"THE STING OPERATION THAT WENT SOUTH" A Professional Investigation into the Sinking of the Bayesian.
Bayesian, the $42Million yacht sunk in the Mediterranean with seven fatalaties in its wake. This was not expected, this was not normal, this was not anticipated, this was not planned - by anyone, for sure. How can we know? A cover-up, devoid of even the most basic ethical standard?
- Bayes' theorem (alternatively Bayes' law or Bayes' rule, after Thomas Bayes) gives a mathematical rule for inverting conditional probabilities, allowing one to find the probability of a cause given its effect.[1] For example, if the risk of developing health problems is known to increase with age, Bayes' theorem allows the risk to someone of a known age to be assessed more accurately by conditioning it relative to their age, rather than assuming that the person is typical of the population as a whole. Based on Bayes' law, both the prevalence of a disease in a given population and the error rate of an infectious disease test must be taken into account to evaluate the meaning of a positive test result and avoid the base-rate fallacy. One of Bayes' theorem's many applications is Bayesian inference, an approach to statistical inference, where it is used to invert the probability of observations given a model configuration (i.e., the likelihood function) to obtain the probability of the model configuration given the observations (i.e., the posterior probability).
.jpg "Private Detective Claes Ekman")
Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy and Darktrace, with daughter Hannah - both deceased as the Bayesian sank. Dr Lynch was fully acquitted in a large $5.4bn legal court process with / against HewlettPackard. "Everybody loves a winner," i.e., except the loser. Are we facing a purblind or myopic refusal to accept the most ancient law of vae victis; a usual provocation based on a sub-stratum of truth? Was Dr Lynch encircled by an envious and sceptical coalition jealous of his success - for of course a final court judgment stating "no convincing, coherent or cogent evidence" does not mean "no evidence". It is clear that elements of doubt exist. The principle of stare decisis is a weak constraint; albeit, clemency surpasses right. Language is the hill we stand upon.
"Caeca invidia est" (Envy is blind).
As we use the term, judgment should not be confused with "thinking". It is a much narrower concept: judgment is a form of measurement in which the instrument is a human mind. Like other measurements, a judgment assigns a score to an object. The score need not be a number. Judgments are not computations, and the do not follow exact rules. A teacher uses judgment to grade an essay, but not to score a multiple-choice test.
Furthermore, many judgments are not predictive but evaluative: the sentence set by a judge or the rank of a painting in a prize competition cannot be easily compared to an objective true value. In short, we can be sure that there is error if judgments vary for no good reason. This is detrimental even when judgments are not verifiable and error cannot be measured. Rules - in general - have an important feature: they reduce the role of judgment. Algorithms, for example, work as rules, not standards. Perhaps a historical intuition and a neutral assessment are more reliable than a court's reason.
Also for an erudite legal scholar and experienced private detective / private investigator, Lady Justice (Latin: Iustitia) can appear opaque and fluid. Without eschewing any "intention to change the truth", do we have the findings of a cooked-up intelligence or legal dossier? The scene is darkly morbid, as winking mendacity can be, but the results are deadly. "Laws are best explained, interpreted and applied by those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding them," as Jonathan Swift formulated it.
Thinking evolved as an extension of the ability to act effectively; it evolved to make us better at doing what is necessary to achieve our goals. Thought allows us to select from among a set of possible actions by predicting the effects of each action and by imagining how the world would be if we had taken different actions in the past.
This is one reason why we think that action came before thought. Even the earliest organisms were capable of action. Single-celled organisms that arose early in the evolutionary cycle ate and moved and reproduced. They did things; they acted on the world and changed it. Evolution selected those organisms whose actions best supported their survival. And the organisms whose actions were most effective were the ones best tuned to the changing conditions of a complex world. Thus, when men say that this or that criminal- or physical action has its origin in the mind, which latter has dominion over the body, they are using words without meaning, or are confessing in specious phraseology that they are ignorant of the cause of the said action... Remember that actions - as when a mouse takes the cheese in a trap, a frog snaps an insect, or even when an immature, short-tempered human culprit commits manslaughter - come first; before thoughts and emotions and feelings. Albeit, if one looks closely into many actions, which are apparently due to sudden impulse, one generally finds that the sudden impulse was merely the last of a long series of events which led up to the action. Alone, it would not have been powerful enough to effect anything. But, coming after the way has been paved for it, it was irresistible.
