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Comment by lightoverhead | Hacker News Reader

Hi Guys,

I am from China, and of course the Bayesian is taught in China. Only in the culture revolution time, this crazy thing may happen; but it's long time ago when Mao was alive. Now China is a modern society; of course, the Bayesian theory is taught in schools; otherwise how could they send the spaceship to the outer space and have the fastest super computer in the world so far. you are smart hackers, not a bunch of kids controlled by traditional biases. As to censorship, that's right, china has notorious censorship. I guess the author's book must have some contents/examples regarding political issues; not Bayesian itself was the reason for the book being censored. These days, when people talked about censorship, I always think of wiki-leaks ......

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Launching a spaceship almost certainly uses Bayesian methods for tracking (e.g., Kalman or particle filters for position tracking), but I seriously doubt that building a supercomputer requires a dedicated use of Bayesian statistics.

On a different note, perhaps you could be slightly less condescending in your future posts.

I didn't find his tone too objectionable. Always consider that getting the tone correct can be difficult in a foreign tongue.

Understandable, but for future reference to anyone who might be interested, telling strangers to "use their brains" is generally not appreciated in many cultures, since it implies that they weren't.

points taken. I updated my original post. sorry for that condescending tone.

Also, as China is surely the least transparent nation among world powers, I think it is unreasonable to expect foreigners outside the curtain to have an understanding of what really goes on behind the curtain. The lack of transparency fuels wild speculation.

I guess you meant "to reason" but wrote it as "to move(use) brain"?

Is a Kalman filter considered a type of Bayesian statistics? It doesn't seem that way to me, but I'm not so hot at higher math.

In any case, many years ago, I worked on a radar system for a fighter plane. Its air-to-ground radar (at the very least; this was the part I was involved in) did indeed use a Kalman filter.

Yes, you can describe tracking and Kalman filter using bayesian statistics. Although, my prof said that originally it was not developed that way, but it is easier to describe it using normal distributions as priors and likelihoods of the position of the object being tracked.

And I guess thanks to those crazy generalizing mathematicians, nowadays you can use something like Kalman filtering with distribution other than normal ones.

Check out particle filters if you want crazy mathematicians. Fun stuff.

Yup. It's a special case of Bayesian estimation that is derived when all the conditional distributions are Gaussian.

You should have noticed in the WikiLeaks case that there are a lot of Americans criticizing our government. It sounds like you are proud of China, but the truly patriotic thing to do is to criticize your government when it does wrong so that it can improve.

If you're thinking about Wikileaks, think about how the official reaction is being widely regarded as a very overbearing, and very un-American thing, not as a typical expression of well-established values.

Indeed, for a summary of well-established American values, see the collection defined by the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate story, and more recently, the NYT's Warrantless Wiretapping story. Together, they put the Administration on the wrong side of our national character, and to a very embarrassing degree.

So I agree with you; the Wikileaks response doesn't just look bad, it is bad. But you join others on the more dubious side of the issue when you cite errors like this as excuses or justifications for vastly more abusive practices elsewhere, rather than violations of civil liberty that shouldn't be tolerated by self-respecting people anywhere.

"But you join others on the more dubious side of the issue when you cite errors like this as excuses or justifications for vastly more abusive practices elsewhere, rather than violations of civil liberty that shouldn't be tolerated by self-respecting people anywhere."

Or to put it more bluntly: "America sucking is no excuse for China sucking" ;)

It's good Assange didn't wiki-leak China. Otherwise he'd be dead, not getting extradited to live in fame in a cushy prison.

You'd be surprised:

http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/Category:China

(link not working FTM)

And just for the record, Assange didn't leak anything, users submit them or it was collected via Tor exit and wikileaks just publishes it.

> I guess the author's book must have some contents/examples regarding political issues; not Bayesian itself was the reason for the book being censored.

Does the reason really matter?

of course, the Bayesian theory is taught in schools; otherwise how could they send the spaceship to the outer space and have the fastest super computer in the world

Do these things require specifically Bayesian statistics?

what do you think?

I think it's not immediately obvious why they would.

I agree, it's not immediate application. But Bayesian is one of the most important or fundamental knowledge to develop these cutting-edge technologies.

How? I'm experienced with spacecraft design and the like, and have never heard of Bayesian probability theory being used. If it was fundamental I'd expect some mention, somewhere.

If you look hard enough, you can find it in e.g. (linear) regressions and Kalman filtering.

From a strictly logical perspective, they might not. But I would wager a fair amount that there are Bayesian methods used somewhere in the stack supporting those two things. I also suspect that genetic algorithms designed for scheduling purposes probably help your phone call data get transferred somewhere along the way. That is to say, just because the two technologies are not obviously connected doesn't mean the former isn't used somewhere to achieve or improve the latter.

That said, even if there is no presence of Bayesianism in the efforts producing those tasks, his point was surely that, in today's world, an education sufficiently advanced to train people to do those things would certainly include Bayesian statistics somewhere in the curriculum.

Thank you garply. "an education sufficiently advanced to train people to do those things would certainly include Bayesian statistics somewhere in the curriculum" is exactly what I want to convey.

lightoverhead,

I agree with the sentiment of your post - there is no reasonable way to censor a fundamental technical topic such as Bayesian statistics. I find myself wondering what the author did not post from his book that was questionable.

However, the tone of your post makes me wonder if you are a shill paid by the Chinese government to counter commentary critical of China on the Internet.

If I am mistaken, you have my sincerest apologies. The actions of your government have caused me to become a skeptic.

HackerNews,

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

Asia Times: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JH14Ad01.html

In action, in relation to the underage Chinese gymnast in 2008 Olympics: http://strydehax.blogspot.com/2008/09/yang-yun-speaks-out.ht...

It's good Assange didn't wiki-leak China. Otherwise he'd be dead, not getting extradited to live in a cushy prison.

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