The FT has a good article that might be seen as being tangentially related to my earlier post on lab leak vs. zoonosis:
If a screenwriter were to come up with a storyline in which a tech tycoon drowns when his luxury yacht is hit by a freak storm just two days after his co-defendant in a multibillion dollar fraud trial — for which both men were recently acquitted — is fatally hit by a car in another set of ostensibly unsuspicious circumstances, they might very well be told this was rather too implausible for viewers to buy.
And yet this was the tragic real-life series of events over the past week or so. . . .
It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theories to start. Pro-Russia personality Chay Bowes posted on X a clip of himself speaking on the Russian state-owned RT channel in which he pointed out the low probability of being acquitted in a federal criminal trial in the US — about 0.4 per cent, according to Pew. “How could two of the statistically most charmed men alive both meet tragic ends within days of each other in the most improbable ways?” asked Bowes.
The article also mentioned that back in 2009, two identical numbers came up back to back in Bulgaria’s national lottery, at odds of four million to one.
PS. The name of Mike Lynch’s yacht? Bayesian.
No, I’m not making that up.