[MarkMc]

This is a very interesting comment for someone like me who has little knowledge of statistics. The stack exchange answer shows how stupid Bayesians can be, and the XKCD shows how stupid Frequentists can be.

Yet I find this particular criticism of Bayesians not fully convincing. The Bayesian approach is to take the existing knowledge (where the phone was often list in the past) with new knowledge (where the beeping is coming from) to come up with probabilities (where to look for the new phone). This seems to me to be the correct approach in general, it's just that in the case of the phone the new knowledge almost entirely outweighs the existing knowledge.