Hedgehogs and Foxes

“All models are wrong; some models are useful”

"Hedgehog scavenging" by It's No Game is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Archilochus was a Greek lyrical poet, who lived more than 2,600 years ago. He was one of the first Western poets to probe his own emotions for themes and was revered in the ancient world. His poetry was so powerful that his ex-fiancée and her father were both said to have committed suicide after he wrote an invective about them. Sadly, though, only fragments of his work have survived the ages. One of them is a single line: “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.” We have no further context.

"Fox" by jans canon is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Many centuries later, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin took this single line of poetry and spun it into an essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox, which was first published in 1953. He divided writers into two classes, hedgehogs, who have one big idea; and foxes, who have lots of little ideas. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who thought that the world around us was a shadow of an idealized world, is an example of a hedgehog; while his student Aristotle, who is the father of biology and painstakingly came up with many different categories, is an example of a fox. Berlin also considered Karl Marx as a hedgehog for his idea that class struggle explains the whole of history, while William Shakespeare was a fox - his plays have many overlapping themes.

Let’s fast-forward to the 21st century. Two experts in making insightful predictions, Nate Silver and Philip Tetlock, both resurrected the contrast between foxes and hedgehogs. They both argued that foxes make better predictions, although - in Silver’s words - hedgehogs make more entertaining guests on television. Hedgehogs tend to take one idea to an extreme and present wildly wrong forecasts with plenty of bravado. We can see this in spades with people who think that everything is a conspiracy.

Of course, the Sharpen Your Axe project is based on promoting a fox-like attitude. Instead of one big idea, we are presenting lessons from lots of areas from skepticism to probability theory, from gambling small amounts of money to modern psychology and from behavioural economics to business theory. We have taken detours through the history of toxicology and virtue-based epistemology, among other areas and there are many more to come.

The reason why foxes make better predictions than hedgehogs takes us quite deep. French writer Paul Valéry once said: “Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.” Statistician George Box later came up with a simpler version: “All models are wrong; some models are useful.”

In other words, we can think of our ideas about the world as models. Our brains are very small and the universe is very large, so all our models will involve some simplification. This means that no model can be absolutely correct - we have rounded off the corners to make them fit in our brains. Using the same model all the time guarantees that we will be wrong a lot of the time. However, if we are able to think hard about whether a model is appropriate or not, we might just be able to drop it when it fails to yield results. Thinking hard about our methodology means we might be able to choose a more insightful model, even if it will never be completely correct.

Striving to be more fox-like leads us to subtle positions. For example, this blog regularly argues that most conspiracy theories are based on questionable methodology and are often designed to protect fringe views from skeptical scrutiny. They are spread by gurus, con artists and denialists, who often promote groupthink in online communities. And yet humans are conspiratorial animals. Conspiracies do happen!

Our best chance is to develop a methodology that allows us to be skeptical about weak conspiracy theories while being open to the idea that some conspiracies might at times be successful. Sadly, a subtle and fox-like approach like this is less emotionally satisfying than yelling a slogan that looks good on a T-shirt. See you next week!

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the critical-thinking rabbit hole.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.