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Sex, Socrates and the source of all our errors

Sex, Socrates and the source of all our errors

From Gaza to Ukraine, via you and me, overconfidence is humanity’s undoing

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Nick Cohen
Jan 17, 2025
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Writing from London
Writing from London
Sex, Socrates and the source of all our errors
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In my last post I asserted that

“Socrates said that living with the male libido was like being ‘chained to a madman’. You can say much the same about Europe and Donald Trump.”

I liked the line and gave myself a little smile. Above all else, it was true. Coping with Trump will be the equivalent of coping with a madman, and it always helps to find a simile that makes your argument for you. Sexual references don’t hurt either. The human race being the way it is, they encourage readers to read on.

Most pleasingly of all, I was showing solidarity with my tribe. I was announcing that I was a sophisticated liberal author and flattering you with the assumption that I was talking to equally sophisticated readers, who would appreciate the classical reference.

Naturally, I was confident that Socrates had indeed said that living with male desire was like being chained to a madman. Absolutely confident.

If it had been the last question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, I would not have needed to phone a friend or ask the audience. I would have answered at once: “Socrates”.

If an admittedly rather unusual assassin had held a gun to my head and demanded I source the quote correctly or die, I would have said “Socrates” again. It never occurred to me that I could be wrong and that I needed to check my sources.

I was so confident, I included a link in the text (see above) to a learned discussion on who first used the phrase, which, if I had bothered to read, would have told me was most certainly not Socrates.

In my ignorance I had demonstrated that most dangerous of cognitive biases: overconfidence. According to one learned psychological authority, "No problem in judgment and decision making is more prevalent and more potentially catastrophic.”

All I can say in mitigation is that Socrates was in the room, or the olive grove, at the time.

In Book 1 of “The Republic” Plato describes how Socrates asked Cephalus about ageing. Cephalus gave some of his thoughts, and then added an idea from Sophocles for good measure.

Francis MacDonald Cornfield’s translation reads:

“I remember someone asking Sophocles, the poet, whether he was still capable of enjoying a woman. ‘Don’t talk in that way,’ he answered; ‘I am only too glad to be free of all that; it is like escaping from bondage to a raging madman.’ I thought that a good answer at the time, and I still think so; for certainly a great peace comes when age sets us free from passions of that sort.”

And not only for men, I imagine.

Psychology has a branch dedicated to cataloguing overconfidence. There is the now well discussed “Dunning–Kruger effect,” in which people of limited ability vastly overestimate their competence: a psychological flaw that explains most of modern politics, and in my experience, the behaviour of every executive in the British media.

The related belief that we imagine ourselves to be better people than we really are was backed in a 1981 study by Ola Svenson, who asked participants to rate their driving safety and skill against others in the experiment. The results, which have been repeated many times, showed that the majority of participants rated themselves as far above the average, despite the statistical impossibility of more than 50% of participants being better than average.

If you think I am talking about harmless errors consider that nearly every terrible decision you can think of was driven by an overconfident refusal to check before committing.

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