So, maybe it’s just me? But I’m finding the narrative around the super yacht sinking off the Sicilian coast, suspect. All these “coincidences“. It’s so ironic. Freak storms and all. I’ve even read a report blaming this on climate change. Come on! Seriously?!
To me the narrative creation, and it is a creative narrative, is intended as a misdirection. Yes, misdirection, the action or process of directing someone to the wrong place or in the wrong direction. Misdirection is a form of deception. An intentional deception A manipulation.
The facts of this story contradict the misdirection. Questionable business dealings. Criminality. Ties to intelligence agencies. The unsinkable yacht. The preposterous and highly questionable storm? The timely killing of the co- conspirator in crime?
The only thing missing from this tall tale is a sea monster. A Kraken or a Leviathan- The Leviathan is often an embodiment of chaos, threatening to eat the damned when their lives are over
A Leviathan is equally as plausible as freak storms, climate change and the copiousness of coincidences
So check the excerpts from the linked article and tell me what you thing?
The sinking of tech billionaire Mike Lynch’s yacht in a freak storm off the Sicilian coast last week certainly has to rank among the most bizarre fatal celebrity accidents in years. There was the weird coincidence that Lynch had just gotten acquitted after a years long legal battle over a multibillion-dollar fraud; the eerie synchrony of the same-day death of his co-defendant after being struck by car while jogging;
the fact that the $40 million vessel had been described as virtually unsinkable; the fact no vessel that size had been sunk by a waterspout in centuries; and the fact that the area where it struck is not known for waterspouts.
But perhaps the wildest thing about the whole saga is the yacht’s name, Bayesian.
Bayesian, refers to a method of statistical calculation that was originally devised by an 18th-century Presbyterian minister, Thomas Bayes. Lynch named his yacht after Bayes’s method in recognition of its role in building his fortune. In short, he had honored a method of calculating probabilities — only to be killed aboard its namesake by an accumulation of wildly off-the-chart improbabilities.
Not to mention the death by water symbolism
“The irony is tragic,” says British science journalist Tom Chivers, who writes for Semafor and published a book this year on Bayesian statistics called Everything Is Predictable. “It’s not a subtle irony. Bayes is the maths of prediction. This sequence of events is just spectacularly unlikely.”
It’s as if Charles Kane had been crushed to death under a giant rosebud.
How did we get here? In statistics, total probability is calculated by multiplying together all the component probabilities. So let’s look at the individual parts of the case.
The name
Mike Lynch was something of a black-swan event in himself. Until he came along, the U.K. had never before had a software billionaire.In 1990, while still a student, he founded his first company at the age of 25 with a loan of £2,000 from an eccentric acquaintance he made in a bar.
An unnamed eccentric acquaintance, in a Soho bar, makes a loan of £2,000
“A lot of venture capitalists didn’t really understand technology. They weren’t very impressed,” says Lynch. “I ended up being lent £2,000 by an eccentric impresario in a bar in Soho
Well that certainly adds to the mystery?
The Trial
The trial took a long time to unfold in part because Lynch waged a years long battle against extradition from the U.K. to the United States, a battle he finally lost in 2023. This past March, his trial began in San Francisco. The New York Times noted that “Mr. Lynch’s odds do not look good.” (Former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain had already been convicted on similar charges and sentenced to five years in prison.) But Lynch and Chamberlain beat the odds. On June 6, a jury found both men not guilty on all counts. “Lynch’s win is extremely unusual in federal criminal cases,” as the New York Post reported. “In fact, only less than 1% of federal cases ended in acquittal in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center.”
What are the odds?
The unsinkable yacht
In interviews with Italian media, Giovanni Costantino, chairman of the company that built the Bayesian, said that his firm’s sailing yachts are “unsinkable” and among “the safest boats in the world.”
How about those waterspouts?
Like tornadoes, waterspouts are more likely to be found in areas where the meteorological conditions are favorable for their development, such as the Florida Keys and Lake Erie. ( I live very near Lake Erie, and water spouts are reported regularly including holding the world record for them- sinking ships are not part of that equation!) As for the region where the Bayesian sank, “I wouldn’t say that this is a hot spot” for waterspouts, says Szilagi.
Even assuming gross negligence on the part of the crew, the sinking of a vessel as large and robust as the Bayesian by a waterspout is vanishingly improbable. Such events are simply exceedingly rare, and none has been so deadly in centuries. In 2004, a waterspout in Greece picked up a boat and flung it onto a 10-year-old boy, killing him. And last year, a waterspout struck a 50-foot boat on Italy’s Lake Maggiore, killing four. The last reported time a waterspout claimed as many victims as died on the Bayesian was back in the 16th century, when one struck a crowded harbor in Malta, killing hundreds.
The death of a partner in crime-the same day!
The same day that the Bayesian sank, U.K. police reported that Chamberlain had died in hospital of his injuries. He became one of the 165 pedestrians between the age of 25 and 59, out of a U.K. population of 42 million, to be killed each year by vehicles.
The bizarreness of this string of unlikelihoods has been lost on no one. “This sequence of events is just spectacularly unlikely,” Chivers notes. “There is this Bayesian-probability aspect to it, this building of unlikeliness upon unlikeliness.”
If you wonder why it is this story is simply not credible after read the excerpts above as well as the entire article, revisit the two previous posts.
The only thing that really makes any sense to me is that some interested party/parties took action/s causing this ship to fail, catastrophically. Mr Lynch surely had made enemies.
All the gobbledygook narrative creation around this improbable sinking really strains credulity
I’m thinking a sea monster really did it! 😉