[de]quarantined by slideshare
A follow-up episode to the SlideShare m’a tuer [sic] saga: After the 20 November closure of my xianblog account and my request for an explanation, I was told by Linkedin that a complaint has been made about one of my talks for violation of copyright. Most surprisingly, at least at first, it was about the slides for the graduate lectures I gave ten years ago at CREST on (re)reading Jaynes’ Probability Theory. While the slides contain a lot of short quotes from the Logic of Science, somewhat necessarily since I discuss the said book, there are also many quotes from Jeffreys’ Theory of Probability and “t’is but a scratch” on the contents of this lengthy book… Plus, the pdf file appears to be accessible on several sites, including one with an INRIA domain. Since I had to fill a “Counter-Notice of Copyright Infringement” to unlock the rest of the depository, I just hope no legal action is going to be taken about this lecture. But I remain puzzled at the reasoning behind the complaint, unwilling to blame radical Jaynesians for it! As an aside, here are the registered 736 views of the slides for the past year:
Xi'an's Og 
January 14, 2021 at 2:44 pm
I agree this is not the biggest deal and it is your own business and responsability, but, assuming those slides are not yet obsolete, the misquotation just makes some of your careful readers (like me) quite uncomfortable because i) it unfortunately discredits Jaynes who doesn’t deserve it and ii) he’s unfortunately no longer in a position to require you to fix it by himself.
January 13, 2021 at 8:28 am
It’s good to see those slides back. However, the unfortunate, misleading misquotation on slide 53 remains. Read “It appears that this result was first found by an amateur mathematician, the Rev. Thomas Bayes (1763)… Furthermore, it was not Bayes but Laplace (1774) who first saw the result in generality and showed how to use it in real problems of inference…” instead of “This result was first found by an amateur (sic!) mathematician (…) not Bayes but Laplace who first saw the result in generality and showed how to use it in
inference.” (p.112).
January 14, 2021 at 8:56 am
I do not get the point. Do you object to my (sic!)?
January 14, 2021 at 11:03 am
The point is that, due to the truncation of the original statement, Laplace has become the amateur, it is not Bayes anymore! As a professor at Ecole militaire, Ecole normale, etc., Laplace was definitely not an amateur but a professionnal, academic scientist. On the contrary, as a reverend, by definition Bayes was an amateur, just like another well-known probabilist and mathematician, Pierre de Fermat, who used to work as a lawyer for a living. Here https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/jaynes-re-read/, you correctly states that the amateur is Bayes, not Laplace, according to Jaynes’ original statement. I would understand your (sic!) for Laplace, but I don’t understand it for Bayes, “amateur” seems perfectly suitable (and not pejorative). Anyway, it would be good to correct the truncated quotation so as to make Bayes the amateur, not Laplace.
January 14, 2021 at 11:56 am
These slides were written ten years ago, I bet the World will not stop spinning if they remain in their current state.