Welcome to Overcoming Bias!

Overcoming Bias began in November ’06 as a group blog on the general theme of how to move our beliefs closer to reality, in the face of our natural biases such as overconfidence and wishful thinking, and our bias to believe we have corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing.

While we had a few dozen authors, most posts came from Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. The topics drifted more widely, and early in ’09 Eliezer moved to a new sister blog, Less Wrong. Robin then made this his wide-ranging personal blog for the next three years. In ’12, Robin wanted to cut back to make more time to write a book, and so Katja Grace, Rob Wiblin, and Carl Shulman joined as new-co-bloggers. In ’13, Robin decided he’d changed his work habits, and this went back to being a personal blog.

Disclaimers:

While we are affiliated with several organizations, and we list them as “supporting” Overcoming Bias, none have paid us to blog, and none necessarily endorse any views expressed here. We’ve never sold ads or access in any way. Copyright is retained by each author. Finally, all views expressed here are ours, not those of George Mason University or the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Comments:

Anyone can comment here, but spam and trollers may be removed or banned. Comments should be polite, on topic, short (< 500 words), and sparing with quotations (links are ok). Don’t repeat your own comments word for word. We have Open Threads once a month for general discussion; longer comments are acceptable there.

Commenting frequency: A good rule of thumb is that your name should not appear more than two times in the 10 most recent comments, as shown on the right sidebar. Three times is acceptable on rare occasions. Four times, never. Post authors are of course excepted. To help us enforce this, we ask that you only use one name when commenting here.

The banner picture above is cropped from “Ulysses and the Sirens” by John William Waterhouse, 1891.