I’m surprise no one responded to this in 14 years [edit, I think the Hanson and Eliezer thread below addresses it well]. I think I agree with the post that explicit self-deception doesn’t work, but automatic self-deception via default selfish attention rationing happens all the time. Similarly, people can choose to be biased even if they can’t directly choose beliefs, because it is necessary to have simplifying algorithms to think at all. A common example would be that all the logical razors people use are also biases, and you can explicitly choose to not reply on the razor and keep thinking.
I think this is one of the sort of things one can find if they do go looking for cases of accidental self-deception, and people not doing this can put people in a mental trap where they think their beliefs are rational to an unjustified degree.
I’m surprise no one responded to this in 14 years [edit, I think the Hanson and Eliezer thread below addresses it well]. I think I agree with the post that explicit self-deception doesn’t work, but automatic self-deception via default selfish attention rationing happens all the time. Similarly, people can choose to be biased even if they can’t directly choose beliefs, because it is necessary to have simplifying algorithms to think at all. A common example would be that all the logical razors people use are also biases, and you can explicitly choose to not reply on the razor and keep thinking.
I think this is one of the sort of things one can find if they do go looking for cases of accidental self-deception, and people not doing this can put people in a mental trap where they think their beliefs are rational to an unjustified degree.