The hedgehog and the fox is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Though published in 1993, the title is a reference to a fragment of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus. The relevant passage translates as:
… a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.
Isaiah Berlin used this concept to classify famous thinkers: those whose ideas could be summarised by a single principle are hedgehogs; those whose ideas are more pragmatic, multi-faceted and evolving are foxes.
This dichotomy of approaches to thinking has more recently been applied in the context of prediction, and is the basis of the following short (less than 5-minute) video, kindly suggested to me by Richard.
Watch and enjoy…
So, remarkably, in a study of the accuracy of individuals when making predictions, nothing made a difference: age, sex, political outlook… Except, ‘foxes’ are better predictors than ‘hedgehogs’: being well-versed in a single consistent philosophy is inferior to an adaptive and evolving approach to knowledge and its application.
The narrator, David Spiegelhalter, also summarises the strengths of a good forecaster as:
- Aggregation. They use multiple sources of information, are open to new knowledge and are happy to work in teams.
- Metacognition. They have an insight into how they think and the biases they might have, such as seeking evidence that simply confirms pre-set ideas.
- Humility. They have a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, admit errors and change their minds. Rather than saying categorically what is going to happen, they are only prepared to give probabilities of future events.
(Could almost be a bible for a sports modelling company.)
These principles are taken from the book Future Babble by Dan Gardner, which looks like it’s a great read. The tagline for the book is ‘how to stop worrying and love the unpredictable’, which on its own is worth the cost of the book.
Incidentally, I could just have easily written a blog entry with David Spiegelhalter as part of my series of famous statisticians. Until recently he was the president of the Royal Statistical Society. He was also knighted in 2014 for his services to Statistics, and has numerous awards and honorary degrees.
His contributions to statistics are many, especially in the field of Medical Statistics. Equally though, as you can tell from the above video, he is a fantastic communicator of statistical ideas. He also has a recent book out: The art of statistics: learning from data. I’d guess that if anyone wants to learn something about Statistics from a single book, this would be the place to go. I’ve just bought it, but haven’t read it yet. Once I do, if it seems appropriate, I’ll post a review to the blog.
