Bayesian

I'm a Bayesian.

Back when I was at the age when math was still worth arguing over, I believed in Bayesian reasoning unconditionally. I had numerous arguments about it (mostly with fellow travelers -- I was surrounded by a filter bubble avant la lettre which, appropriately, referred to itself as the Bayesian mafia). We revered and wholeheartedly agreed with our platoon leaders, found likeminded friends at other universities who did great work, and disdained heretics who advocated despicable methods that deviated from the axioms of probability and Bayes' rule in favor of some other (thereby ad-hoc and wrong) representation of uncertainty, or who didn't accept the subjectivist interpretation of said numbers between zero and one as the One and Only Way to Represent Uncertainty (there, I capitalized it, that makes it true).

So it was strange to see the recent firestorm of news about the sinking of a super-yacht named Bayesian off the coast of Sicily. It felt almost personal.

One generally does not consider the population of super-yachts among one's acquaintances. So it was doubly weird to see that Mike Lynch was amongst the missing (and now confirmed dead). Mike was one of those brilliant, charming, but infuriating people who left a trail of creation and destruction. I knew him. Not well, but well enough.

My first reaction, upon hearing the news, was one of which I'm not proud. The man kept a tank of piranhas outside of his Cambridge office, which tells you at least a bit about him. He was not subtle. He was on the yacht celebrating the end of his legal troubles that had followed him for more than ten years after he had cleverly (let's just call it that) sold a company he founded, Autonomy, to HP's naive new CEO, Léo Apotheker, helping Léo lose HP $30 billion in market cap in his brief 10-month tenure until he was fired. Many of us who witnessed that disaster up close had blamed Mike Lynch, rather than Léo or HP's board, who of course had the actual responsibility of ensuring acquisitions (and CEO hires) make sense.

Mike Lynch was sometimes called a British Steve Jobs. I think the only actual connection between them was that Mike proved Steve right about Léo. When Steve Jobs heard about HP's Board hiring Léo as the new CEO after they foolishly pushed out the actually brilliant Mark Hurd, his reaction was "I don't get it." As the New York Times put it rather scathingly, "Almost from the day Mr. Apotheker arrived, H.P.’s operating results declined with dizzying speed."

I suppose maritime disasters involving billionaires make for juicy stories, and perhaps affect one's empathy for the people involved and the individual personal tragedies. Last year it was the Titan submersible, which joined the Titanic on the bottom of the Atlantic. The public's reaction was pretty much "Yeah, well, you were kind of asking for it - what were you thinking?" This time, salient details about the Bayesian shipwreck abound:

• The captain and crew made it into the lifeboat and survived, while the ship's cook and half the passengers (including the owner, owner's daughter, and four guests) drowned, which seems very un-Titanic-like. 
• The yacht might have been struck by a tornado, which seems such an unlikely event it should make any Bayesian salivate (one of the dogmata of Bayesian decision theory being that a probability of zero should rarely, if ever, be assumed).
• The Bayesian had a mast of 75 meters (the tallest aluminum mast in existence), taller than many church spires, which might have contributed to the capsizing. I suppose the designers had believed tornado-like winds were sufficiently unlikely that they did not need to be taken into account when designing super-yachts; the tallest aluminum mast, now, that was cool. See previous comment about probability of zero.
• The party on the Bayesian was specifically to celebrate Lynch's acquittal on US criminal charges, after his CFO was convicted on US fraud charges and HP won the UK civil case. The United States federal conviction rate is 99.8% according to Wikipedia. The other victims included the Clifford Chance attorney who spent ten years defending Lynch, and the Morgan Stanley executive who had testified on his behalf. 
• Just two days earlier, Mike Lynch's co-defendant in the US fraud trial, Stephen Chamberlain, died after being struck by a car while jogging in Cambridge. 

Yes, I twirled around the idea of a biblical conspiracy, but that sort of capability and accuracy seems a stretch. At least the tornado part. Reddit comment: "Sorry, but if Hewlett Packard arranged the hit, they'd still be waiting for the correct driver to be installed."

Probably just a freak coincidence. Or, as us Bayesians refer to it, "a low-probability event."