When the superyacht of British tech billionaire Michael Lynch sunk in the Mediterranean Sea recently, killing him and several other people onboard, it came up in the news that the $40 million luxury vessel had an unmistakably nerdy moniker: the Bayesian.
Bayesian reasoning has become a hot topic to tech leaders like Lynch, who see it as a blueprint to making decisions by examining known probabilities and tweaking prior understandings when new data becomes available.
"But the real power of the Bayesian approach isn't procedural; it's that it replaces the facts in our minds with probabilities," wrote New Yorker writer Joshua Rothman in a 2021 article about rational thinking.
It's hard not to wonder: did Bayesian reasoning take any part in the decision to take a very expensive yacht into a storm with a crew that may have been grossly unprepared?
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