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Will_Newsome comments on Personal Evidence - Superstitions as Rational Beliefs - Less Wrong
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I'm interested in whether the axioms or theorem are even wrong in this case.
Why isn't this covered under the general observation "your observations [of haunting] are very little information and move a outsider's beliefs by [very small amount], and if your own beliefs don't converge, you're just demonstrating your irrationality by overweighting your experience and ignoring how many thousands of people throughout history have felt equally freaked out by 'haunted houses' only for detailed investigation to find nothing."?
I'm curious now whether and how the agreement theorem holds in cases where the environment includes agents that are selectively presenting different evidence to different rational observers. You'd think that'd ruin the result along the same lines as the no free lunch theorems.
If they're presenting false evidence and are otherwise indistinguishable from truth-tellers, then I would guess that agreement would fall a lot or cease to happen; if they're the equivalent of random noise, then I'm not sure what would happen, but probably bad stuff if we go by Hanson's paper on communicating rare evidence; and if they're merely being selective about evidence, you can still infer stuff from their reports (the Bullock thesis in my backfire effect page would be relevant here).
(This is obvious, but it took me a bit to explicitly notice: deceptive agents in the environment is exactly the same formally speaking as irrational agents in the notionally Bayesian community, so of course the agreement theorem doesn't apply.)