Responses below. As a meta-remark, your comment doesn't steelman my argument, and I think that steelmanning arguments helps keep the conversation on track, so I'd appreciate it if you were to do so in the future.

Penrose is a worrisome case to bring as an example, since he is in fact wrong, and therefore you're giving an example where your reasoning leads to the wrong conclusion.

The point of the example is that one shouldn't decisively conclude that Penrose is wrong — one should instead hedge.

Perhaps a relevant analogy is that of the using seat belts to guard against car accidents — one shouldn't say "The claim that I'm going to get into a potentially fatal car accident is in fact wrong, so I'm not going to wear seat belts." You may argue that the relevant probabilities are sufficiently different so that the analogy isn't a good one. If so, I disagree.

If you can't easily find examples where your reasoning led you to a new correct conclusion instead of new sympathy toward a wrong conclusion, this is worrisome.

There are many such examples. My post extended to a length of eight pages without my going into them, and I wanted to keep the post to a reasonable length. I'm open to the possibility of writing another post with other examples. The reason that I chose the Penrose example is to vividly illustrate the shift in my epistemology.

In general, I tend to flag recounts of epistemological innovations which lead to new sympathy toward a wrong conclusion, as though the one were displaying compassion for a previously hated enemy, for in epistemology this is not virtue.

One would expect this sort of thing to sometimes happen by chance in the course of updating based on incoming evidence. So I don't share your concern.

The Penrose example worries me for other reasons as well, namely it seems like it would be possible to generate hordes and hordes of weak arguments against Penrose; so it's as if because the argument against Penrose is strong, you aren't bothering to try to generate weak arguments; reading this feels like you now prefer weak arguments to strong arguments and don't try to find the many weak arguments once you see a strong argument, which is not good Bayesianism.

I can see how the example might seem disconsonant with my post, and will consider revising the post to clarify. [Edit: I did this.] The point that I intended to make is that I was previously unknowingly ignoring certain nontrivial weak lines of evidence, on the grounds that they weren't strong enough, and that I've recognized this, and have been working on modifying my epistemological framework accordingly.

I don't think that the hordes and hordes of weak arguments that you refer to are collectively strong enough to nullify the argument that one should trust Penrose because he's one of the greatest physicists of the second half of the 20'th century.

You also claim there's a strong argument for Penrose, namely his authority (? wasn't this the kind of reasoning you were arguing against trusting?) but either we have very different domain models here, or you're not using the Bayesian definition of strong evidence as "an argument you would be very unlikely to observe, in a world where the theory is false"

• I don't remember arguing against trusting authority above – elaborate if you'd like.
• I wasn't saying that one should give nontrivial credence to Penrose's views based on his authority. I was saying that one should give nontrivial credence to Penrose's views based on the fact that he's a deeper thinker than everybody who I know (in the sense that his accomplishments are deeper than anything that anyone who I know has ever accomplished).