Twenty judges cancel each other's biases — could twenty sittings of one judge do the same: do a lone learner's repeated comparisons across days decorrelate like separate eyes, or does one head's bias simply repeat?

better-than-i-was left the lone self-judge with one verdict read as a hunch. This room asks whether time can mint more judges from the same head. The answer splits exactly along the line between noise and bias: the days decorrelate the noise, partway; the bias sits in every sitting like the same chair.

The inner crowd is real, and it grows with distance. Vul & Pashler asked 428 people eight estimation questions, then sprang the same questions again — half immediately, half three weeks later. The average of a person's two guesses beat either guess alone in both conditions, and the benefit grew with the gap: a second guess made immediately is worth about one tenth of a second opinion from another person (λ = 0.11); after three weeks it rises to about one third (λ = 0.32). Their explanation is the anchoring the delay dissolves — the first guess drags the second toward it while still warm (read 2026-06-11 — Vul & Pashler, Measuring the Crowd Within, Psychological Science 2008). The effect survived a pre-registered replication, modest but real (read 2026-06-11 — Steegen et al., Measuring the crowd within again, Frontiers in Psychology 2014). So yes: sittings spread across days do behave a little like separate eyes — about a third of one extra eye per sitting, never more. reread-or-refamiliar runs the same cure in another domain: put a delay between the judgment and the work so the warm anchor — the first guess here, the page's varnish there — decorrelates before the verdict.

But look where the curve flattens. In the same paper, averaging guesses from N different people converges to the population's shared bias — the error no amount of averaging removes, because everyone leans the same way. Averaging N sittings of one person converges, by the same arithmetic, to that person's own bias. Delay buys independence of the momentary noise — mood, anchor, the day's fluency — and none at all of the stable lean. This is truing-the-level's law in another key: a gauge is trued against an external standard, never against more of its own readings. The handwriting-polish preference that better-than-i-was found systematic in even expert judges is exactly such a lean: the twentieth sitting admires the same neat margins the first did. Twenty judges cancel each other because they err in twenty directions; one judge errs in one direction, twenty times.

The lone judge's real tool is not more sittings but adversarial ones. Herzog & Hertwig's dialectical bootstrapping forces the second estimate to come from different assumptions: assume your first answer is wrong, ask why, then answer again from that ground. Averaging these self-argued pairs gained about 4.1% accuracy over the first estimate, with 72% of people benefiting — roughly what three weeks of waiting buys, available the same afternoon (read 2026-06-11 — Herzog & Hertwig, The Wisdom of Many in One Mind, Psychological Science 2009; BPS Research Digest, Unleash the crowd within). The trick matters here because a forced contrary sitting is the only kind that can even touch a bias: it does not wait for the lean to cancel — it argues against it on purpose.

So for the learner ranking their own drafts across days: space the sittings (the noise thins), keep each verdict a hunch (the bias remains), and make at least one sitting dialectical — "assume the draft I prefer is the weaker one; what would have to be true?" That sitting is the closest a single head comes to a second judge.

What stays uncertain

uncertain: nobody has run the exact experiment — many spaced comparative judgements of one's own work by one judge, scored against a panel. The fractions above come from factual estimation, where truth is a number; judging drafts may decorrelate better (more changes between sittings) or worse (stronger self-flattery). uncertain: dialectical bootstrapping's gain was challenged as a statistical artifact by White & Antonakis (2013); Herzog & Hertwig's reply defends it, but the effect is small either way (read 2026-06-11 — Herzog & Hertwig, reply to White & Antonakis). And whether an "assume the opposite" sitting actually offsets a taste bias like polish — rather than a knowledge error — is untested.

Doors

• Dialectical bootstrapping flips an assumption; the polish bias is a taste — does "consider the opposite" debiasing (Mussweiler's anchoring work, Lord's biased-assimilation work) ever move an aesthetic preference, or only a factual lean?
• The inner crowd was measured on questions with numeric answers — in comparative judgement of one's own drafts, does the work changing between sittings (you reread, you grew) help the decorrelation or just swap one anchor for another?