The Hedgehog Theory: Why Your Favorite Smart Person Is (Probably) Full of Sh*t

Hedgehogs are not a particularly powerful, fast, or flexible species. In fact, compared to many others in their environment, they're fairly slow and weak. But hedgehogs successfully survive using one effective strategy. They curl into a ball, expose their spines, and become difficult to attack. On the opposite end of the spectrum, foxes are a nimble, fast, and adaptable species. For both hunting and defense, they employ a variety of strategies, like hiding, pouncing, scavenging, running, as well as acclimating to various environmental conditions. Neither the fox's nor the hedgehog's strategy is universally right or wrong, better or worse. Both species have and continue to survive. But there's something very interesting about the differences between them. As the ancient Greek poet Archilochus said, The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. There are several interpretations one could make of this line, but 20th century philosopher Isaiah Berlin used it as a metaphor to define and contrast the two primary ways in which thinkers, writers, and public figures, which we can extend to people more broadly, approach ideas. In his essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, Berlin argued that one common category of thinkers, which he referred to as hedgehogs, view and treat the world through clear, definable frameworks. These individuals are often very confident about their scopes of understanding and conclusions. Berlin writes, They relate everything to a single central vision, a single universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance. Berlin contrasts hedgehogs with another category of thinkers, which he referred to as foxes, who, on the contrary, view and treat the world as something more nuanced, malleable, and uncertain. These individuals are far less likely to produce phenomena into singular domains or theories, and are also less likely to be highly confident in their conclusions. Like a fox, they are willing to adapt, neither pounce or hide, depending on context. Berlin writes, They pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. The invasive species of the modern world. A lot has changed since Berlin's essay in 1953. The quantity and impact of thinkers and public figures expressing ideas, theories, advice, and so-called facts hasn't merely increased, but proliferated in modern culture. Now, anyone can publish and share, essentially anything online, at any time, with access to the entire world. We encounter the thoughts and views of hundreds if not thousands of ordinary people, experts, crackpots, interesting thinkers, good-faith communicators, bad-faith communicators, charlatans, artists, marketers, or some combinations thereof, on a daily basis. On one hand, this is remarkable. We have constant access to some of the best and most interesting minds on the planet, and we can engage with others' minds through all sorts of efficient and interesting mediums. We have access to their insights, theories, protocols, advice, and modes of thought on a real-time basis, some of which can be extremely interesting, useful, or even life-changing, for both individuals and society at large. But on the other hand, we also have equal access to mediocre, deficient, or malicious minds, who share just as many thoughts and views, often with far more conviction and noise. And it can sometimes be hard to tell them apart. As a result of both our psychology and the ways media platforms exploit our psychology, we are very bad at parsing and focusing on good information and good-faith communicators. We are more attracted to, and media platforms primarily amplify, confidence, charisma, contrarianism, resonance, fear-mongering, simplicity, certainty, and so on. None of which on their own are markers of high-quality information or good-faith communication. In fact, they are often indicators of the opposite. The Expert Economy Most of us strive to see and understand the world as clearly and simply as possible. We yearn for clear answers and explanations because, deep down, we know, or perhaps feel, that life and reality are devoid of them. In our stubborn need for existential orientation, we attempt to map words and concepts onto the world, trying to create a perfect overlay between thought and reality. But this is like taking a literal physical map as the equivalent for the territory it symbolizes. The map is very useful, but it is also very incomplete. It cannot show all the objects, people, dimensions, weather, or events existing and shifting in each moment within the territory. And you cannot traverse the map itself. We all feel the unsettling dissonance our perception of reality and the limited control and understanding we have of it. We have our maps, but they don't show us why or how we should go anywhere and what will happen if we do. What's actually around the corner? As a response to this, instead of acknowledging and embracing the dissonant ambiguity inherent to existence, we often strive for clearer maps, origins to blame our circumstances on, clear routes to escape our circumstances, clear destinations to hope for. As a result, there is a massive, ever-expanding economy built not so much around the actual clarity of maps, but the marketing and scalability of the clarity of maps. This is because, as a species, we really can't understand things much more clearly. That is, we can't comprehensively understand or predict much about reality, the variability and complexity of people's lives, economies, societies, the metaphysical underpinnings of it all, and so on. But we can continue to sustain and sell the hopeful illusion that we can. Foxes are more often right, but you know of way more hedgehogs. Building on the work of Isaiah Berlin, American political psychologist and author Philip Tetlock spent nearly two decades studying 284 experts, including academics, journalists, analysts, and public intellectuals. Almost all the participants in the study had postgraduate education, were publicly recognized, and, on average, had roughly 12 years of work experience in their field. Tetlock and his team collected and tracked 28,000 of their predictions about the world across 18 years, measuring both the accuracy of their predictions and their levels of confidence in them. In the end, across the board, the experts' predictions were barely better than chance. Even the most accurate cluster of experts performed only slightly better than simple, mindless predictive models. Crucially, however, there was a spectrum of different thinking styles and confidence levels exhibited by the experts, ranging from those who were narrow and confident to those who were more open and tentative. Here, Tetlock borrows the fox and hedgehog terms from Berlin to define the two primary groups he found in his analysis. Hedgehogs being more confident and likely to extend their views into many domains, and foxes being more open and tentative. Interestingly, Tetlock found there was a clear group that was significantly more accurate in In other words, the group of experts that were the most confident were the least accurate. In fact, they were worse than chance. Tetlock writes, Speaking of overconfidence around information and predictions, one of the noisiest and messiest arenas for this is the mainstream news. This video's sponsor, Ground News, is a platform that provides solutions for these very problems. Information overload, misinformation, media bias, and manipulation. It works by gathering news from all around the world and organizing it into one spot. You can then compare the headlines, framings, political leanings, and corporate ownership of all the news sources reporting on the same stories, allowing you to cut through the noise and manipulation and differentiate facts from politics and sensationalism. For example, with SpaceX recently completing the largest IPO in history, there's a lot of different sources reporting on the event, both analyzing and predicting its implications, from the stock market to the future of technology and humanity. 