I doubt that anyone is advocating the version of the Modesty Argument that you’re attacking. People who advocate something resembling that seem to believe we should only respond that way if we should assume both sides are making honest attempts to be Bayesians. I don’t know of anyone who suggests we ignore evidence concerning the degree to which a person is an honest Bayesian. See for example the qualification Robin makes in the last paragraph of this:
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2005-March/014620.html.
Or from page 28 of http://hanson.gmu.edu/deceive.pdf “seek observable signs that indicate when people are self-deceived about their meta-rationality on a particular topic. You might then try to disagree only with those who display such signs more strongly than you do.”
There seems to be enough agreement on some basic principles of rationality that we can conclude there are non-arbitrary ways of estimating who’s more rational that are available to those who want to use them.
I doubt that anyone is advocating the version of the Modesty Argument that you’re attacking. People who advocate something resembling that seem to believe we should only respond that way if we should assume both sides are making honest attempts to be Bayesians. I don’t know of anyone who suggests we ignore evidence concerning the degree to which a person is an honest Bayesian. See for example the qualification Robin makes in the last paragraph of this: http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2005-March/014620.html. Or from page 28 of http://hanson.gmu.edu/deceive.pdf “seek observable signs that indicate when people are self-deceived about their meta-rationality on a particular topic. You might then try to disagree only with those who display such signs more strongly than you do.” There seems to be enough agreement on some basic principles of rationality that we can conclude there are non-arbitrary ways of estimating who’s more rational that are available to those who want to use them.