Analytic Confidence's Origins and Early History
Analytic confidence beginnings coincide with the cognitive psychology movement, especially in psychological decision theory. This branch of psychology did not set out to study analytic confidence as it pertains to intelligence reporting. Rather, the advances in cognitive psychology established a groundwork for understanding well calibrated confidence levels in decision making.
Early accounts of explaining analytic confidence focused on certainty forecasts, as opposed to the overall confidence the analyst had in the analysis itself. This highlights the degree of confusion among scholars about the difference between psychological and analytic confidence. Analysts often lessened certainty statements when confronted with challenging analysis, instead of proscribing a level of analytic confidence to explain those concerns. By lessening certainty levels due to a lack of confidence, a dangerous possibility of misrepresenting the target existed.
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Famous quotes containing the words analytic, confidence, origins, early and/or history:
““You, that have not lived in thought but deed,
Can have the purity of a natural force,
But I, whose virtues are the definitions
Of the analytic mind, can neither close
The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Men are often so foolish as to boast and value themselves upon their passions, even those that are most vicious. But envy is a passion so full of cowardice and shame that no one every ever had the confidence to own it.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“Make-believe is the avenue to much of the young child’s early understanding. He sorts out impressions and tries out ideas that are foundational to his later realistic comprehension. This private world sometimes is a quiet, solitary
world. More often it is a noisy, busy, crowded place where language grows, and social skills develop, and where perseverance and attention-span expand.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)