From On Grand Strategy (John Lewis Gaddis, 2018) pp8-9
In an effort to determine the roots of accuracy and inaccuracy in forecasting, the American political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock and his assistants collected 27,451 predictions on world politics between 1988 and 2003 from 284 “experts” in universities, governments, think tanks, foundations, international institutions, and the media. Replete with tables, graphs, and equations, Tetlock’s 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, reports the findings of this most rigorous study ever done on why some people get the future right and others don’t.
“Who experts were – professional background, status, and so on – made scarcely an iota of difference,” Tetlock concludes. “Nor did what experts thought – whether they were liberals or conservatives, realists or institutionalists, optimists or pessimists.” But “how experts thought – their style of reasoning – did matter.” The critical variable turned out to be self-identification as “foxes” or “hedgehogs” when shown Berlin’s definitions of those terms. The results were unequivocal: foxes were far more proficient predictors than hedgehogs, whose record approximated that of a dart-throwing (and presumably computer-simulated) chimpanzee.
Startled by this outcome, Tetlock sought what distinguished his foxes from his hedgehogs. The foxes relied, for their predictions, on an intuitive “stitching together [of] diverse sources of information,” not on deductions derived from “grand schemes.” They doubted “that the cloudlike subject of politics” could ever be “the object of a clocklike science.” The best of them “shared a self-deprecating style of thinking” that “elevate[d] no thought above criticism.” But they tended to be too discursive – too inclined to qualify their claims to hold an audience. Talk show hosts rarely invited them back. Policy makers found themselves too busy to listen.
Tetlock’s hedgehogs, in contrast, shunned self-deprecation and brushed aside criticism. Aggressively deploying big explanations, they displayed a “bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it.”’ When the intellectual holes they dug got too deep, they’d simply dig deeper. They became “prisoners of their preconceptions,” trapped in cycles of self-congratulation. These played well as sound bites, but bore little relationship to what subsequently occurred.
All of which suggested, to Tetlock, “a theory of good judgment”: that “self-critical thinkers are better at figuring out the contradictory dynamics of evolving situations, more circumspect about their forecasting prowess, more accurate in recalling mistakes, less prone to rationalize those mistakes, more likely to update their beliefs in a timely fashion, and as a cumulative result of these advantages better positioned to affix realistic probabilities in the next round of events?” In short, foxes do it better.
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