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I certainly see how a Bayesian theory is useful, but I can't fathom how to use it instead of an if statement. What does that even mean? What would it look lik
by tocomment 20y ago
I certainly see how a Bayesian theory is useful, but I can't fathom how to use it instead of an if statement. What does that even mean? What would it look like? Can anyone enlighten me?
- npk 20y agoIt's a platitude. The full quotation and context is here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/17.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/17.html I read the "very senior Microsoft developer"'s point as something like: because if statements are so fundamental, most lowly MS programmers think in terms of them. Google, hires programmers who've taken a course in machine learning or something, and use statistical inference (a bunch of if statements, just with some abstraction) instead of lookup tables (a bunch of if statements.) Yawn. This is just Google PR speak. The quotation doesn't really mean if statements will go away, it just means that you need to think at a "higher level." This is just someone saying "X is smarter than Y."