The best tools for identifying the appropriate action in a given circumstance are mental faculties that can process information. Visual systems must be able to do a fair amount of sophisticated processing to distinguish a rat from a leaf. Other mental processes are also critical for selecting the appropriate action. Memory can help indicate which actions have been most effective under similar conditions in the past, and reasoning can help predict what will happen under new conditions.
Some - or many, even most – business and legal institutions are trapped in financial constructs that makes it hard to pursue missions intelligently, albeit, it is not flesh and blood that make us fathers. Being [critical] of everyone enable us – as a Private Detective Group – to be impartial, utilizing oratio obliqua; explicit and implicit, verbal and non-verbal.
You need to own – or create – great content to differentiate yourself in the market, and it is like anything else; perseverance seems to pay off. The market gives no quarter - you need technological and/or linguistic advantages - and be reminded that while the amateur may feel like your friend, there is joy in developing expertise and craftmanship. Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. Peel that onion of reality!
Science shows us regularly that our intuitions are mistaken. Science is constantly learning something new, and more often than not such learning means jettisoning wrong ideas. That is why science often clashes with common sense – our intuition, for example, wants Earth to be flat and still, and time to be the same everywhere. None of this is true.
This is one reason why we think that action came before thought. Even the earliest organisms were capable of action. Single-celled organisms that arose early in the evolutionary cycle ate and moved and reproduced. They did things; they acted on the world and changed it. Evolution selected those organisms whose actions best supported their survival. And the organisms whose actions were most effective were the ones best tuned to the changing conditions of a complex world. Thus, when men say that this or that criminal- or physical action has its origin in the mind, which latter has dominion over the body, they are using words without meaning, or are confessing in specious phraseology that they are ignorant of the cause of the said action... Remember that actions - as when a mouse takes the cheese in a trap, a frog snaps an insect, or even when an immature, short-tempered human culprit commits manslaughter - come first; before thoughts and emotions and feelings. Albeit, if one looks closely into many actions, which are apparently due to sudden impulse, one generally finds that the sudden impulse was merely the last of a long series of events which led up to the action. Alone, it would not have been powerful enough to effect anything. But, coming after the way has been paved for it, it was irresistible.
The best tools for identifying the appropriate action in a given circumstance are mental faculties that can process information. Visual systems must be able to do a fair amount of sophisticated processing to distinguish a rat from a leaf. Other mental processes are also critical for selecting the appropriate action. Memory can help indicate which actions have been most effective under similar conditions in the past, and reasoning can help predict what will happen under new conditions.
Some - or many, even most – business and legal institutions are trapped in financial constructs that makes it hard to pursue missions intelligently, albeit, it is not flesh and blood that make us fathers. Being [critical] of everyone enable us – as a Private Detective Group – to be impartial, utilizing oratio obliqua; explicit and implicit, verbal and non-verbal.
You need to own – or create – great content to differentiate yourself in the market, and it is like anything else; perseverance seems to pay off. The market gives no quarter - you need technological and/or linguistic advantages - and be reminded that while the amateur may feel like your friend, there is joy in developing expertise and craftmanship. Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. Peel that onion of reality!
Science shows us regularly that our intuitions are mistaken. Science is constantly learning something new, and more often than not such learning means jettisoning wrong ideas. That is why science often clashes with common sense – our intuition, for example, wants Earth to be flat and still, and time to be the same everywhere. None of this is true.
