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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".

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.

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).

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

Deleted comment

I would seriously doubt this is the reason. If you want to learn applied Bayesian stats, you go to a machine learning or game theory conference or read research papers. There are plenty of Chinese citizens doing both, including low-level university students, so this really can't be the reason.

I would think that the reason has something to do with objectionable content inside this specific book, perhaps in an example problem as another commenter noted.

Bayesian stats have been around for a very long time, and it's senseless to try to block textbook-level access to it, unless you're really trying to block just the textbook itself.

I apparently double-posted my comment, and deleted the duplicate, your parent, before your post was committed. Sorry about that. I also modified the other version, which, in some sort of karmic reaction, is now dead. Let me

1. Repost the modified dead parent:

> Probably because they're using Bayesian filters on various security fronts: internal threat analysis, the great firewall, whatever side projects some bureaucrat is using to pad his income.

>edit: This is a problem with classification/censorship schemes: the censors/classifiers are all stove-piped, so their decisions come with a high degree of variability. The censor may well have been unaware that this is a whole field of work, or, is aware, but isn't responsible for the censoring decisions about all other related titles.

2. point to Feynman's accounts of censorship at Los Alamos as just how dense censors are: http://goo.gl/nfxqp

Ultimately, I think you're right, this doesn't make sense, except in some colloquial circumstance that is already water under the bridge for the actors.

On the other hand, nothing says that the China censorship mechanism has to be consistent, in fact I'd almost expect them to be arbitrary and capricious.

It might be that whatever individual decided to ban this book would also have wanted to ban other the things you mention if they had been aware of them.

If they try to ban Chinese citizens from international conferences and journals in anything related to Bayesian methods, I can tell you firsthand that a lot of math/CS/ML/AI conferences will shrivel up quite a bit. They won't die, but it'll be like the Cold War, where Russian mathematicians made advances that were insulated from the west for many years, and vice versa. A net loss for everyone, especially in a topic as fundamental as Bayesian methods.

You misunderstand, I'm very much not saying that there is or will be a general policy of banning things related to Bayesian methods. Rather, thats its quite possible one mid-level bureaucrat thought that Bayesian methods were unacceptable in this one instance. Maybe he (I think "he" is a safe assumption here) was confused and really thought that this sort of math was subversive. Maybe he was worried that he hadn't banned enough things this month and his supperiors would think he was lazy. Maybe the publisher failed to pay the customary bribe. In any of these cases, though, the official reason for the ban might very well be that "Bayesian Methods are subversive".

Seeing as this is a post on Bayesian statistics in China, I must ask: why are you sufficiently confident to assert that "he" is a safe assumption? Because it's political, because it's mathematical, because it's irrational, or because it's China?

Reviewing the evidence a bit more, it seems I shouldn't be. I imagined the gender ratio in the CCP was worse than what evidence I've been able to dig up suggests it is.

Ah, point taken.

Actually, one of the best ways to learn applied bayesian stats, used by most machine learning researchers I've asked about this, is to read Gelman's books on bayesian data analysis and hierarchical/multilevel modeling.

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