Reading this clarified something for me. In particular, "Banish talk like "There is absolutely no evidence for that belief".
OK, I can see that mathematically there can be very small amounts of evidence for some propositions (e.g. the existence of the deity Thor.) However in practice there is a limit to how small evidence can be for me to make any practical use of it. If we assign certainties to our beliefs on a scale of 0 to 100, then what can I realistically do with a bit of evidence that moves me from 87 to 87.01? or 86.99? I don't think I can estimate my certainty accurately to 1 decimal place--in fact I'm not sure I can get it to within one significant digit on many issues--and yet there's a lot of evidence in the world that should move my beliefs by a lot less than that.
Mathematically it makes sense to update on all evidence. Practically, there is a fuzzy threshold beyond which I need to just ignore very weak evidence, unless there's so much of it that the sum total crosses the bounds of significance.
Practically, there is a fuzzy threshold beyond which I need to just ignore very weak evidence, unless there's so much of it that the sum total crosses the bounds of significance.
Consider the difficulties of programming something like that:
Ignore evidence. If the accumulated ignored evidence crosses some threshold, process the whole of it.
You see the problem. If the quoted sentence is your preferred modus operandi, you'll have to restrict what you mean by "ignore". You'll still need to file it somewhere, and to evaluate it somehow, just so when the cumulative weight exceeds your given threshold, you'll be able to still update on it.
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.