Experts Stumble Within Overconfidence Communities

Overconfidence is a huge factor causing errors in fields such as science, politics, government and the military. Some people define overconfidence as if it only pertained to the future. But since the English language lacks any good word meaning specifically “having too high an opinion of what you know or what your skills are,” it seems appropriate to define overconfidence very broadly, as something that may involve both the present and the future. We can define overconfidence as “having too high an opinion of the skills or accomplishments of yourself or others, or the chance of future success of yourself or others.”

By doing a Google search for “overconfidence” you can find various interesting treatments of the topic. But such treatments often simply look at an individual mind, and ignore the social aspects of overconfidence. A large amount of all overconfidence is something that arises in a social context. One of the main reasons why people become overconfident is that they become part of what can be called an overconfidence community. We can define an overconfidence community as a group of people that overestimate their own knowledge or overestimate the accomplishments of people in the group or overestimate the likelihood of future success of the group or some people in it.

It is easy to come up with historical examples of overconfidence communities. In the early 1940's Hitler and the Nazis built an overconfidence community in which it was believed there would be a high likelihood of success when Germany engaged in very risky military undertakings such as the invasion of the Soviet Union. Anyone in the spring of 1941 realistically assessing the odds of Germany succeeding in an invasion of the Soviet Union would have been very cautious or pessimistic, on the grounds that the Soviet Union had a much higher population, a much bigger country, a much bigger army and far more tanks (the Soviet Union had more than 14,000 combat-ready tanks, and Germany less than 4000). But in the community of the Nazi leadership and German army leadership, a belief took hold that victory was very likely. Germany ended up losing the war.

There was an overconfidence community created when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, with many predicting a short military involvement not costing very much in dollars or casualties. This overconfidence was epitomized by the “Mission Accomplished” banner raised on an aircraft carrier President George W. Bush visited shortly after the war began. The invasion led to long years of chaos in the country with endless terrorist bombings and much of the country being taken over by the ISIS terrorist group. US costs (counting interest payments) were in the trillions, with 4000+ dead and tens of thousands wounded. The “Mission Accomplished” banner is now a symbol of overconfidence and hubris.

Overconfidence communities can consist of a group of investors. One such overconfidence community existed just before the stock market crash of 1929. In the summer of 1929, people were thinking that investing in the stock market was a sure-fire financial move. A similar overconfidence community developed involving investors in high-tech stocks in the late 1990's. But then in 2000 there was a great crash in the value of high-tech stocks. Another overconfidence community consisted of investors in real estate and mortgage-backed securities around 2005 and 2006. The community was very frequently warned that a huge “housing bubble” had developed, but the investors paid little or no attention. Then housing prices plummeted after 2006, leading to the Great Recession of 2008.

In the world of organized religion, there are quite a few overconfidence communities. Of course, if you happen to believe that your organized religion and its leaders or scriptures are divinely guided or divinely inspired, you then will not think that your particular community is an overconfidence community. But since there are many organized religions with conflicting teachings which cannot all be right, even the adherent of a traditional organized religion will concede that some other religious communities are overconfidence communities that have too high an opinion of their own state of knowledge.

In the world of politics, there can be overconfidence communities. A prominent example is the group of political pundits who predicted that Donald Trump had no chance of winning the Republican nomination in 2016, and who then predicted after he won that nomination that he had no real chance of winning the presidency.  

And even in the world of scientific academia, there are overconfidence communities: communities that have improperly raised their own "Mission Accomplished" banners. One very large overconfidence community is the community which maintains that scientists have figured out the origin of biological organisms. The explanatory pretensions of this community are mountainous, but its members offer only a tissue-thin explanation to back up their main claim: the idea that incredibly organized biological innovations are explained by random mutations (blind chance variations) and what they call natural selection (the mere fact that fit organisms reproduce more).  Another overconfidence community is the one that maintains that all the astonishing wonders of the human mind can be explained by mere brain activity. Those in this community have no remotely persuasive explanations of how noisy neurons and synapses with very frequent protein turnover can explain things such as accurate instant retrieval of 50-year-old memories, human imagination, and minds that create deep philosophical thoughts. But the community proclaims its “neurons explain it all” dogma as if it were fact, and ignores a large body of evidence conflicting with such a dogma.

Another example of an overconfidence community in academia is one that predicted for decades that a speculative theory called supersymmetry would by our time have been confirmed by the activity of the Large Hadron Collider. That gigantic machine has been running for years, and has found no evidence the theory is true.  Then there is the SETI overconfidence community, which since about 1965 has been speaking as if we are not long away from receiving radio signals from extraterrestrials. Pitchmen of this community (people such as Carl Sagan) spoke so confidently that around 1973 I thought extraterrestrial radio signals would be discovered by the year 2000. 

Part of the way in which overconfidence communities preserve overconfidence is by shielding their members from facts that might shake their overconfidence.  For example, it was recently reported that a Russian person with a university degree in engineering (who worked decades as an engineer, and reported no difficulties) had been found to have lived his life with only half a brain. This news matched the finding of a previous scientific paper finding that someone with half a brain had above-average intelligence. But this news item (tending to disrupt confidence in "brains make minds" dogma) was not reported on any of the major science news sites beloved by various overconfidence communities.  Such sites also fail to report objectively on evidence of paranormal phenomena. 

One of the key factors fueling the growth of an overconfidence community is what is known as social proof. Social proof is when the likelihood of someone adopting a belief or doing something becomes proportional to how many other people adopted that belief of did that thing. If we were to write a kind of equation for social proof, it would be something like this:

Social proof of belief or action (s) = number of people believing that or doing that (x) multiplied by the average prestige of such people (y) multiplied by how much such people are like yourself (z).

If lots of people adopt a belief or do some thing, that thing, there will be a larger amount of social proof. If some of those people are famous or popular or prestigious or influential, there will be a larger amount of social proof. If some or lots of those people are like yourself, there will be a larger amount of social proof. So, for example, we might not be influenced if told that most Mongolians water their lawns every week, but if we live on Long Island, and we hear that most Long Island residents water their lawns every week, we may well start doing such a thing.

Given these factors, it is rather easy to see how overconfidence communities can get started in the academic world, even when the communities are rather tiny. A physics professor may advance some far-fetched theory, and get a few supporters among other physics professors. These few professors each has a high prestige, since our society has adulation for physics professors. If you are then another physics professor, you may be drawn into the overconfidence community which will already have two of the three “social proof” factors in its favor – because the few adherents are just like you, and are high-prestige people. So even with only a few believers, it may be possible for the overconfidence community to get started. The more people who start believing in the idea, the more of a “social proof” snowball effect is created.

When you belong to an overconfidence community, it can cast a spell on you, and make you accept bad reasoning you would never accept if you were outside of the community. Once you leave the community, there can be a kind of “the scales fall from your eyes” effect, and you can ask yourself: what was I thinking when I believed that?  In the future, as it becomes ever more clear that the members of overconfidence communities in academia are making unsound claims, and pretending to know things they don't actually know, there will be many people who drift out of such overconfidence communities, and experience “the scales fall from your eyes” moments. And in such moments the questions they will ask will be something like “what the hell was I thinking?” or “how could I have believed in something so unbelievable?”