Private Detective Claes Ekman - www.bureau-ekman.com - has been retained to thoroughly investigate the Bayesian yacht disaster outside Porticello, Sicily. At present the team is being built around a number of outstanding individuals, including the brothers Toftenow from Sweden. Olle and Nils Toftenow are known for their premium content documentaries, a great many of them based on true crimes.
The Italian criminal police and the country's dismal justice system have so terribly handled earlier murder cases involving British and American citizens - see Amanda Knox & Meredith Kercher, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erla7Ley4Tw - so we doubt we will presently observe an improvement this time. Some police officers and prosecutors and judges may be squirming and loitering in their uniforms and suits right now, chippy and capricious about their legal credentials, tweaking one another's beaks.
Faced with this ruckus, Italy's government should have drawn a clear distinction between harmful acts and obnoxious or foolish words. The legal actions themselves conjure up a self-abnegating passivity, more ovine than human, more bleater than leader. A "thorn in the flesh, but not a dagger in the heart". The business of jurisprudence / justice is not frivolous. It is serious. Whatever it is, it is.
Any perpetrator with a desire to surrender himself wholly to an avenging / odious taskmaster and a creed beyond reason might have committed a dreadful deed - not necessarily on purpose because things went south and overboard - and conscire it. "All wish to hide their sins," says Seneca, "but a good conscienta loves the light."
Having evaded any pasty-faced, emollient law enforcement pulchritude in a callous foul play game won't mean evidence and proof provided by a private detective / private investigator stalwart as Bureau Ekman will be considered as "fruit of the poisonous tree". Au contraire, it will or might make an "enormous imposition" eventually and in due course.
Can Europe's most seasoned private detective / private investigator find the culprits - and simultaneously document the case in a movie alongside and in parallel with writing a forthcoming book - things will markedly brighten up for griefing families of the victims. The situation can best mordantly and turgidly be described as recondite, all parties being nonplussed (Latin non plus means "no more").
Besides having worked with international security / criminal investigations since 1978 - initially at foreign embassies in Sweden, including those of Russia, Serbia, Germany, England, USA, Iran, et seq - Claes E. has the optimal experience to handle the Bayesian case as he:
A) finished his major business law thesis in San Francisco (where Mike Lynch - being extradited from England - was under house arrest after being sued by HewlettPackard located in San Francisco / the Bay area).
B) sold his company to Manpower / Blue Arrow in the 80's - thence reporting to the main board of directors of that entity, the world's largest recruitment group, situated in London (where both Autonomy and DarkTrace were founded, run and located legally).
C) is an experienced yacht master with many years as helmsman throughout the Med (the Med often being described as a sea when it is in fact an African continental lake caught close to two colliding landmasses / teutonic plates resulting in, among other things, the Alps and the Himalayas) where the Bayesian sank.
Claes E. can burn bridges and still swim across the ocean. He is the epitome of self-reliance and his independence is so profound that burning bridges does not faze him. His boldness is not about recklessness; it is about clarity. His greatest ally is truth. His breakthrough moments often come via thought experiments in which he let his imagination drift.
What [truths] can be certain except death and taxes, unless we intend to bend the perception of what we encounter... We will have to dive into dialectical reason / reasoning - an almost evolutionary-guided truth seeking adventure - in order to advance. However, we must never forget there are no goals in evolution; no morality, no purpose.
Human proclivity for evil force us looking into the core or kernel of truth, not only into proof; not even facts that fit a posited theory. Finding a course in-between involves much semantic and legal contortion. Rule-bound approaches to criminal investigations are often presented as the final stage in the evolution of law. Such final presentations are usually made with the speaker's tongue planted firmly in their cheek. We often consider such presentations basically unenlightening ... what is interesting is what is not there.
Isaac Newton stated, hypotheses non fingo – (I do not invent hypotheses), however, there are so many clues existent in this case already so we feel a whole, imaginary thought edifice is dawning. Private Detective / Private Investigator Bureau Ekman contra mundum? Perhaps; at times. Interesting! Dangerous! No doubt.
