More on Bayes in China

Here’s an update of whether they didn’t teach Bayesian statistics in China because the “prior distribution” violated the principles of communism:

Chuanhai writes, “Zaiying Huang and I took a Bayesian course taught in the department of Mathematics at Wuhan University in 1984-1985.”

Hao writes, “Interesting. I didn’t learn Bayes in China and never heard of this. But it sounds possible at that time.”

Hongyu: “I did not hear this, I only learned the Bayes theorem but nothing else.”

Tian:

In my only “mathematical statistics” course back in college, my teacher told us the philosophical views of Bayesian statistics without much detail, but it sounded very cool.

Mao’s quote should be interpreted (in the most direct Chinglish way) as “the truth needs to be examined using empirical facts”. So I don’t it completely conflicts with the views of Bayesian statistics.

Just my 2 cents!

Finally, Xiao-Li clarifies:

It’s not my teachers, but rather time (or generation!) differences. It was late 70th when I got to colleague, when the culture revolution just ended. And indeed, my teachers told me about this in reference to why they did not “dare” to study Bayes *during* culture revolution (or study anything else for that matter). By 84-85, things have changed considerably. Indeed, in 85, I took a seminar course at Fudan during which I learned empirical Bayes. And according to Don, that is why I was admitted because I wrote a personal statement on why I wanted to study empirically Bayes. Don said he was impressed because finally there was a Chinese student who did not just say how good his/her mathematics was, but of course retrospectively I have to confess that I really didn’t know much about what I was talking about! :-)

Of course Xiao-Li is being modest. He understood everything, but just in Chinese, not English!