I agree that the "looking" part is important: Looking and not finding evidence is a different kind of "absence of evidence" than just not looking.
Well, let's take this example as given but change one little thing. Let's say I'm not looking for tigers -- instead, I heard that there are two big rocks, Phobos and Deimos, and I'm looking for evidence of their existence.
I search a house and I don't find them. I search 5 billion houses and I don't find them. I search a trillion houses and still don't find them. At this point would I be insane to believe Phobos and Deimos exist?
I think it would indeed be pretty silly to maintain that a) they exist and b) each house has an independent 10^-9 chance of containing them, after searching a trillion houses and finding neither. But if you didn't place much credence in anything like b) in the first place, your confidence in a) may not be meaningfully altered. If you already thought Phobos and Deimos were moons of Mars, then you would have extremely minimal evidence against their existence. But again, we can construct a Paradox of the Heap-type setup where you search the solar system, one household-volume at a time, and if all of them come up empty you should end up thinking Phobos and Deimos probably aren't real, so each individual household-volume must be some degree of evidence.
My thought here - and perhaps we agree on this, in which case I'm happy to concede the point - is that the need to look in the right place is technically already covered by the relevant math, specifically by the different strengths of evidence. But for us puny humans that are doing this without explicit numerical estimates, and who aren't well-calibrated to nine significant figures, it's a good rule of thumb.
(This comment has been edited multiple times. My apologies for any confusion.)
your confidence in a) may not be meaningfully altered
Meaningfully? I thought we were counting infintesimals :-D
If we are talking about "meaningfully altered" (or what I'd call "detectable") then not finding a tiger in my rubbish bin does not meaningfully alter my beliefs and the absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.
the need to look in the right place is technically already covered by the relevant math
I am not sure of that. First, we're concerned with statistics, not math (and I think this is a serious difference). Seco...
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.