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.
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?”
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