GLess than ten weeks ago, 59-year-old Mike Lynch was on trial in San Francisco on a 17-year fraud conviction. He was almost certain to receive a 25-year prison sentence.
He feared he would die in an American prison, not because he was guilty – he had spent £30 million on legal fees to defend his innocence – but because it was almost unheard of in the US for anyone to win a case against the US Department of Justice. His chances of winning were 0.5 per cent. Yet after 13 years of gathering detailed evidence to support his case, he was acquitted and it felt like a miracle.
Once back in the UK, Lynch began celebrating what he called his second life. Through tears, he told an interviewer how magical the London traffic seemed to him. “I just think, ‘This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,’” he said.
This month, the tech mogul took his family, friends and lawyers to celebrate a Mediterranean cruise on his luxury sailboat. The vessel sank in an unusually violent storm in the early hours of Monday morning. His body was found on Wednesday, along with five others who were pulled from the sunken Bayswater yacht. His 18-year-old daughter Hannah is still missing.
The chance of such a yacht being swept away by a weather event while moored was very slim because it had never happened before, said sailing expert Stuart Campbell, editor of Boat International magazine, in Night news“I spoke to a lot of people in the industry today and they were just as shocked as I was – they couldn’t believe this could happen.”
As if beating the odds twice in a few weeks wasn’t strange enough, it has since emerged that Lynch’s co-defendant in the US trial, his company’s former vice-president of finance Stephen Chamberlain, was killed by a car on Saturday while jogging in Cambridgeshire.
The odds of the defendants dying within weeks of the trial, if Lynch also drowned, are incredible. The combination of the three events is even more incredible. While all of this must be a series of coincidences, whether fortunate or tragic, there are certainly other possibilities. X-files– There will be conspiracy theories about this issue for years to come.
But the great irony is that this Essex-born academic, technology innovator, entrepreneur, adviser to the Prime Minister, and general member of the British Society of the Elderly and Righteous is also one of the world’s leading authorities on probability theory.
If Lynch’s story weren’t true, anyone who went to Netflix to dramatize it would probably be fired, because it would be so absurdly improbable.
Specifically, Lynch is an advocate and teacher of Bayesian mathematics at his alma mater, the University of Cambridge. In fact, he named his boat after Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century statistician and Presbyterian clergyman from Tunbridge Wells.
Bayesian mathematics embraces the idea that predicting unusual outcomes—such as unusual weather events, for example—cannot be done accurately using a traditional, static framework of information. Instead, it must be continually updated with new data about how the situation is evolving. Bayesian mathematics also forms the basis of the current boom in artificial intelligence, pioneered by Mike Lynch.
Lynch, who has been called the British Bill Gates, comes across to many as a science geek (perhaps lucky not to have spent a long time in prison). But I can attest that he is a very different person. I have been in contact with him since 2016, and I have found him not only to be unnervingly candid and honest, but also highly entertaining, unusually well-versed in everything from technology to classical culture, and unexpectedly unconventional in his views on science.
That’s how I arrived at his Pall Mall office eight years ago for a fascinating one-on-one meeting with educational lessons on a subject not technology, not his already mounting legal problems, but… dogs.
Mike Lynch contacted me about a column I’ve written for many years in Financial TimesHe knew I was interested in fringe science—I had once written a book about Uri Geller—and that we had been at the same school in Essex but didn’t know each other at the time. So Lynch decided I was the right person to talk to about helping him set up a research project on dogs’ sixth sense.
This topic fascinated him. Lynch explained that he was convinced that dogs had an as-yet-unexplained sixth sense—that they truly knew things without the need for traditional sensory input.
For example, dogs seem to know when you’re on your way home, even if you’re miles away. “I’ve done this informal experiment a number of times,” he told me. “I’ll get on a train in London to our home in Suffolk and at that very moment the dogs will get excited. My wife and I have eliminated as many clues as we can. You’ll notice the moment the dogs start barking and it will match the moment I get on the train.”
The problem, he explained, was that the experimental work that had been done in this area was flawed. For his next big project, he wanted to fund some proper, rigorous, indisputable research.
“I’m not a parapsychologist or a paranormal expert,” he told me. “I don’t believe in auras or energies or anything weird. I stick to science, and I know it’s controversial, but there’s an effect that needs to be explained.”
As a first step, he asked me to write an article inviting people to describe their experiences with dogs’ sixth sense, and then to help him launch a website for them to publish their experiences. “That way, we build a database of dogs who are supposed to have psychic abilities to work with.”
