bad driving also increases because of global warming.

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