(At this point, I fear that I must recurse into a subsequence; but if all goes as planned, it really will be short.)

I once lent Xiaoguang "Mike" Li my copy of "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". Mike Li read some of it, and then came back and said:

"Wow... it's like Jaynes is a thousand-year-old vampire."

Then Mike said, "No, wait, let me explain that—" and I said, "No, I know exactly what you mean." It's a convention in fantasy literature that the older a vampire gets, the more powerful they become.

I'd enjoyed math proofs before I encountered Jaynes. But E.T. Jaynes was the first time I picked up a sense of formidability from mathematical arguments. Maybe because Jaynes was lining up "paradoxes" that had been used to object to Bayesianism, and then blasting them to pieces with overwhelming firepower—power being used to overcome others. Or maybe the sense of formidability came from Jaynes not treating his math as a game of aesthetics; Jaynes cared about probability theory, it was bound up with other considerations that mattered, to him and to me too.

For whatever reason, the sense I get of Jaynes is one of terrifying swift perfection—something that would arrive at the correct answer by the shortest possible route, tearing all surrounding mistakes to shreds in the same motion. Of course, when you write a book, you get a chance to show only your best side. But still.

It spoke well of Mike Li that he was able to sense the aura of formidability surrounding Jaynes. It's a general rule, I've observed, that you can't discriminate between levels too far above your own. E.g., someone once earnestly told me that I was really bright, and "ought to go to college". Maybe anything more than around one standard deviation above you starts to blur together, though that's just a cool-sounding wild guess.

So, having heard Mike Li compare Jaynes to a thousand-year-old vampire, one question immediately popped into my mind:

"Do you get the same sense off me?" I asked.

Mike shook his head. "Sorry," he said, sounding somewhat awkward, "it's just that Jaynes is..."

"No, I know," I said. I hadn't thought I'd reached Jaynes's level. I'd only been curious about how I came across to other people.

I aspire to Jaynes's level. I aspire to become as much the master of Artificial Intelligence / refle...

Yep

Yep

Yep

Yep