Thanks for a great post Adam, I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

This might be missing the point, but I just can't get past it. How does a rational agent come to believe that the being they're facing is "an unquestionably honest, all knowing agent with perfect powers of prediction"?

I have the suspicion that a lot of the bizarreness of this problem comes out of transporting our agent into an epistemologically unattainable state.

Is there a way to phrase a problem of this type in a way that does not require such a state?