Private Detective Claes Ekman has criss crossed the Mediterranean in his own Nautor 371 - "Swan of the South" - a great many times. As a skilled and certified scuba diver, many sunk wrecks have been investigated en route. Claes' Nautor Swan has been through far worse weather conditions than the one that sank the Bayesian.
The premier Swedish documentary movie creators, Olle (centre) and Nils (right) Toftenow.
The famous German & European "True Crime" documentary film producer Britta Marks will assist our team extensively. Britta has produced movies for, among others, ZDF, ZDF info, WDR, MDR, RTL, RTL2, VOX, PRO 7, SAT 1, Kabel 1, n-tv, Bild, SF, Oxygen, Servus TV, as well as co-operating with e g Mossad and BND. Her motto is: "T R U E S T O R I E S W E L L T O L D."
.jpg "True Crime Documentary - Bayesian")
This is the St Petersburg - a $3.6million yacht - sank by our client's antagonists enroute through Swedish waters during the autumn of 2024. Sinking the favourite toys of tycoons - often more beloved than wives, cars, estates, companies - is a classic. Bizarre and absurd - perhaps. The mondial business tug of war demands its toll. Da, pravda! Bureau Ekman had assisted with legal affairs for the yacht transition.
The Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences
Can / Will Bureau Ekman solve the Bayesian Case on a method of evidence-backed hypotheses? The scientific method encourages reasonable caution. We produce a hypothesis, gather evidence, test that hypothesis against the available evidence and then refine the hypothesis or gather more evidence. The prominent thinker Carl Friedrich Gauss described the method as: "Science as the planned groping in darkness."
As a young academic and business law scholar I made my mark as the author / composer of legal court documents, on behalf of both myself and external clients. I became a kind of machine for grinding theories and texts out of small pieces of facts; and as Mark Twain formulated it: "Facts are stubborn." I followed the trail of crumbs. Truth and conscience forces impelled me beyond my own control - though not in the Jedi sense. Soon followed a dawning realization that legal affairs are ugly.
The legal courts inherent flaw, its lack of autonomy - beholden to all, master of none - was always addressed. We might call it unbiased, neutral, disinterested. However, those desriptions seem too clever by half. Alas, the reality is frequently more pedestrian. I was not Bambi's little brother, and neither were individual, opposing lawyers, nor the court's presiding judges. It was not always pretty.
“The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s said by a character called Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, which was (we think) written between 1596 and 1599. Shakespeare also wrote later: "Save a place in Hell, since there are some lawyers passing away soon." Bear in mind, in legal battles, preparedness, a good thought and a sharp pen is worth a lot more than a sword. Plato, the sovereign of all times and the author of around 35 philosophical dialogues, combines analytical skills with great powers of reasoning to produce a well-structured solution that deals emphatically with counter-arguments. The Academy of his produced many influential Sophists - always keen to describe and reject clever but empty reasoning.
In Plato's allegory of the cave, the shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason. It explores the theme of belief versus knowledge.
The two words “reasoning” and “inference” are often treated as synonyms. We might state that reasoning is only one way of performing inferences, and not such a reliable way at that. We might pose a question: Is this process – attending to reasons – the only way to pursue the goal of extracting new information from information that we already possess?
Of course not! After all, even animals form expectations about the future. Their life depends on these expectations being on the whole correct. Since the future cannot be perceived, it is through inference that animals must form expectations. It is quite implausible, however, that, in so doing, animals attend to reasons.
