Self-deception

Self-deception is a state of preserving a wrong belief, often facilitated by denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical arguments. Beliefs supported by self-deception are often chosen for reasons other than how closely those beliefs approximate truth.

Deceiving yourself is harder than it seems. What looks like a successively adopted false belief may actually be just a belief in false belief.

Blog posts

• Self-deception: Hypocrisy or Akrasia?

Sequence by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Part of How To Actually Change Your Mind sequence

• No, Really, I've Deceived Myself
• Belief in Self Deception
• Moore's Paradox
• Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive
• Striving to Accept

Other resources

• Robin Hanson (2009). "Enhancing Our Truth Orientation". in Larissa Behrendt, Nick Bostrom. Human Enhancement. Oxford University Press.  (PDF)

See also

• Anti-epistemology, Belief in belief
• Semantic stopsign, Compartmentalization, Motivated skepticism
• Improper belief, Truth