Hypothesis: in many important cases someone with an alief tending toward not-A and a belief that A, will behave differently than someone otherwise similar who consistently endorses not-A. Assuming the belief that A came about in the right way, that's genuine self-deception.
Today's post, No, Really, I've Deceived Myself was originally published on 04 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Some people who have fallen into self-deception haven't actually deceived themselves. Some of them simply believe that they have deceived themselves, but have not actually done this.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Teaching the Unteachable, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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