Yep, there's a link with regularization and also with informative priors – James-Stein works so well because across an incredibly wide range of scenarios, a par

Yep, there's a link with regularization and also with informative priors – James-Stein works so well because across an incredibly wide range of scenarios, a parameter estimate of infinity is not nearly as likely as a parameter estimate of 0, yet that's what ordinary least squares linear regression assumes.