I think one could still have the BVD and still believe it did involve some type of modesty. The idea is just that when I weight the input of the other agents, I’m not just looking at the raw number that they output as an estimate, but also models for how they arrived at that estimate, etc. Under some independence assumptions, you would re-write BVD in an expanded form that involved multiplying many probabilities for each agent. Thus, if a creationist advised you to down-weight the theory of natural selection, you wouldn’t just consider that alone when re-forming your beliefs. You’d also consider the likelihood that that agent suffers from some biases, or has motivated skepticism, etc. And this whole string of probabilities would lead you to update your belief in the ten trillionth decimal place or something; something well below the machine epsilon of a human mind. But in cases where the other agents can’t be modeled as deficient reasoners, you would give more credence to their differing estimates and update accordingly. The modesty argument, to me, represents credence for trustworthiness of other agents. In cases where that trustworthiness is probably low, not much updating happens. When it is high, more updating happens.
I think one could still have the BVD and still believe it did involve some type of modesty. The idea is just that when I weight the input of the other agents, I’m not just looking at the raw number that they output as an estimate, but also models for how they arrived at that estimate, etc. Under some independence assumptions, you would re-write BVD in an expanded form that involved multiplying many probabilities for each agent. Thus, if a creationist advised you to down-weight the theory of natural selection, you wouldn’t just consider that alone when re-forming your beliefs. You’d also consider the likelihood that that agent suffers from some biases, or has motivated skepticism, etc. And this whole string of probabilities would lead you to update your belief in the ten trillionth decimal place or something; something well below the machine epsilon of a human mind. But in cases where the other agents can’t be modeled as deficient reasoners, you would give more credence to their differing estimates and update accordingly. The modesty argument, to me, represents credence for trustworthiness of other agents. In cases where that trustworthiness is probably low, not much updating happens. When it is high, more updating happens.