Bill Godwin, American scientist and philosopher, sees something additional at the heart of polarized entrenchment:…

… One needs to begin with the assumption (obviously true if one thinks about it) that they may well be right and it is we who are wrong because of our own ignorance or assumption or biases or cultural and life experiences. It’s amazing what one can learn about other people’s lives, other people’s experiences, other people’s assumptions and biases, and other people’s cultures with this approach. And it is amazing how often that new understanding will modify one’s own views.

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 Tetlock’s 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 ‘on one hand, and on the other’. Yet explicit hedgehogs who claim to predict the future will always attract a larger audience than eclectic foxes who acknowledge they can’t, even if the larger audience learns nothing useful from the predictions.

Conclusions

21. The practice of obliquity

There is not, and will not be, such a science. Our objectives are typically imprecise and multi-faceted, and change as we work towards them, and properly so. Our decisions depend on the responses of others and on what we anticipate those responses will be. The world is complex, imperfectly known, and our knowledge of it is incomplete, and theses things will remain true however much we learn and however much we analyse it.

We do not solve problems in the way the concept of decision science implies because we can’t. The achievement of the great statesman is not to reach the best decision fastest but to mediate effectively among competing views and values.

Solomon, R. C., Ethics and Excellence, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994 (new edition)

One of the most obvious facts of social and political life is the longevity of the temporary. British licensing hours for taverns, for instance, French rent controls, or Washington “temporary” government buildings, all three hastily developed in World War I to last “a few months of temporary emergency” are still with us fifty years later. The effective decision-maker knows this. He too improvises, of course. But he asks himself every time, “If I had to live with this for a long time, would I be willing to?” And if the answer is “No,” he keeps on working to find a more general, a more conceptual, a more comprehensive solution— one which establishes the right principle.

As a result, the effective executive does not make many decisions. But the reason is not that he takes too long in making one—in fact, a decision on principle does not, as a rule, take longer than a decision on symptoms and expediency. The effective executive does not need to make many decisions. Because he solves generic situations through a rule and policy, he can handle most events as cases under the rule; that is, by adaptation. “A country with many laws is a country of incompetent lawyers,” says an old legal proverb. It is a country which attempts to solve every problem as a unique phenomenon, rather than as a special case under general rules of law. Similarly, an executive who makes many decisions is both lazy and ineffectual.