Reason has recently entered the world of politics on a great scale - perhaps not for the first time since Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and the latter's namesake J. Stuart Mill. As long as the idea of a political spectrum has existed, there have been complaints that a single axis is inadequate to reflect the complexity of multifaceted civic matters. While pursuing answers to the questions of science, from the origins of life to the origins of everything, which might appear to be among the most arrogant of human endeavours, the chase itself is humbling. Measured by all dimensions, each human life is infinitesimal; our individual accomplishments are visible only in the aggregate of many generations of effort. Evidence does not care about approval. This applies to all evidence. The value of information does not reside in the number of thumbs-up it gets but in what we do with it. We thence set about rigorously pursuing evidence rather than likes. As scientists we might wish we had managed to collect more evidence, but the data we have is substantial and from it we can infer many things. A scientist must go where the evidence leads, the old adage runs. There is humility in following the evidence, and it frees you from preconceptions that can cloud observations and insight. Much the same can be said for adulthood, a good definition of which might be "the point at which you have gathered enough experience that your models have a high success rate in forecasting reality". In truth, most events in life stem from a confluence of multiple causes. Should we let go of prejudices? Wield William of Occam's razor and seek the simplest explanation. Be willing to abandon models that fail, which some inevitably do when they collide with the imperfect grasp of facts and the laws of nature. The idea that presentation is successful when language is aligned with truth implies that truth can be known; truth needs no argument but only accurate presentation; the reader is competent to recognize truth; the symmetry between writer and reader allows the presentation to follow the model of conversation; a natural language is sufficient to express truth; and the writer knows the truth before he puts it into language. Investigative activities are defined conceptually and lead to skills. This is true of all intellectual activities. There are skills of mathematical discovery, skills of painting, skills of learning a language, and so on. But in no case is the activity constituted by the skills. Great painters are often less skillful than mediocre painters; it is their concept of painting, not their skills, that define their activity. Similarly, a foreigner may be less skillful than a native speaker at manipulating tenses or using subjunctives, but nonetheless be an incomparably better writer. Intellectual activities generate skills, but skills do not generate intellectual activities. The relationship is not symmetric. One famous French private detective - private investigator described his method as follows: "J'ai sur-tout à caeur la clarté... Mon style ne sera point fleuri, mes expressions seront simples comme la vérité." (Above all, I have clarity at heart. My style will not be at all florid; my expressions will be simple as the truth.) Giovanni Agnelli, once a famous CEO of FIAT as well as a great womanizer and playboy, was once asked how he came to be in a position to conquer so many women's hearts, bodies and minds. He replied: "Most men talk about women, I talk with women." As private detectives - private investigators we follow the same route, talking and interacting with criminals - felons and refuse to adopt the mannered style of the courtroom, even implying that there is something artificial and dishonest in that style. We adopt as our model scene conversation, voice, spontaneity. As a result, it is easy to excerpt from our conversations with criminals - felons discrete, intelligible, disinterested units of discourse. By contrast, imagine a speech by an Athenian orator whose main goal, unlike Socrates' who developed the scene conversation model, is to win his legal case. My original starting point in most private detective - private investigator cases is Plato's discussion in book 10 of the Republic - mimesis ranking third after truth - in conjunction with Dante's assertion that in the Commedia he presented true reality. It is possible to present the most everyday phenomena of reality in a serious and significant context. Being concerned with realism in general, the question is often to what degree and in what manner realistic subjects and happenings are treated; seriously, problematically or tragically. The category of "realistic detective works of serious style and character" has seldom been treated or even conceived as such. Am I fit to analyze our private detective - private investigator models theoretically and to describe them systematically? To do that would have necessitated an ardous and, from the reader's point of view, a tiresome search for definitions at the very beginning of my undertaking of the case. (Not even the term "realistic" is unambiguous.) Our train of reasoning can easily be rendered in the form of a syllogism: I describe myself; I am in a situation which constantly changes - due to its revolving appearance, guided by new information. Shall we leave logical continuity in the lurch and first introduce conclusions in the form of surprising assertions? Now at last comes the minor premise, not directly but