As of 10am (EST) today we have had 100,019 distinct visits and 221,616 page views, in the 116 days Overcoming Bias has been operating. In this time we’ve had 3189 comments and 229 posts (of which I’ve written 118). I wish I could quote some measure of how much bias we have overcome.
We could have created a blog with just a few contributors, which would have better controlled post quality. The reason we invited many contributors is because we hoped to create a conversation and community. So let me encourage contributors to have conversations with each other here on our key issues, and let us think about how we as a community might overcome bias better than we could alone.
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By Robin Hanson · Hundreds of paid subscribers
This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
"Overcoming" could be interpreted any or all of several ways:Elimination of a bias from our mind;Compensation, in which we admit we can't prevent ourselves from having the bias, so we focus on compensating, e.g., by establishing a counter-bias;Avoidance, as when we prevent ourselves from being in gambling situations to prevent ourselves from suffering from probability biases.
Elimination might be impossible for biases that are genetically determined, and I have seen no claims on this blog that it is even possible to eliminate biases. Avoidance seems the most common technique I use,
Congratulations with the 100.000 visits.
The community/conversation-idea is a good one, but a lot of contributors alone do not accomplish this goal, as should be clear by now - if most of the contributors are allowed to stay inactive without consequenses for a long period of time, it could indeed (and I think it does) result in less conversation and discussion among the contributors on average, than a smaller but more active set of contributors would.
A little OT; you need more female contributors. Even if it is a result of self-selection, it is problematic that only one of thirty four contributors are women.