Probabilities go up or down, but there is no magic threshold beyond which they change qualitatively into "knowledge".
Matter of fact there are thresholds below which extra processing cost does not pay off (or, in case of human head, when it is extremely implausible that the processing is even going to be performed correctly).
Probabilistic reasoning is, in general, computationally expensive. In many situations, a very large number of combinations of uncertain parameters has to be processed, the cross correlations must be accounted for, et cetera.
Actions conditioned on evidence generally have higher expected utility than those not conditioned on evidence, and processing of beliefs conditioned on evidence likewise so.
The expected utility sums for things such as expenditure of resources have a term for resources being kept for the future uses which may be more conditional on evidence, and the actions that are less evidence conditioned than usual ought to lose out to the bulk of possible ways one may act in the future (edit: the ways which you can't explicitly enumerate).
That's just some of the thresholds that an optimally programmed intelligence (on a physically plausible computer) would apply.
This is sort of like going on about what Maxwell's equations taught you about painting. Maxwell's equations are quite far from painting, about as far in terms of inference length as Bayes theorem is from most actual decision making or belief forming. edit: make that much further, actually, considering that there's no AI.
Let's make an example to clarify. There is Bob. Bob being rich would be evidence for him having a good job. Bob having a good job would be evidence for him being rich. Both of those would be evidence with regards to Bob's education, and so on and so forth. Everything cross correlates to everything else, the belief propagation is NP complete, the algorithms for computing it are very nontrivial, and various subtle implementation errors would make everything converge on a completely wrong value.
Strengths of relevant relations between beliefs about Bob are themselves beliefs, so the graph is pretty damn huge. When known probabilities get fairly close to 0 and 1, it is tractable whenever unknowns are close to 0 or 1. But when they're closer to the middle, you're dealing with a very complicated relation. And if you could compute the resulting equation in your head, well, there's a lot of lesser engineering tasks that you should absolutely breeze through.
edit: expanded a bit. Really, we do know how to progressively approximate from quantum electrodynamics to geometric optics to drawing 3d shapes to painting, but we do not know how to get from Bayes theorem to a full blown AI on physically plausible hardware.
I agree with your points about the value of information. Indeed, as Vaniver said, Bayesianism (i.e., "qualitative Bayes"), together with the idea of expected-utility maximization, makes the importance of VoI especially salient and easy to understand. So I'm a little puzzled by your conclusion that
This is sort of like going on about what Maxwell's equations taught you about painting.
... because your argument leading up to this conclusion seems to me to be steeped in Bayesian thinking through-and-through :). E.g., this:
...The expected utility
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.