15. The hedgehog and the fox
The political scientist Phillip Tetlock has used his taxonomy in a long-term study of expert political judgement. Over two decades, he invited respondents to predict political events and used hindsight to assess the quality of their responses. The experts were not very good at anticipating the future. No surprise: the world is complex and uncertain, our understanding of it is incomplete.
But Tetlockās most striking discovery is that although the foxes perform better in terms of the quality of their judgments, the hedgehogs perform better in terms of public acclaim. Hedgehogs are people who know the answers. Foxes know the limitations of their knowledge. Hedgehogs create headlines for journalists, and their confident certainties attract the attention of politicians and business leaders. Give me a one-handed economist, goes the saying, but careful judgement really is often a matter of āon one hand, and on the otherā. Yet explicit hedgehogs who claim to predict the future will always attract a larger audience than eclectic foxes who acknowledge they canāt, even if the larger audience learns nothing useful from the predictions.