I'm pretty sure Eliezer thinks this heuristic should be applied to events that occurred in the past, not ones that will occur in the future--it's a way of assessing whether a piece of evidence should be trusted or whether we should defy it. It's also a way of weeding out hypotheses that don't actually make experimental predictions. I don't think he's trying to say that we should ignore things that seem weird, particularly because he speaks out against the absurdity heuristic later on.