Expanding a bit on this correspondence: I think a key idea Scott is missing in the post is that a lot of things are mathematically identical to “agents”, “markets”, etc. These are not exclusive categories, such that e.g. the brain using an internal market means it’s not using Bayes’ rule. Internal markets are a way to implement things like (Bayesian) maximum a-posteriori estimates; they’re a very general algorithmic technique, often found in the guise of Lagrange multipliers (historically called “shadow prices” for good reason) or intermediates in backpropagation. Similar considerations apply to “agents”.
Expanding a bit on this correspondence: I think a key idea Scott is missing in the post is that a lot of things are mathematically identical to “agents”, “markets”, etc. These are not exclusive categories, such that e.g. the brain using an internal market means it’s not using Bayes’ rule. Internal markets are a way to implement things like (Bayesian) maximum a-posteriori estimates; they’re a very general algorithmic technique, often found in the guise of Lagrange multipliers (historically called “shadow prices” for good reason) or intermediates in backpropagation. Similar considerations apply to “agents”.
See also the correspondence between prediction markets of kelly bettors and Bayesian updating.