We discussed possible names for the site, and how we would meet to discuss the next step. He was about to go on a business trip with David Cameron, and I was living in New York at the time, so it was important to coordinate the notes.
It wasn’t what I expected, but I found him engaging, especially when he went on explaining his theories for about 90 minutes. He was an inspiring teacher with a great mind and was patient when I was late or misunderstood what I was saying.
“Dogs are incredibly good at reading people’s emotions,” he said. “The main thing is that dogs are unusual among creatures because they have mirror neurons, which are very important. These are the neurons in the brain that put you in someone else’s shoes. If you hit my hand with a hammer, it will hurt. That’s the basis of empathy.”
If Lynch’s story weren’t true, anyone who went to Netflix with her dramatization would probably be dismissed for being ridiculously improbable.
“This makes it possible for children as young as two and a half to learn to lie. Deception is a great thing because to be deceptive, you have to realize that not everyone has the same information as you do. So it’s a key step and a very smart job. Dogs run a model in their mind of what it would be like to be you or another dog. That’s how they become pack animals.”
He admitted that all this was conventional science. The big question he wanted to know was whether there was something beyond that, some kind of world that you couldn’t explain. “You have to have a good understanding above all of the probabilities—the probability that this or that effect is explainable by known science.
“That’s why it’s time to do the experiment properly, so we can see if there are dogs that are actually capable of producing statistically meaningful results.”
As one of the world’s authorities on mathematical theory, Lynch reassured me that he was “a firm believer in the scientific method,” but he wanted me to keep in mind that the mammalian brain is also the most complex element in the known universe.
“So the idea that we’re going to be able to figure everything out seems presumptuous,” he insisted. “I want skeptics to understand all aspects of the study even if they don’t want to believe it.”
In this way, he said, he could prove—or disprove—that dogs are “Bayesian calculators.” Bayesian reasoning is a kind of magical thinking in a way because it is more precise and complex than classical logic. “What dogs do in their Bayesian way is use intuition—see data in a different way. But this is not magic, it is science, and in a few years from now it will lead to amazing advances in artificial intelligence.”
This transition to AI eight years ago from the dry theories of a long-dead cleric was hardly surprising. Lynch had the kind of mind that was always ahead of his time.
He is considered by many in academic and business circles to be a tech genius, which is why his technology company, Autonomy, was sold in 2011 for $11.7 billion to the declining computer giant HP. It was HP that later suffered buyer’s remorse and began blaming Lynch and his team—incorrectly—for manipulating the books.
For a dogged academic, his view of intuition made sense in terms of data processing and how we expect things to happen. He insisted that “guesses, gut feelings, intuition” were sophisticated metrics by which decisions were made, “not boring spreadsheets. That’s why big companies make such bad decisions. The risk of analysis drives me crazy, but I had to learn this.”
Lynch told a story from his past when a “sophisticated dreamer” came up with the brilliant idea of downloading music online. Lynch said he spent a long time explaining why his vision wouldn’t work. It would take four days to download a single song online and the disk to store it would cost as much as an average home.
Reflecting on his reaction, he said, “Of course, I should have said all that and then gone and planned the cost of the drives and realized he was probably right. But overanalysis prevented that from happening and I missed the opportunity.”
Mike Lynch’s dog project never came to fruition. He was not interviewed because of the question mark surrounding him due to the unresolved court case at the time.
“This is really sad,” he emailed me after I told him. “But thanks for trying.” He seemed genuinely upset. We stayed in touch throughout the trial, and still discussed the unleashed dog experience while he was in San Francisco in the run-up to the trial and the case itself. And as the judge demonstrated, I wasn’t the only one who found Lynch compelling and exuding character and integrity.
I discussed the whole story, which was heartbreaking, yesterday with a medical consultant friend from school who has been following his ordeal. We agreed that this latest tragic twist in his amazing story seemed as unlikely as it was deeply sad.
Bayesian mathematics is widely used in predicting likely weather, what are the chances that a boat called the Bayesian will not capsize due to a hurricane/waterspout in the Mediterranean?
“Very clever question, sorry,” my friend replied, “but with all the money in the world, why would a natural events forecaster sleep with friends and family on a boat when the weather is really bad?”
Unfortunately, we may never know.
“Infuriatingly humble alcohol fanatic. Unapologetic beer practitioner. Analyst.”