Edwin Thompson Jaynes

Edwin Thompson Jaynes (July 5, 1922 – April 30, 1998) was a physicist and statistician, and author of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

Jaynes (circa 1960)

Quotes

Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (2003)

• In principle, the only operations which a machine cannot perform for us are those which we cannot describe in detail, or which could not be completed in a finite number of steps.
  • Pg. 7.

• Common language — or, at least, the English language — has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this. To interpret the first kind of statement in the ontological sense is to assert that one’s own private thoughts and sensations are realities existing externally in Nature. We call this the ‘mind projection fallacy’, and note the trouble it causes many times in what follows. But this trouble is hardly confined to probability theory; as soon as it is pointed out, it becomes evident that much of the discourse of philosophers and Gestalt psychologists, and the attempts of physicists to explain quantum theory, are reduced to nonsense by the author falling repeatedly into the mind projection fallacy.
  • Pg. 22.

• The semiliterate on the next bar stool will tell you with absolute, arrogant assurance just how to solve the world's problems; while the scholar who has spent a lifetime studying their causes is not at all sure how to do this.

• It appears to be a quite general principle that, whenever there is a randomized way of doing something, then there is a nonrandomized way that delivers better performance but requires more thought.