It seems Shalizi’s comments on Jaynes have been somewhat refuted. The paper claiming that subjective Bayes induces a backward arrow of time fails to account for the entropy generation inside the mind of the agent forming beliefs about the world. It requires energy to convert observations into states of belief, and hence increases entropy. Shalizi’s argument does not account for this and (like many puffed-up “rebuttals” of Jaynes) fails for an essentially trivial reason. Shalizi is a great writer and thoughtful researcher, but just got things very very wrong on that occasion.
It seems Shalizi’s comments on Jaynes have been somewhat refuted. The paper claiming that subjective Bayes induces a backward arrow of time fails to account for the entropy generation inside the mind of the agent forming beliefs about the world. It requires energy to convert observations into states of belief, and hence increases entropy. Shalizi’s argument does not account for this and (like many puffed-up “rebuttals” of Jaynes) fails for an essentially trivial reason. Shalizi is a great writer and thoughtful researcher, but just got things very very wrong on that occasion.