The fox knows many things the hedgehog only one thing
Summary
- One central vision versus many general things.
Details
- Greek poet Archilochus gave a metaphor: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” As far as I can tell, he did not elaborate on this idea, but in 1953 philosopher Isaiah Berlin used this as a basis to divide people into hedgehogs: those who pursue one big idea, and foxes, who focus on many different things
- It could be summarised as specialists vs generalists
- Generalists tended to be better at making predictions about the future than specialists.
References
- wikipedia on Isaiah Berlins essay
- see also the fable of the fox and the cat
- Think for Yourself - Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence - Vikram Mansharamani
Quotes
"The integrators outperformed their colleagues on pretty much everything, but they especially trounced them on long-term predictions. Eventually, Tetlock conferred nicknames (borrowed from philosopher Isaiah Berlin) that became famous throughout the psychology and intelligence-gathering communities: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,” and the integrator foxes, who “know many little things.”
Hedgehog experts were deep but narrow. Some had spent their careers studying a single problem. Like Ehrlich and Simon, they fashioned tidy theories of how the world works through the single lens of their specialty, and then bent every event to fit them. The hedgehogs, according to Tetlock, “toil devotedly” within one tradition of their specialty, “and reach for formulaic solutions to ill-defined problems.” Outcomes did not matter; they were proven right by both successes and failures, and burrowed further into their ideas. It made them outstanding at predicting the past, but dart-throwing chimps at predicting the future. The foxes, meanwhile, “draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction,” Tetlock wrote. Where hedgehogs represented narrowness, foxes ranged outside a single discipline or theory and embodied breadth.
Incredibly, the hedgehogs performed especially poorly on long-term predictions within their domain of expertise. They actually got worse as they accumulated credentials and experience in their field. The more information they had to work with, the more they could fit any story to their worldview. This did give hedgehogs one conspicuous advantage. Viewing every world event through their preferred keyhole made it easy to fashion compelling stories about anything that occurred, and to tell the stories with adamant authority. In other words, they make great TV"
Related
- Genius versus skill accumulation
- Communicate goal or intention rather than micromanaging how a task should be done
- Range - Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World - David Epstein