Hal, I’m not really the best person to explain the Modesty Argument because I don’t believe in it! You should ask a theory’s advocates, not its detractors, to explain it. You, yourself, have advocated that people should agree to agree—how do you think that people should go about it? If your preferred procedure differs from the Modesty Argument as I’ve presented it, it probably means that I got it wrong.
What I mean by the Modesty Argument is: You sit down at a table with someone else who disagrees with you, you each present your first-order arguments about the immediate issue—on the object level, as it were—and then you discover that you still seem to have a disagreement. Then at this point (I consider the Modesty Argument to say), you should consider as evidence the second-order, meta-level fact that the other person isn’t persuaded, and you should take that evidence into account by adjusting your estimate in his direction. And he should do likewise. Keep doing that until you agree.
As to how this fits into Aumann’s original theorem—I’m the wrong person to ask about that, because I don’t think it does fit! But in terms of real-world procedure, I think that’s what Modesty advocates are advocating, more or less. When we’re critiquing Inwagen for failing to agree with Lewis, this is more or less the sort of thing we think he ought to do instead—right?
There are times when I’m happy enough to follow Modest procedure, but the Verizon case, and the creationist case, aren’t on my list. I exercise my individual discretion, and judge based on particular cases. I feel free to not regard a creationist’s beliefs as evidence, despite the apparent symmetry of my belief that he’s the fool and his belief that I’m the fool. Thus I don’t concede that the Modesty Argument holds in general, while Robin Hanson seems (in “Are Disagreements Honest?”) to hold that it should be universal.
Hal, I’m not really the best person to explain the Modesty Argument because I don’t believe in it! You should ask a theory’s advocates, not its detractors, to explain it. You, yourself, have advocated that people should agree to agree—how do you think that people should go about it? If your preferred procedure differs from the Modesty Argument as I’ve presented it, it probably means that I got it wrong.
What I mean by the Modesty Argument is: You sit down at a table with someone else who disagrees with you, you each present your first-order arguments about the immediate issue—on the object level, as it were—and then you discover that you still seem to have a disagreement. Then at this point (I consider the Modesty Argument to say), you should consider as evidence the second-order, meta-level fact that the other person isn’t persuaded, and you should take that evidence into account by adjusting your estimate in his direction. And he should do likewise. Keep doing that until you agree.
As to how this fits into Aumann’s original theorem—I’m the wrong person to ask about that, because I don’t think it does fit! But in terms of real-world procedure, I think that’s what Modesty advocates are advocating, more or less. When we’re critiquing Inwagen for failing to agree with Lewis, this is more or less the sort of thing we think he ought to do instead—right?
There are times when I’m happy enough to follow Modest procedure, but the Verizon case, and the creationist case, aren’t on my list. I exercise my individual discretion, and judge based on particular cases. I feel free to not regard a creationist’s beliefs as evidence, despite the apparent symmetry of my belief that he’s the fool and his belief that I’m the fool. Thus I don’t concede that the Modesty Argument holds in general, while Robin Hanson seems (in “Are Disagreements Honest?”) to hold that it should be universal.