We are interested in constructing a probability distribution q(x) such that no matter what particular value p(x) takes, q(x) will still make good predictions.
This is the thing I don’t think physicists (or Jaynes, though I haven’t really read Jaynes) do. But if I’m wrong I’ll edit the post to reflect that.
If you rephrased that as “no matter what microstate compatible with the extrinsic observations the system is in, our model makes good predictions” I think you’d find that most physicists would recognize that as standard thermodynamics, and also that (like me) they wouldn’t recognize it as a game :).
A particular sentence I’d point to is
This is the thing I don’t think physicists (or Jaynes, though I haven’t really read Jaynes) do. But if I’m wrong I’ll edit the post to reflect that.
If you rephrased that as “no matter what microstate compatible with the extrinsic observations the system is in, our model makes good predictions” I think you’d find that most physicists would recognize that as standard thermodynamics, and also that (like me) they wouldn’t recognize it as a game :).
Okay, I’ve edited the relevant part of the original post to link to this comment thread.