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Comment by pmichaud | Hacker News Reader

Is there any way to find out the specific reason the book was not allowed to be published?

Gelman is also a political scientist and many of the book's examples are about elections and election forecasting, probably not topics the Chinese government likes citizens reading about.

While the thought that there's something in this book that is being censored is an appealing story, it's also a less than likely explanation.

My guess is that the chinese publisher didn't want to pay royalties, and this was a convenient way to get a good quality copy of the book for printing without having to share profit.

I think you nailed it.

I've been thinking about it, and this may not be it. It sounds like he already has a relationship with this publisher for domestic publishing.

The author doesn't know, but he hypothesizes that it's because "the idea of prior distribution [is] contrary to Communism".

Which seems more than a little ridiculous to me, but ... it is China.

Pretty sure he was joking there?

It seems like a joke at first, but once you take into account China's previous actions it's actually quite likely.

Like the (brief) period when the sense of traffic lights was changed, so that "red" indicated "go". This makes perfect sense, since anything red must of course stand for making progress.

I was actually just trying to make a bayesian joke, but I think it was a little too subtle.

If you watch the stock market news in China on TV, a stock highlighted in red means it went up, and green means down.

That's an interesting sidenote.

I wonder if it's a subtle psychological trick to not associate red with negative connotations (such as "declining profits", "stop", "blood") because the color red is part of the CPC's identity makeup.Or maybe it's just a cultural thing, like how they wear white when someone died and black to celebrate a birth/life (I'm not sure if it is a chinese custom however, but I know it's an asian custom).

I'm pretty sure it has to do with the material of examples used in the book rather than with the actual theory.

Agreed. If it's Gelman many examples will be from elections, which in itself might be enough to give the communist party in china pause.

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