throw3192312

Thanks for pointing this out. I was much too cynical in the above post.

I wonder if the C-bashers were saying something similar when Lisp machines were reigning unchallenged.

Resisting immigration of a particular demographic, one that arguably contributes most to the coffers of the said welfare state, is well within epistemological domain of the word 'xenophobia'.

It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neither has Baidu, nor Tencent, nor Wechat. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba, and is on a long drawn collision course towards merging with Amazon. The startups I've seen generally seem to target foreign markets, or to service people who service foreign markets; this is inherently a tiny subset of India's population.

Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone).

I also feel there is generally a lot of self-flattering that goes on, often for this very reason. I'm old enough to remember the embarrassment that was to be 'India's answer to OLPC' (also conceived at an IIT of note).

As someone who has seen enough of the math, I strongly feel that probability just makes ideas seem "sexier" in ML; often you don't really need probability, or you only need it to use Jensen. Worse, using probabilities generally masks deeper ideas from surfacing. Bayesian-ism, has become another cargo-cult, in many ways.