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torekp comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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In the first paragraph you quoted, EY arbitrarily and pointlessly juxtaposes two different questions. I say "pointlessly" charitably, because if there is a point, it's a bad one, to (guilt-by-)associate an affirmative answer to the first, with an affirmative answer to the second.
Could the Born probabilities be basic? "Could" would seem best interpreted here as "formulable consistently with the two-factor Great Reductionist approach." "Basic" I'll take as relative to a model: if a law is derived in the model, it's not basic. Now that we know what the question is, the answer is: sure, why not? Physical laws mention "electric charge", "time", "distance"; adding "probability" doesn't seem to break anything, as long as the resulting theory is testable. That basically probabilistic theory might not be the most elegant, but that's a different argument. And there's no need to top probabilities with fundamental-degree-of-realness sauce.
He is not an instrumentalist, so he finds this approach (anything that helps one make good predictions goes) aesthetically unsatisfying.
I'm not saying or implying that "anything that helps one make good predictions, goes". I really don't think instrumentalism is relevant here; if we take it off the table as an option, there still doesn't seem to be any reason to disprefer a theory that posits "objective probability" to one that posits "electric charge", aside from the overall elegance and explanatory power of the two theories. Which are reasons to incline to believe that a theory is true, I take it, not just to see it as useful.