as the conclusion of a subordinate syllogism. The vitality of the will to investigation and expression is so strong that our private detective - private investigator style breaks through the limits of a purely theoretical disquisition. We might skip intermediate steps of reasoning, but replace what is lacking by a kind of contact which arises spontaneously between steps not connected by strict logic. Occasionally we might repeat clues, leads and ideas which we consider important over and over in ever-new formulations, each time working out a fresh viewpoint - so these clues, leads and ideas radiate in all direction. All these are characteristics which we are much more used to finding in conversation - though only in the conversation of exceptionally thoughtful and articulate people - than in a printed work of theoretical content. We are inclined to think that this sort of effect requires vocal inflection, gesture, the warming up to one another which comes with an enjoyable conversation. Voltaire wrote in his Candide: "We two - you and I - are having a conversation. That is the whole purpose of my writing. So - as life is short, nasty and brutal - I happen to be deceased. Memento mori - and tempus fugit. However, it does not change my writing objective." Clever man, and a man of mighty vision and courage. Our presentation of the investigation of the Bayesian case, however changeable and diverse it is, never goes astray, and at times we might contradict ourselves, albeit we never contradict the truth. This mirrors a very realistic conception of man based on experience and in particular on self-experience: the conception that man is a fluctuating creature subject to the changes which take place in his surroundings, his destiny, and his inner impulses. To fully understand a complicated phenomenon or thing, one must see it in its entirety - see its whole life cycle. "Humans are by nature evil, however, not without responsibility for their actions," wrote Aristotle. Children are easier studied than adults: first they want to be loved, then they want to be respected for abilities and compence, thence - and finally - they want to be feared, i.e., having power and control. To investigate and discern a pattern in the Bayesian criminal case will take both time and effort, albeit there is more to it than meets the eye. Bureau Ekman and its committed, professional team will - in two or double senses - go to the bottom of this affair. We are in an intense chase / battle for understanding. What has happened, or rather, what has happened that has not happened before? Our motive in this private detective - private investigator case is pure truth, our purpose is presentation. We can choose and emphasize as we please. It must naturally be possible to find what we claim in the case. My interpretations are no doubt guided by a specific purpose. Yet this purpose assumed form only as I went along, playing as it were with my actions, and for very long stretches of my way I have been guided only by the actions themselves. Furthermore, the great majority of the actions and investigations were chosen at random - what we might call serendipity - on the basis of accidental and personal preference rather than in view of a definite purpose. Investigations of this kind do not deal with laws but with trends and tendencies which cross and complement one another in the most varied ways. I was and is by no means interested merely in presenting what would serve my purpose in the narrowest sense; on the contrary, it was my endeavour to accomodate multiplex data and to make my investigations correspondingly elastic. I had to dispense with almost all the more recent, external investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical material. Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something which modern criminological research has disproved or modified. I trust that these probable errors include none which affect the core of my investigation. I hope that the ongoing investigation may contribute to bringing together all those whose love for truth, justice and our occidental logic has serenely persevered. This might be the final usefulness of our venture. Sincerely,
The legal courts inherent flaw, its lack of autonomy - beholden to all, master of none - was always addressed. We might call it unbiased, neutral, disinterested. However, those desriptions seem too clever by half. Alas, the reality is frequently more pedestrian. I was not Bambi's little brother, and neither were individual, opposing lawyers, nor the court's presiding judges. It was not always pretty.
“The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s said by a character called Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, which was (we think) written between 1596 and 1599. Shakespeare also wrote later: "Save a place in Hell, since there are some lawyers passing away soon." Bear in mind, in legal battles, preparedness, a good thought and a sharp pen is worth a lot more than a sword. Plato, the sovereign of all times and the author of around 35 philosophical dialogues, combines analytical skills with great powers of reasoning to produce a well-structured solution that deals emphatically with counter-arguments. The Academy of his produced many influential Sophists - always keen to describe and reject clever but empty reasoning.
In Plato's allegory of the cave, the shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason. It explores the theme of belief versus knowledge.
