# Chapter 04: Overcoming Bias / LessWrong / Rationality community

> Debugging humanity, one very long blog post at a time

Canonical URL: https://foom.hyperplex.org/chapter/overcoming_bias

Timeline: 2006–2012

Robin Hanson founded Overcoming Bias, where Yudkowsky soon became the most prominent contributor. Across the Sequences, lessons about cognitive bias and epistemology accumulated into a shared intellectual web, a course of study, and then the basis of a community. LessWrong launched in 2009, carrying that project into a site of its own.

The earlier emphasis on accelerating AGI increasingly gave way to “raising the sanity waterline.” The hope was that a small group trained to reason unusually well might be able to build AGI without causing an existential catastrophe. The 2008 Hanson–Yudkowsky “Foom” debate put that hope beside a more basic disagreement over how AI progress would actually unfold, although the test itself was just two theorists arguing about a future that neither could see.

## Predictions in this chapter

- [“A planet-sized neural network would fail”](https://foom.hyperplex.org/p/planet/index.html.md): Falsified: 2023; predicted 2006.
- [AGI = ten insights, a small team, one desktop](https://foom.hyperplex.org/p/foom/index.html.md): Falsified: 2023; predicted 2008.

## Chapter sources

- [Overcoming Bias](https://www.overcomingbias.com/)
- [LessWrong Sequences](https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality)