Honestly, I'm more prone to the latter form of confirmation bias, expecting things to be going wrong as things like that always do.

From this line, I take it that you view yourself either as more of a pessimist or at least that a pessimistic attitude is the more "realistic" one :-)

I hope sharing your thoughts on bias, coming from someone as widely known to be solidly rational as you are, helps folks to wrassle their own biases into submission.

Thanks, I hope so as well, but for the most part, I'm very unsure just how much impact simply sharing these ideas will have as people are generally slow to make changes in the way they think about things.

But I have more hope for the information rating tools we're starting to build to address these kinds of problems, and I think it is important to start to lay out the reasons why I think these tools can be beneficial, divorced from a discussion of the tools themselves. In other words, I want to start by examining the problems, and then start looking at possible solutions (including simple ones such as I propose in this post that people can use today).