Why not?
I think of epistemology as bigger than just "what does 'certainty' mean?" -- e.g. the issues of what is knowledge, how can it be acquired, etc. You can build an epistemology on the foundation of the Bayesian approach, but you cannot reduce the whole epistemology to it.
how you would unpack the practical consequences of a position being obvious to you.
In this particular case it's easy. Yvain set up an axis with two endpoints: the black-and-white Aristotelian approach and the pure-black Wilsonian approach. Both of these endpoints fail pretty clearly in real life. No one can operate either on the basis "I only believe what I proved to be 100% true and do not believe the rest at all" or "I do not believe anything". Everyone has degrees of belief regardless of how ready they are to formalize it in some framework. Therefore a spectrum-of-grey approach, the "middle ground" looks obvious to me.
I think of epistemology as bigger than just "what does 'certainty' mean?" -- e.g. the issues of what is knowledge, how can it be acquired, etc. You can build an epistemology on the foundation of the Bayesian approach, but you cannot reduce the whole epistemology to it.
The thing as I understand is that Bayesian Reasoning is half of the pie. In Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners, EY explains the thesis that "meaning" is twofold: Either you talk about causality links in the Bayesian sense (which requires Bayesian reasoning),...
David Chapman criticizes "pop Bayesianism" as just common-sense rationality dressed up as intimidating math[1]:
What does Bayes's formula have to teach us about how to do epistemology, beyond obvious things like "never be absolutely certain; update your credences when you see new evidence"?
I list below some of the specific things that I learned from Bayesianism. Some of these are examples of mistakes I'd made that Bayesianism corrected. Others are things that I just hadn't thought about explicitly before encountering Bayesianism, but which now seem important to me.
I'm interested in hearing what other people here would put on their own lists of things Bayesianism taught them. (Different people would make different lists, depending on how they had already thought about epistemology when they first encountered "pop Bayesianism".)
I'm interested especially in those lessons that you think followed more-or-less directly from taking Bayesianism seriously as a normative epistemology (plus maybe the idea of making decisions based on expected utility). The LW memeplex contains many other valuable lessons (e.g., avoid the mind-projection fallacy, be mindful of inferential gaps, the MW interpretation of QM has a lot going for it, decision theory should take into account "logical causation", etc.). However, these seem further afield or more speculative than what I think of as "bare-bones Bayesianism".
So, without further ado, here are some things that Bayesianism taught me.
What items would you put on your list?
ETA: ChrisHallquist's post Bayesianism for Humans lists other "directly applicable corollaries to Bayesianism".
[1] See also Yvain's reaction to David Chapman's criticisms.
[2] ETA: My wording here is potentially misleading. See this comment thread.