Douglas Knight: "In particular, when you say that knowledge of particles makes something colder, makes it possible to extract work, you've gone back to the ideal observer."

Eliezer: "I think emphatically not! To extract work, you've got to be inside the system, extracting it."

I think what Douglas may be implying is that unless you are perfectly insulated from what you are getting knowledge of (e.g. and ideal observer), the act of getting knowledge of something will heat it up. As you are doing work and increasing the entropy in the surroundings.

It raises some interesting and quirky ideas in me. I'm picturing future the future where an intelligence explosion or at least expansion where a statistical machine is the dominant producer of entropy on the planet and it deciding to not go perform too much statistics so it doesn't go over the hypsithermal limit of its environment and make its environment less rather than more predictable.