From Watts Up With That?

By Mitzi Perdue

“The internet will have no more economic impact than the fax machine,” said Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. U.S. intelligence insisted the Afghan government would hold for months after the American withdrawal. It fell in eleven days. Military analysts around the world predicted Kyiv would fall within seventy-two hours in February 2022. It never did. The media lined up to predict that “Harry Potter” would flop because kids no longer read. Harry Potter sold half a billion copies.

These were not fringe voices. These were the crowned heads of their domains, credentialed, lauded, confident experts. Their expertise was real, but their predictions were wrong.

Why are experts so often and so publicly wrong?

The Fox and the Hedgehog Problem

The answer comes from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, whose wisdom still matters today: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Hedgehogs are deep specialists. They master one domain, seeing the world through a narrow lens. Their training encourages a single track that says double down, go deep, defend your turf.

• Foxes are integrators, generalists who pull ideas from different fields and adapt as reality demands. Foxes do not just tolerate ambiguity; they thrive in it.

Science Measures the Problem with Hedgehogs

Psychologist Philip Tetlock spent twenty years tracking expert predictions about world events. In his two-decade study, Tetlock catalogued more than twenty-eight thousand expert predictions and found that experts were slightly less accurate than a random coin toss.

The questions he posed were simple ones with yes or no answers. For example, would the Soviet Union collapse in five years? Would a major war break out? Again and again, the hedgehogs, the deep experts, failed dramatically. The generalists, however, did substantially better than chance. Their secret was breadth of perspective and adaptability, the classic traits of foxes.

Experts failed because of tunnel vision. Like photographers using a telephoto lens, hedgehogs saw only a narrow slice of reality. Foxes, with a wide-angle view, caught the crucial details on the periphery, the details specialists ignored.

Why This Pattern Persists and Why It Is Dangerous

The deeper someone goes into a field, the more their framework, their one big thing, becomes their only lens. There’s the ever-present danger that new information will be sifted to fit what they already believe. In both science and academia, the native habitat of experts, there is the danger that promotions or tenure or funding will go to the practitioners who agree with an existing consensus. 

Some say, only half jokingly, that science advances one funeral at a time. They say this because once someone holds a particular view, that view can become part of their identity, and they will wall off anything that contradicts it. When entire disciplines fall victim to this kind of thinking, you get the worst effects of hedgehog thinking. You get a whole field in which brilliant people are confidently yet spectacularly wrong.

Journalists: Foxes in a Hedgehog World

So where do we find foxes? One place is journalists. The best journalists are forced to be foxes. Every day, they deal with conflicting accounts, unexpected outcomes, and situations where things they were sure of turn out not to be so.

Journalists remind the public, often at great personal risk, that truth is messy and theory must bow to evidence. Their gift is not perfection but rather curiosity, adaptability, and the humility to revise when the facts change. Journalists add the complexity that specialists often remove. In a world flooded with confident error, the fox mind is an antidote.

Experts are often right, but they are also often wrong. We need credentialed authorities because their deep knowledge helps us make sense of complexity. But when it comes to prediction, seek out foxes, that is, the generalists and synthesizers, because their broad perspective and adaptability make them better at spotting large patterns and recognizing new realities. In the end, the wisest guide is not the hedgehog who knows one big thing but the fox who pays attention to everything.

This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.