I don't think screening off helps with the underlying problem.
Let's recall where we started. I commented on the expression "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" by saying "Only provided you have looked, and looked in the right place."
The first part should be fairly uncontroversial. If you don't look you don't get any new evidence, so there's no reason to update your beliefs.
Now, the second part, "the right place". In this thread Wes_W gives a numerical example that involves searching for tigers in houses and says that you need to search about 5 billion houses to drop your confidence to 90% -- and if you search a trillion houses and still don't find a tiger, "then you'd be insane to still claim that tigers probably do exist."
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?
That is the issue of "looking in the right place".
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 insa
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.