Talk:The Bayesian

The acquisition and trial

• Autonomy was a British tech darling of the early 2000s.
• In 2011 it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for 11.1 billion US dollars.
• The acquisition was a disaster. HP eventually wrote down Autonomy's value by $8.8 billion.
• HP sued Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch and his management team, accusing them of fraudulent accounting and misleading HP into overpaying for the company.
• In 2022 HP was successful in its litigation. Lynch was found personally liable and ordered to pay US$1bn in damages.
• Hot on the heels of the civil trial, Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former Vice President of Finance, were extradited to the US to face criminal charges including wire fraud and conspiracy.
• In June 2024, Lynch and Chamberlain were acquitted on all counts. The jury were not persuaded beyond reasonable doubt that Lynch had intentionally committed fraud.
• Chamberlain returned to his home in Cambridgeshire, while Lynch treated his daughter and some close friends to a cruise on his superyacht, The Bayesian on a cruise in the Mediterranean by way of celebration.
• On 17 August 2024, two months after his acquittal, Stephen Chamberlain was hit by a car while jogging in Longstanton Cambridgeshire.
• While at anchor off the north coast of Sicily early on the morning of August 19, 2024, The Bayesian was hit by a freak storm and, in the pace of about 7 minutes, capsized and sank. Lynch his daughter and five others were killed.

Conspiracy theory

The improbable circumstances of Chamberlain’s and Lynch’s deaths, within days of each other and, just two months after their acquittal, raised eyebrows. It seemed to be an extraordinary coincidence although the mainstream commentary quickly rationalised that no one had anything particular to gain from these incidents. Nor would it be easy to orchestrate a sudden violent storm at all, let alone one of sufficient power to capsize a 60-metre, 500 tonne yacht. If you wanted to “off” a business executive, there were far easier ways of doing it.

Conspiracy and systems: two competing theories

Hold this as a provisional hypothesis: We can bifurcate explanations of the world into [[conspiracy theory|conspiracy theories and systems theories.

Conspiracy theories put ultimate credit or blame, for the way the world . or a part of it, is down to the intentional actions, be they malign or well-meant, of a limited number of improbably influential people.

I will grant you at once, this is a wide conception indeed of “conspiracy theory”: it includes not just gunpowder plots and Russian bots in Western elections but the general idea that great art is the product of singular genius, commercial success is the outcome of exceptional leadership, and jazz is not just a succession of happy accidents.

By contrast, systems theory says in a nutshell, into a bit more complicated than that. In the case of great artists and great visionary business people, their input into the artistic process is not discounted altogether but instead aggregated with a great deal of other system information to generate an outcome. Shakespeare was indeed a genius but would yet have died in anonymity were it not for his sponsors, publishers, patrons, theatres, actors, critics and audience: the maginificent cultural establishment that we now know as the Shakespeare canon contains a lot of stuff that was nothing to do with William Shakespeare.

Systems and paradigms

I rabbit on a lot on this site about power structures and paradigms. These are systems of political, scientific and cultural control.

Systemantics

The best place to start systems theory is John Gall’s short, acerbic, funny and devastatingly incisive book Systemantics: The Systems Bible