You didn’t say anything about “a correctness-maximization perspective” and those never have a need to “precommit” to anything, which is a decision-theory rather than epistemic concept.
Maybe not in so many words but I assumed it was clear in the footnote (which I have not edited).
I do think an analogy with decision theory is valid though:
two-boxer says: “I won’t decide in advance not to pick both boxes, it’s only ‘rational’ to decide in the moment, I don’t care I’m predictably leaving out winnings ex ante”
You might say: “I won’t decide in advance not to believe I’m a Boltzmann brain, it’s only ‘rational’ to decide in the moment, I don’t care that I’m predictably sabotaging the accuracy of my future beliefs”
Or if you don’t agree with that… then what would your opinion be on that?
This is tangential, but there are situation in which something like precommitments are epistemic concepts.
For example, without any precommitments, you do not get to be surprised if you generated a random number between 0 and 100 and it so happened to be 29. In this case it’s just some non-specific number.
However, if you’ve specifically precommited to 29 in particular beforehand, you can be lawfully surprised. This time you are observing a more specific event because of your precomitment.
Sleeping Beauty experiment, but every day the room that the Beauty is in changes its color from Red to Blue or vise versa. The initial color of the Room is determined randomly with equal probability for Red and Blue
A regular person without any epistemic precomitments upon observing any color of the walls doesn’t get any new information about the state of the coin.
P(Tails|Blue or Red) = P(Tails)
But with an epistemic precomitment to one particular color, a person can correctly guess that the coin is Tails in 2⁄3 of iterations of probability experiment—not mere awakenings! - when the walls of the room are this color. Doesn’t matter which color the walls are, the core part it’s the same color the person has precommited to:
P(Tails|Blue) = P(Tails|Red) = 2⁄3
Once again, the act of precommitment itself is what allows the person to observe a more specific event, and in this case, update their credence.
You didn’t say anything about “a correctness-maximization perspective” and those never have a need to “precommit” to anything, which is a decision-theory rather than epistemic concept.
Maybe not in so many words but I assumed it was clear in the footnote (which I have not edited).
I do think an analogy with decision theory is valid though:
two-boxer says: “I won’t decide in advance not to pick both boxes, it’s only ‘rational’ to decide in the moment, I don’t care I’m predictably leaving out winnings ex ante”
You might say: “I won’t decide in advance not to believe I’m a Boltzmann brain, it’s only ‘rational’ to decide in the moment, I don’t care that I’m predictably sabotaging the accuracy of my future beliefs”
Or if you don’t agree with that… then what would your opinion be on that?
This is tangential, but there are situation in which something like precommitments are epistemic concepts.
For example, without any precommitments, you do not get to be surprised if you generated a random number between 0 and 100 and it so happened to be 29. In this case it’s just some non-specific number.
However, if you’ve specifically precommited to 29 in particular beforehand, you can be lawfully surprised. This time you are observing a more specific event because of your precomitment.
Or consider Technicolor Sleeping Beauty problem:
A regular person without any epistemic precomitments upon observing any color of the walls doesn’t get any new information about the state of the coin.
P(Tails|Blue or Red) = P(Tails)
But with an epistemic precomitment to one particular color, a person can correctly guess that the coin is Tails in 2⁄3 of iterations of probability experiment—not mere awakenings! - when the walls of the room are this color. Doesn’t matter which color the walls are, the core part it’s the same color the person has precommited to:
P(Tails|Blue) = P(Tails|Red) = 2⁄3
Once again, the act of precommitment itself is what allows the person to observe a more specific event, and in this case, update their credence.