[oh_my_goodness]

Good review of common ground. At this point hopefully the active folks in the discussion can see that we're all describing statistical mechanics exactly the same way.

What I'm saying is pedagogical. We need to define our macro-states. We don't need to go on and talk about our definitions being information or 'knowledge.' We could just use the definitions and calculate. We can talk about 'knowledge' but we don't need to.

The exception is when we actually have some information about what macro-state some system is really in. Obviously we then have to build that information into our model, and the entropy changes. What I'm saying is this: it's not necessary to mix that into our definition of entropy. That definition is not going to help folks who don't understand entropy, and it's unnecessary.