Herzog and Hertwig called their more involved process “dialectical bootstrapping.” You can pull yourself up by your own proverbial bootstraps by assuming that you are wrong, providing a second estimate based on a search for new evidence, and then averaging the two estimates. (Interestingly, in Herzog and Hertwig’s studies, bootstrapping did not lead to second estimates that were more accurate than the first. The benefit of dialectical bootstrapping was only realized when the first and second estimates were averaged together. Compared to simply providing a second judgment, dialectical bootstrapping creates diversity —it leads to estimates that are more likely to have offsetting errors.)

via You Know More than You Think: Scientific American.

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