Trust the experts? It’s a bad bet: Does Watt agree with that?

By Mitzi Perdue

“The Internet will have no more economic impact than the fax machine,” said Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. US intelligence insisted that the Afghan government would hold out for months after the US withdrawal. It fell in eleven days. Military analysts around the world predicted that kyiv would fall in seventy-two hours in February 2022. It never happened. The media lined up to predict that “Harry Potter” would fail because children no longer read. Harry Potter sold 500 million copies.

These were not marginal voices. These were the crowned heads of their domains, accredited, praised and trusted experts. His experience was real, but his predictions were wrong.

Why are experts wrong so often and so publicly?

The problem of the fox and the hedgehog

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

• Hedgehogs are deep specialists. They dominate one domain and see the world through a narrow lens. Their training encourages a single track that says bend, go deep, defend your territory.

• Foxes are integrators, generalists who draw ideas from different fields and adapt as reality demands. Foxes don’t just tolerate ambiguity; They thrive in it.

Science measures the hedgehog problem

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

The questions he posed were simple with yes or no answers. For example, would the Soviet Union collapse in five years? Would a major war break out? Time and time again, the hedgehogs, the profound experts, failed dramatically. Generalists, however, performed substantially better than chance. Their secret was broad perspective and adaptability, classic fox traits.

The experts failed because of tunnel vision. Like photographers who use a telephoto lens, the hedgehogs only saw a small portion of reality. The foxes captured crucial details in the periphery with their wide angle, details that the specialists ignored.

Why this pattern persists and why it is dangerous

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

Some say, half-jokingly, that science advances one funeral at a time. They say this because once someone has a particular vision, that vision can become part of their identity, and they will block anything that contradicts it. When entire disciplines fall victim to this type of thinking, the worst effects of hedgehog thinking occur. You get a whole field in which brilliant people mess up confidently but spectacularly.

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 face conflicting accounts, unexpected results, and situations in which things they were sure of turn out not to be so.

Journalists remind the public, often at great personal risk, that the truth is fuzzy and that theory must yield to evidence. His gift is not perfection but curiosity, adaptability and the humility to review when facts change. Journalists add complexity that specialists often eliminate. In a world flooded with confident mistakes, the fox mind is an antidote.

Experts are usually right, but they are also wrong. We need accredited authorities because their deep knowledge helps us understand the complexity. But when it comes to prediction, let’s look for the foxes, that is, the generalists and synthesizers, because their broad perspective and adaptability make them better at detecting big 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 available through RealClearWire.