The two words “reasoning” and “inference” are often treated as synonyms. We might state that reasoning is only one way of performing inferences, and not such a reliable way at that. We might pose a question: Is this process – attending to reasons – the only way to pursue the goal of extracting new information from information that we already possess?
Of course not! After all, even animals form expectations about the future. Their life depends on these expectations being on the whole correct. Since the future cannot be perceived, it is through inference that animals must form expectations. It is quite implausible, however, that, in so doing, animals attend to reasons.
Reason has recently entered the world of politics on a great scale - perhaps not for the first time since Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and the latter's namesake J. Stuart Mill. As long as the idea of a political spectrum has existed, there have been complaints that a single axis is inadequate to reflect the complexity of multifaceted civic matters. While pursuing answers to the questions of science, from the origins of life to the origins of everything, which might appear to be among the most arrogant of human endeavours, the chase itself is humbling. Measured by all dimensions, each human life is infinitesimal; our individual accomplishments are visible only in the aggregate of many generations of effort. Evidence does not care about approval. This applies to all evidence. The value of information does not reside in the number of thumbs-up it gets but in what we do with it. We thence set about rigorously pursuing evidence rather than likes. As scientists we might wish we had managed to collect more evidence, but the data we have is substantial and from it we can infer many things. A scientist must go where the evidence leads, the old adage runs. There is humility in following the evidence, and it frees you from preconceptions that can cloud observations and insight. Much the same can be said for adulthood, a good definition of which might be "the point at which you have gathered enough experience that your models have a high success rate in forecasting reality". In truth, most events in life stem from a confluence of multiple causes. Should we let go of prejudices? Wield William of Occam's razor and seek the simplest explanation. Be willing to abandon models that fail, which some inevitably do when they collide with the imperfect grasp of facts and the laws of nature. The idea that presentation is successful when language is aligned with truth implies that truth can be known; truth needs no argument but only accurate presentation; the reader is competent to recognize truth; the symmetry between writer and reader allows the presentation to follow the model of conversation; a natural language is sufficient to express truth; and the writer knows the truth before he puts it into language. Investigative activities are defined conceptually and lead to skills. This is true of all intellectual activities. There are skills of mathematical discovery, skills of painting, skills of learning a language, and so on. But in no case is the activity constituted by the skills. Great painters are often less skillful than mediocre painters; it is their concept of painting, not their skills, that define their activity. Similarly, a foreigner may be less skillful than a native speaker at manipulating tenses or using subjunctives, but nonetheless be an incomparably better writer. Intellectual activities generate skills, but skills do not generate intellectual activities. The relationship is not symmetric. One famous French private detective - private investigator described his method as follows: "J'ai sur-tout à caeur la clarté... Mon style ne sera point fleuri, mes expressions seront simples comme la vérité." (Above all, I have clarity at heart. My style will not be at all florid; my expressions will be simple as the truth.) Giovanni Agnelli, once a famous CEO of FIAT as well as a great womanizer and playboy, was once asked how he came to be in a position to conquer so many women's hearts, bodies and minds. He replied: "Most men talk about women, I talk with women." As private detectives - private investigators we follow the same route, talking and interacting with criminals - felons and refuse to adopt the mannered style of the courtroom, even implying that there is something artificial and dishonest in that style. We adopt as our model scene conversation, voice, spontaneity. As a result, it is easy to excerpt from our conversations with criminals - felons discrete, intelligible, disinterested units of discourse. By contrast, imagine a speech by an Athenian orator whose main goal, unlike Socrates' who developed the scene conversation model, is to win his legal case. My original starting point in most private detective - private investigator cases is Plato's discussion in book 10 of the Republic - mimesis ranking third after truth - in conjunction with Dante's assertion that in the Commedia he presented true reality. It is possible to present the most everyday phenomena of reality in a serious and significant context. Being concerned with realism in general, the question is often to what degree and in what manner