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). Second, I haven't thought this through, but I suspect a big issue here is what exactly your belief is. To give a quick example, when you don't find a tiger in your garbage, is the tiger live and real or plush and a toy? When you're unsure about the existence of something, your idea of what exactly that something is can be fuzzy and that affects what kind of evidence you'll accept and where will you look for it.
Meaningfully? I thought we were counting infintesimals :-D
As in "for most practical purposes, and with human computational abilities, this is no update at all". I'm not sure we can usefully say this isn't really evidence after all, or we run into Paradox of the Heap problems.
When you're unsure about the existence of something, your idea of what exactly that something is can be fuzzy and that affects what kind of evidence you'll accept and where will you look for it.
Let me give an example where I think "absence of evidence is evi...
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.