Perhaps Jaynes is trying here to prevent the reader from even thinking about these questions, but if so his strategy is more bold and unconventional than I can fathom.

His strategy is to make them look like trivial details, things that can be safely assumed, things that only a pedantic mathematician could care about, things that don't matter.

As for P(AB|C) = F[P(A|C),P(B|A&C)] that is equation 2.1. Jaynes considers an alternative in equ 2.2 and then discusses how to organize an exhaustive case split....

This part, in particular is what struck me as the most absolutely, monumentally awful part of the book. The other cases jaynes considers in his "exhaustive case split" are only a tiny, minuscule, arbitrary set of the things that P(AB|C) might depend on. Why should P(AB|C) not depend on the specific structure of the propositions themselves?

What bothers me so much about this part of the book isn't so much that the argument is incomplete, but that Jaynes is downright deceptive in his attempts to convince the reader that it is a complete rigorous justification for the Bayesian approach. Jaynes (and Eliezer) make it sound like Cox proved a generic Dutch book argument against anyone who doesn't use the Bayesian approach. There may indeed be such a theorem, but Cox's theorem just isn't it.

I haven't read past chapter 3 (or was it 4?), but I don't recall encountering anything which is monumentally bad. Care to give an example?

Should I also sit in the dark before bed?

Can I make a pro-babyeater argument?

Here is a dialogue between an imaginary six-year-old child named Dennis and myself.

Me: Hi Dennis, do you like broccoli?

Dennis: No, I hate it!

Me: But it's good for you, right?

Dennis: I don't care! It tastes awful!

Me: Would you like to like broccoli?

Dennis: No, I can't stand broccoli! That stuff is gross!

Me: What if I told you some magic words that would make it so that every piece of broccoli you ever ate would taste just like chocolate if you said them? Would you say the magic words?

Dennis: Well...

Me: You like chocolate, don't you?

Dennis: Yes, but...

Me: What?

Dennis: Your questions are too hard.

I think everyone has conflicts between their different wants. I want to do well in my classes, but I don't want to study. And yet I can't think of any conflicts between my metawants: If I could choose to like studying just as much as I like my favorite computer game, I would make that choice. The wants offered to the humans in the babyeaters story seem fairly sensible from a utilitarian perspective. They promote peace throughout the galaxy and mean lots of fun for everyone. What's not to like?

of the 102 people who cared about the ending to 3 Worlds Collide, 68 (66.6%) prefered to see the humans blow up Huygens, while 34 (33.3%) thought we'd be better off cooperating with the aliens and eating delicious babies.

I'm shocked. Are there any significant variations in the responses of babyeaters compared to freedom fighters to other questions?

Ming the Merciless offers you a choice that you cannot refuse. Either (a) his torturer will rip one of your fingernails off, or (b) his torturer will inflict pain more intense than you can imagine, continuously for the next 24 hours, without otherwise harming you. But in case (b) only, his evil genius neuroscientists will cause you to afterwards completely forget the experience, and any other aftereffects from the stress will be put right as well. If you refuse to make a choice, you will get (b) without the amnesia.

What do you choose?

If you choose (a), how much worse would (a) have to be, for you to choose (b)? If you choose (b), how much less bad would (a) have to be, for you to choose (a)?

I haven't read Jaynes's work on the subject, so I couldn't say. However, if he thinks that equal probabilities mean equal obligation to be surprised, I disagree with him. It's easy to do things that are spectacularly unlikely - flip through a shuffled deck of cards to see a given sequence, for instance - that do not, and should not, surprise you at all.

These surveys are fun! 1. Fast food e.g. McDonalds 2. Concerns about low nutritional value and food safety. 3. If I have been drinking I will happily enjoy a fast food burger 4. My son is going to be one of those kids who never gets to go to McDonalds unless its for a birthday party. 5. No. 6. N/A 7. If their reasons seem rational I think that's cool. If their reasons seem to be founded on a selective evidence and hippy crap I think they are stupid. 8. Friday nights are the killer, see question 2. 9. Warm cheeseburgers taste good. 10. I enjoy organic and free range animals, especially pest game like wild pigs and rabbits. It seems more noble to take animals randomly from the wild like natural predators do. I'm ok with non-cruel farming though.

Do you have any pointers to how to prepare/select raw meat so that it is safe to eat?

Yes: smell and taste it. If it smells good, eat it. If it doesn't smell good, or if you find yourself wanting to spit it back out (either before or after you swallow), it's bad.

My wife and I have both found that ours bodies are quite sensitive to the scent and taste of raw food; it's easy to tell if something is bad or not. I seem to remember reading somewhere that bacterial counts can be 26 times higher in cooked food than raw, before it's detectable by taste or smell; evidently evolution hasn't had enough time to tune our senses for detecting the quality of cooked proteins!

One other interesting phenomenon I've never seen mentioned anywhere: for lack of anything else to call it, I call it the throat sense. After you swallow something that passes the smell and taste test, but which isn't quite good enough, you'll find an urge to hack it back up from your throat, even though you've already swallowed it.

It's not like throwing up, exactly; it's as if the food just doesn't go all the way down, and you can just spit it right back out again. I think that babies and circus regurgitators make use of the same machinery. But I wasn't aware that I had such a thing, personally, until the first time I swallowed a bad egg that I didn't smell first. (Nowadays, I smell every egg after opening, and I don't refrigerate them. Refrigeration makes them harder to smell, and kept out of the sun, they keep for 2-3 weeks.)

As far as I know, I've never gotten sick from eating a raw protein gone bad, because they don't stay down long enough to reach my stomach. (I did get sick the first time I ate a bad avocado, but I didn't realize yet that it wasn't supposed to taste like that!)

So, as long as you aren't disguising the taste and smell of your food, I wouldn't worry too much about safety. When it comes to raw, if it tastes good, it is good. You can at least trust evolution to get this bit correct. ;-)

What bores you is obviously way too subjective for me to discuss further, but if you think that good is unlikely to come of this discussion, I'd be interested to know why.