[thirduncle]

If there are dozens of watches scattered around, of course you first look where the light is good.

At first, yes. But when one has had enough experience looking for scarce commodities (of whatever kind: genuinely attractive apartments, interesting music / restaurants, romantic partners, etc) one learns that the "where the light is" search technique only gets you so far.

[ska]

Point is, it very often gets you far enough. So you try it first, and only adjust when you have real evidence that this is not working for you.

Certainly in this scenario - the false positive rate is only important if the true positive rate is too low. It's not at all clear that is a factor.

[thirduncle]

So you try it first, and only adjust when you have real evidence that this is not working for you.

That's the whole point -- in order to find evidence that it isn't working, you have to start looking at the false negatives --

or that is to say, where the "light is not".

[kirillseva]

You have just equated hiring a coder for a job to finding a spouse.

[thirduncle]

Actually no, I didn't.