realistic subjects and happenings are treated; seriously, problematically or tragically. The category of "realistic detective works of serious style and character" has seldom been treated or even conceived as such. Am I fit to analyze our private detective - private investigator models theoretically and to describe them systematically? To do that would have necessitated an ardous and, from the reader's point of view, a tiresome search for definitions at the very beginning of my undertaking of the case. (Not even the term "realistic" is unambiguous.) Our train of reasoning can easily be rendered in the form of a syllogism: I describe myself; I am in a situation which constantly changes - due to its revolving appearance, guided by new information. Shall we leave logical continuity in the lurch and first introduce conclusions in the form of surprising assertions? Now at last comes the minor premise, not directly but as the conclusion of a subordinate syllogism. The vitality of the will to investigation and expression is so strong that our private detective - private investigator style breaks through the limits of a purely theoretical disquisition. We might skip intermediate steps of reasoning, but replace what is lacking by a kind of contact which arises spontaneously between steps not connected by strict logic. Occasionally we might repeat clues, leads and ideas which we consider important over and over in ever-new formulations, each time working out a fresh viewpoint - so these clues, leads and ideas radiate in all direction. All these are characteristics which we are much more used to finding in conversation - though only in the conversation of exceptionally thoughtful and articulate people - than in a printed work of theoretical content. We are inclined to think that this sort of effect requires vocal inflection, gesture, the warming up to one another which comes with an enjoyable conversation. Voltaire wrote in his Candide: "We two - you and I - are having a conversation. That is the whole purpose of my writing. So - as life is short, nasty and brutal - I happen to be deceased. Memento mori - and tempus fugit. However, it does not change my writing objective." Clever man, and a man of mighty vision and courage. Our presentation of the investigation of the Bayesian case, however changeable and diverse it is, never goes astray, and at times we might contradict ourselves, albeit we never contradict the truth. This mirrors a very realistic conception of man based on experience and in particular on self-experience: the conception that man is a fluctuating creature subject to the changes which take place in his surroundings, his destiny, and his inner impulses. To fully understand a complicated phenomenon or thing, one must see it in its entirety - see its whole life cycle. "Humans are by nature evil, however, not without responsibility for their actions," wrote Aristotle. Children are easier studied than adults: first they want to be loved, then they want to be respected for abilities and compence, thence - and finally - they want to be feared, i.e., having power and control. To investigate and discern a pattern in the Bayesian criminal case will take both time and effort, albeit there is more to it than meets the eye. Bureau Ekman and its committed, professional team will - in two or double senses - go to the bottom of this affair. We are in an intense chase / battle for understanding. What has happened, or rather, what has happened that has not happened before? Our motive in this private detective - private investigator case is pure truth, our purpose is presentation. We can choose and emphasize as we please. It must naturally be possible to find what we claim in the case. My interpretations are no doubt guided by a specific purpose. Yet this purpose assumed form only as I went along, playing as it were with my actions, and for very long stretches of my way I have been guided only by the actions themselves. Furthermore, the great majority of the actions and investigations were chosen at random - what we might call serendipity - on the basis of accidental and personal preference rather than in view of a definite purpose. Investigations of this kind do not deal with laws but with trends and tendencies which cross and complement one another in the most varied ways. I was and is by no means interested merely in presenting what would serve my purpose in the narrowest sense; on the contrary, it was my endeavour to accomodate multiplex data and to make my investigations correspondingly elastic. I had to dispense with almost all the more recent, external investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical material. Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something which modern criminological research has disproved or modified. I trust that these probable errors include none which affect the core of my investigation. I hope that the ongoing investigation may contribute to bringing together all those whose love for truth, justice and our occidental logic has serenely persevered. This might be the final usefulness of our venture. Sincerely,
Claes Reinhold Ekman
PS! Relevant and valuable tips regarding the Bayesian case will be magnanimously remunerated: $10.000:00 ++