When it comes to predicting the future, the question is: are you a hedgehog or a fox?
The distinction, popularized by philosopher Isaiah Berlin in an essay based on a Greek poem, separates people into two types:
The Hedgehog: Knows one big thing. Hedgehogs view the world through a single, overarching philosophy or idea through which they interpret all circumstances. They tend to be highly confident in their forecasts.
The Fox: Knows many things. Foxes have no grand, unifying philosophy; instead, they are pragmatic, muddle along, adapt to changing circumstances, and are willing to change their minds along the way.
Politicians, for instance, often lean toward being hedgehogs, while pragmatic individuals are more foxy. The question is, which one is better at predicting the future?
The Tetlock Experiment
Political scientist Philip Tetlock tested this question in a massive study spanning 20 years, involving 284 experts who made 28,000 long-term predictions about world events. Tetlock found that the forecaster's personal ideology (optimist or pessimist, conservative or liberal) made little difference to their accuracy. The only consistent pattern was how they thought, not what they thought.
The results were clear: Foxes were much better at predicting the future than hedgehogs. Hedgehogs were particularly poor at forecasting subjects in their own field of expertise because their high confidence led to overly certain and often incorrect predictions.
A classic example of the hedgehog fallacy is the historian Arnold Toynbee. In 1947, he was widely regarded as one of the world's most renowned scholars. Based on his grand, self-proclaimed "scientific theory of history" that all 23 past civilizations he studied had gone through the same stages before collapsing, Toynbee made the confident prediction that Western civilization was not yet finished. He forecast that its golden age—a stage of universal government and religious renaissance—would begin around the year 2000. His peers were skeptical, and they were right; Toynbee is now largely remembered as a case study in hedgehog overconfidence.
Characteristics of a Good Forecaster
In his book Future Babble, author Dan Gardner identified three key characteristics shared by the best forecasters (the foxes):
Aggregation: They use multiple sources of information, are open to new knowledge, and are happy to work in teams to gather diverse perspectives.
Metacognition: They have insight into their own thinking and are aware of the biases they might hold, such as the tendency to seek evidence that merely confirms their preset ideas.
Humility: They possess a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, admit errors, and change their minds.
Good forecasters are rarely prepared to state "categorically" what will happen. Instead, they are willing to give probabilities for future events, recognizing, in the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld, both the "known unknowns" and the "unknown unknowns."
So, when listening to someone tell you what is in store for the world, remember to ask yourself: are they a confident hedgehog or a humble, adaptable fox?
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