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)
“I see advertisements for active young men, as if activity were the whole of a young man’s capital. Yet I have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. What a doubtful compliment this to pay me!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
A light-blue lane of early dawn,”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)