[vzqx]

I think you need to rigorously define your macrostates. If your two states are "my friend's password" and "not my friend's password" then the macrostates are perfectly objective. You don't know what macrostate the system is in, but that doesn't change the fact that the system is objectively in one of those two macrostates.

If you define your macrostates using subjective terms (e.g. "a string that's meaningful to me" or "a string that looks ordered to me") then yeah, your entropy calculations will be subjective.

[anon84873628]

That's better than how I was going to say it:

In one case you're looking at the system as "alphanumeric string of length N." In another, the system is that plus something like "my friend's opinion on the string".

Also, as the article says, using "entropy" to mean "order" is not a good practice. "Order" is a subjective concept, and some systems (like oil and water separating) look more "ordered" but still have higher entropy, because there is more going on energetically than we can observe.

[hatthew]

I guess part of my question is, are there any macrostates that are useful to us that can't be described using more abstract human-subjective terms? If a macrostate can be described using human terms, I'd say the state is somewhat ordered. And if a state can't be described using human terms, then wouldn't it be indistinguishable from "particle soup" and thus not a useful macrostate to talk about?