Thanks for your generous reply, Claire. I agree the ‘double counting’ issue remains challenging, although my thought was that most people, at least in the wider world, are currently pretty immodest, the downsides are not too large in what I take to be common applications where you are trying to weigh up large groups of people/experts. I agree there’s a risk of degrading norms if people mistakenly switch to offering ‘outside view’ credences publicly.
I regret I hadn’t seen the ‘impressions’ versus ‘beliefs’ distinction being used before. ‘Impression’ works very well for ‘credence by my lights’ (I had toyed with using the term ‘image’), but I’m not sure ‘belief’ translates quite so well for those who haven’t seen the way the term is used in the rationalist community. I guess this might just be hard, as there does seem to be a good word (or two) I can find which captures modesty (“being modest, my credence is X”, “modestly, I think it’s Y”, maybe?)
Thanks for your generous reply, Claire. I agree the ‘double counting’ issue remains challenging, although my thought was that most people, at least in the wider world, are currently pretty immodest, the downsides are not too large in what I take to be common applications where you are trying to weigh up large groups of people/experts. I agree there’s a risk of degrading norms if people mistakenly switch to offering ‘outside view’ credences publicly.
I regret I hadn’t seen the ‘impressions’ versus ‘beliefs’ distinction being used before. ‘Impression’ works very well for ‘credence by my lights’ (I had toyed with using the term ‘image’), but I’m not sure ‘belief’ translates quite so well for those who haven’t seen the way the term is used in the rationalist community. I guess this might just be hard, as there does seem to be a good word (or two) I can find which captures modesty (“being modest, my credence is X”, “modestly, I think it’s Y”, maybe?)