I know this is HN and we love these simplistic universal laws here (Hanlon's razor being another beloved law) but Occam’s razor isn’t really applicable here, or at the very least, it isn’t very helpful, and it certainly isn’t conclusive. That he was exfiltrated by the Chinese government also requires the same number of variables as that he was disappeared by the American government. So Occam’s Razor actually suggests nothing here.
Occam’s razor is a rule of thumb which suggests that if several hypotheses explain the same thing, the simplest one should be favored. When we have a missing person with several unknown variables, until we see some evidence, any guess is as good as other. And no hypotheses should be ruled out.
On HN we also like Bayesian analysis, so instead of looking for the simplest explenation, we should be asking what we already know. What is the probability that this person was disappeared by the government, given that 3 other students have been disappeared by the government lately? Given that these 3 other students were also people of color? Etc.
I didn't either at first, I went and looked it up after enough people started using it to nullify/discredit what I had to say in serious conversation.
Murphy's Law Book 2, January 24, 1980
A book of jokes, meant to be humorous.
No previous literature related to it before then.
I can't help but laugh when people use it now, so I guess its still funny... in a way.
It says a lot about the character of a person that takes a joke and uses it in a way, that it was never intended to be used. Useful knowledge to keep in your back pocket if needed.
> When we have a missing person with several unknown variables, until we see some evidence, any guess is as good as other.
Really? So that he was abducted by aliens is also on the table and has the same probability?
Obviously there can be some prior information that makes „he was exfiltrated by Chinese intelligence services“ more likely than „he was disappeared by US intelligence services“.
I’m not saying there is, but philosophically, you don’t need to know anything more than „A person with relations to china disappeared“ to be able to determine one hypothesis as the most likely one.
> Obviously there can be some prior information that makes „he was exfiltrated by Chinese intelligence services“ more likely than „he was disappeared by US intelligence services"
The obvious one being if the FBI is arresting a spy they would not be doing search warrants on his properties weeks after he goes missing. They do that stuff immediately.
Instead if we're speculating, this far more sounds like the FBI are playing catch up to circumstances that became suspicious after a few weeks.
I answered the exfiltration likelihood in a sibling thread. The summary is that spies are very rare and it is not a likely explanation. Keeping the Bayesian hat on we can pretty much rule out aliens. We have never witnessed an alien abduction, so the chances of this being an alien abduction is actually infinitely smaller than exfiltration.
We can set the same prior probability to all the possibilities, that is fine. But given the evidence the posterior for alien abduction is very close to 0, if not just simply 0.
Given the recent pattern of behavior from the US government, we have seen quite a few people disappeared. The posterior for US government involvement is IMO much higher than exfiltration. That said, no government involvement is higher still (and is actually the hypothesis favored by Occam’s Razor).
Wrapping your conspiracy theories into pseudo-science based on wild guesses doesn't make them more likely.
There is a long series of scientists in the US that were secretly working for the Chinese government. It is simply the most likely explanation that this is another instance of that.
It also doesn't make any sense that the US government would secretly "disappear", as you put it, this individual while they are openly deporting thousands elsewhere, often based on flimsy evidence. Furthermore, if you are secretly getting rid of someone, you do it to avoid taking responsibility. Why would you send the FBI to raid their residence afterwards? That immediately connects you to the disappearance, thereby sabotaging your own scheme.
I did say the likeliest explanation is no government involvement, but that USA involvement is still likelier than China‘s involvement given recent pattern of conduct.
Chinese exfiltration is also a conspiracy theory. In fact chinese exfiltration requires a larger conspiracy than USA disappearance. If you want to apply Occam’s Razor (which you shouldn’t), you should actually favor disappearance over exfiltration (but really you should favor no government involvement).
> There is a long series of scientists in the US that were secretly working for the Chinese government.
If that is so, can you provide me with a list. That list would actually have to be pretty long to make exfiltration the likeliest hypothesis. Like there would have to be more than a couple of dozen cases this century.
