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I think "useful" is doing a lot of work here. A lot of math notation exists clearly to gate keep. It's often nonsensical. It's a shame because it really makes m

I think "useful" is doing a lot of work here. A lot of math notation exists clearly to gate keep. It's often nonsensical. It's a shame because it really makes mathematicians look bad (re:annoying) to those who can see through it. It's not hard to see through it or anything, but it is obnoxious. All you need is an english explanation of the notation, and then you're good, but often all of the sources on the topic are written in the same obnoxious babble language. Take sequential Monte Carlo / sequential importance sampling for instance. This powerpoint on it is clownishly bad: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/courses/260-spring10/readings/samsi_lec2.pdf http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/courses/260-spring10... This is supposed to be an algorithm implemented in code. It's essentially illegible without code examples, which it doesn't feature. Code examples tell you what the cipher signifies; at no point does the cipher provide any value to the learner. Fanciful bayes-theoretical statements and so on basically reduce to "iteratively build enlarging valid states." Given the fact that this simple statement is missing, I question if the professor has some sort of communication disorder or if they're just a troll. Similar to pomo philosophers, it's probably a mix.

Jensson 5y ago
Lecture powerpoints are bad everywhere since you are meant to listen to the lecturer speaking about them, they aren't meant to be read independently like this. Try to understand programming based on a programming lecture powerpoint, it is usually impossible. Edit: Also you can't write code for what he is talking about in that lecture. Code cannot deal with infinities or continuous values. You'd get approximations which isn't the same thing, then you'd need to prove that those approximations are good enough which would have to be done without code anyway.

Jensson 5y ago

Lecture powerpoints are bad everywhere since you are meant to listen to the lecturer speaking about them, they aren't meant to be read independently like this. Try to understand programming based on a programming lecture powerpoint, it is usually impossible. Edit: Also you can't write code for what he is talking about in that lecture. Code cannot deal with infinities or continuous values. You'd get approximations which isn't the same thing, then you'd need to prove that those approximations are good enough which would have to be done without code anyway.