In reviewing Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment upon its release in 2005, The New Yorker of course discussed the main finding that expert judgements are not much better than those of lay forecasters.
Another key focus of the review was Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, a metaphor drawn from Archilochus sometime in the 7th century BC. Tetlock uses it to categorise the two approaches people take to forecasting, finding:
Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.
An interesting aside is what Tetlock saw when he explored how the hedgehog and fox mindsets correlated with political leanings:
[There was no] significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes. (Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.)
It seems natural, then, that one would want to aim to be a fox in our thinking, right? Well, maybe not if you want to make a name for yourself:
The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you’re right you can be really and spectacularly right. Great scientists, for example, are often hedgehogs. They value parsimony, the simpler solution over the more complex.
So, whether it’s the (overly-)confident single-mindedness of the hedgehog or the flexible pragmatism of the fox, being aware of the approaches can help us better navigate the complexities of an uncertain future. Especially combined with Tetlock’s other recommendations, of being comfortable with complexity and uncertainty and keeping our confidence in check.