Suppose the chance of finding a tiger somewhere in a given household, on a given day, is one in a billion. Or so say the pro-tigerians. The tiger denialist faction, of course, claims that statistic is made-up, and tigers don't actually exist. But one household in a trillion might hallucinate a tiger, on any given day.
Today, you search your entire house - the dishwasher AND the fridge AND the trashcan etc.
P(You find a tiger|tigers exist) = .000000001
P(You don't find a tiger|tigers don't exist) = .000000000001
P(You don't find a tiger|tigers exist) = .999999999
P(You don't find a tiger|tigers don't exist) = .999999999999
And suppose you are 99.9% confident that tigers exist - you think you could make statements like that a thousand times in a row, and be wrong only once. (Perhaps rattling off all the animals you know.) Your prior odds ratio is 999 to 1. So you take your prior odds, (.999/.001) and multiply by the likelihood ratio, (.999999999/.999999999999), to get a posterior odds ratio of 998.999999002 to 1. This is, clearly, a VERY small adjustment.
What if you search more households: how many would you have to search, without finding a tiger, before you dropped just to 90% confidence in tigers, where you still think tigers exist but would not willingly bet your life on it? If I've done the math right, about five billion. There probably aren't that many households in the world, so searching every house would be insufficient to get you down to just 90% confidence, much less 10% or whatever threshold you'd like to use for "tigers probably don't exist".
(And my one-in-a-billion figure is probably far too high, and so searching every household in the world should get you even less adjustment...)
But if you could search a trillion houses at those odds, and still never found a tiger - then you'd be insane to still claim that tigers probably do exist.
And if a trillion searches can produce such a shift, then each individual search can't produce no evidence. Just very little.
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.