Sorry, I think that I was editing my comment after you replied. (I have no excuse. I think what happened was that I was going to make a quick typofix, but the edit grew longer, and by the end I'd forgotten that I had already submitted the comment.)
How do you react to my conjecture that your background knowledge screens off (or seems to) the experience of seeing a tiger in your trashcan from the hypothesis that tigers exist?
I don't think screening off helps with the underlying problem.
Let's recall where we started. I commented on the expression "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" by saying "Only provided you have looked, and looked in the right place."
The first part should be fairly uncontroversial. If you don't look you don't get any new evidence, so there's no reason to update your beliefs.
Now, the second part, "the right place". In this thread Wes_W gives a numerical example that involves searching for tigers in houses and says that ...
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.