EDIT: I did quick googling to find any sources which backs your claim. This NY Post article is the strongest one (https://nypost.com/2025/02/20/us-news/us-science-labs-face-g...) it is basically a propaganda piece citing far right US politicians who claim extraordinary numbers (like 8000 scientists) without any evidence. As we know extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I feel that the word conspiracy is not helping to bring clarity to the discussion. Covert operations are by definition conspirations but that's not what people generally mean when they use the word conspiracy so let's just avoid using a word that might muddy the discourse unnecessary.
Both the Chinese and USA governments engaged (or have been accused of engaging) in unlawful kidnapping of their own (and foreign) nationals from foreign countries over the last decades.
So I'm not sure how one can dismiss the possibility that this is indeed one of such cases.
Searching the DOJ homepage with the search term “spy” (to see which they have showcased) gives us 209 results, including a bunch of news around the 2009 conviction. The most resent news I found was from 2022 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/five-individuals-cha...) a very vague news which is actually more about harassing private citizen (presumably piggy-banking out of the anti-asian hate following Covid). The most resent news about actual spying against the US government was from 2020 (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-a...) Alexander Yuk Ching Ma. He was actually found guilty in may 2024 (so he is missing from that Wikipedia list). The DOJ article about the conviction doesn’t use the word spy, so it is missing from my search, but here it is: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-cia-officer-s....
Given the above, I think it is safe to bet that if he was arrested for being a spy, the DOJ would indeed want to showecase it. However, spies are very rare, and the likelyhood of OP’s case being a spy is very low. It is much more likely that he disappeared for other reasons.
A guy was arrested for being a PRC spy, stealing sensitive documents from GE Vernona. 2-3 years ago. I remember it because he was using stenography to embed documents in landscape photos sent via email.
They also use various means to charge people. Lying to a federal agent is a serious crime. Almost any misuse of federal funds can a a serious crime.
Wouldn't "murder victim" be the Occam's razor explanation? We know his wife is still living in the house. We also know that statistically speaking your spouse is the person most likely to murder you. I'm not going to say anything more than that because the obvious next statement would be one that is based entirely on speculation, but it takes a lot less speculation than all these ridiculous James Bond fanfics I'm seeing.
> We also know that statistically speaking your spouse is the person most likely to murder you.
This is slightly misleading. While it is true that the person with the highest probability of murdering you is your partner (at least, if you're a woman), it is more likely that the murder is a stranger to the victim than to be the spouse of the victim.
For example, in the FBI's 2011 dataset [1], of the 7076 murders by someone with a known relationship to the victim, 1295 were by a husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend. This is compared to, of course, the 2700 murders committed by acquaintances and 1481 by strangers. From this, we can see ~18% of murders are by their partners and ~60% are by someone quite a bit further flung.
The reason why both statistics are simultaneously true is that most people have only a few partners (focusing the entire risk on a small group) where as there are many thousands of people in the latter categories (creating a very diffuse risk).
So, if you were to bet one which person murdered someone, you would do well to guess one of their partners. If you had to guess if the victim knew their murderer, you should bet that they did not.
Yeah, good example of the maximum entropy principle, [0] in which "the selected distribution is the one that makes the least claim to being informed beyond the stated prior data, that is to say the one that admits the most ignorance beyond the stated prior data", a.k.a. the most entropy. Occam's Razor must still be constrained to known facts, and you cannot construct a "simplest answer" out of data you simply do not have.
There's plenty of other public information. The FBI was searching his house for undisclosed reasons, so most definitely they have some kind of investigation open on him. And his degrees were issued by universities in Nanjing and Shanghai, China, strongly suggesting he is a Chinese National, perhaps naturalized to the United States.
That was known at the time of my post.
We now also know now at the time of his escape, Indiana University had terminated his Professorship. And has continued to disavow he and his wife.
I did not misuse Occam's razor, my knowledge of public facts simply exceeded yours.