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Get a clearer understanding of what's actually going on in the world by going to ground.news.com or by using my QR code and you'll get 40% off their Unlimited Access Vantage Plan. The Secrets to Success Ironically, what we tend to reward and be attracted to in media and popular discourse is precisely what makes the ideas within them more likely to be fallible. The shows, podcasts, books, and content that confidently claim clear answers to life, clear resolutions to problems, clear origins of suffering, clear predictions or assessments of what's happening or likely to happen, are more likely to be weaker compared to those who explore ideas with openness, ambiguity, and hesitancy. Tetlock writes, The net result is a double irony. A perversely inverse relationship between prime exhibit indicators of good judgment and the qualities the media prizes in pundance, the tenacity required to prevail in ideological combat, and the quality science prizes in scientists, the tenacity required to reduce superficial complexity to underlying simplicity. Perhaps this still might seem counterintuitive. Individuals with shows, books, podcasts, lots of experience, lots of money, social status, big audiences, or all the above, must know more than the average person, must have greater talents or intellects, must be keen to more secrets and insights, must be special. Maybe. Maybe not. It depends. And it depends on a lot. And that's the problem. Firstly, when it comes to personal, self-help, or success-oriented advice, and this should be fairly obvious, what works for some people doesn't mean it will work for everyone. In some cases, it won't work for most, if not all, others. Each person is an entirely unique blend of biological and psychological make-ups, combined with a unique set of environmental, social, and economic circumstances, all stirred together through an entirely unique sequence of experiences. No one will ever have the same unique concoction of existence as anyone else throughout the entire universe in perpetuity. Each of us alone walk the path of our feet and occupy the space of our heads in every moment. Besides the profound and somewhat unsettling existential implications of this, it is also inexorable within this that each of us will develop unique skills, abilities, and perspectives, or lack thereof. That includes everything from athleticism, to articulacy, to wittiness, to thinking styles, to self-discipline, and everything else. Academic and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky writes, You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly. We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment. Furthermore, as a result of who and where we are, we will each uniquely encounter, or not, information, resources, and opportunities at various points within our lifetimes. Even if two people inherently possess the same skills or abilities, but one starts off with certain economic or social advantages, or they happen to have some serendipitous good fortune in their life at an opportune time, this person is almost certainly going to achieve greater levels of success. And if one argues that their ability to encounter opportunities or accumulate resources was a product of their ambition or self-discipline, where then did these propensities for ambition or self-discipline come from? Ultimately, any simple, universalized prescription for how to live or become successful are in direct opposition with reality. The One Thing We Can Know Referring back to Tetlock's study, though the hedgehog experts were wrong more significantly and more often than the foxes, the foxes were still wrong a lot. They were not much stronger at assessing the world than simple, mindless extrapolation models. And although they were far less extreme in the degree of their confidence, their confidence levels were still mostly higher than their abilities. The conclusion here is, ironically, clear. Although there is a better, more robust way of thinking in assessing the world, with sufficient time or complexity, we rarely know what we are talking about. We are dramatically worse at understanding and forecasting the world than our feelings of confidence imply. It's very hard to embrace nuance and ambiguity. It's harder to convey and express it. And it's hardest of all to package and sell it. But that is what this world really is. Messy, convoluted, ambiguous, and contradictory. One theory will not resolve the cosmos. One daily routine or mindset will not resolve a life. It's mostly luck, but it's not pointless. In the end, sharing one's insights and assessments, or making observations and predictions, whether by experts, writers, thinkers, or simply those who care, is of course not bad or devoid of value. In many cases, there's a lot of value in it. Firstly, it's genuinely interesting to engage in and hear out different people's perspectives, ideas, and insights, simply for its own sake. And it is all the more interesting and stimulating when it is from individuals who have domain expertise, have had success in life, or are simply very articulate or interesting in their ways of thinking. Secondly, there's of course nothing wrong with sharing and seeking knowledge, predictions, or advice, regardless of category or expertise. This is a natural tendency of humankind. And in many cases, when done in earnest, it is a noble and beautiful exchange that points at the heart of our desire to connect and persist through insight and wisdom. Thirdly, there are, of course, real experts and real domains that have real knowledge or advantages. And when information or advice is shared in good faith by an expert about their domain, for those for whom encountering said information would benefit, it will. And lastly, there's of course nothing wrong with being confident, charismatic, clear, or resonant. These qualities certainly do not automatically imply bad faith or bad information. And there's broadly nothing wrong with being like a hedgehog. Even within uncertainty, it can be valuable to push ideas to their limits in order to find their limits, in order to make bold claims, or inspire bold change, in order to help orient social or personal directions and narratives. Interestingly, one could say there is something hedgehog-like in reducing the complexity of cognitive styles into two binary categories, hedgehogs and foxes. And yet, it does gesture at something important nonetheless. The ultimate point is this. When we are viewing, reading, or engaging with people and ideas, it's important to remember how easily influenced we are by these factors alone, and how little these factors alone may indicate accuracy or merit. Ultimately, success in life is not expertise over life. Expertise in certain domains is not expertise in other domains. And neither expertise nor success ever equate to anything close to clairvoyance. Nothing grants anyone the ability to grasp the ungraspable and know the unknowable, which, at enough distance and time and space, and enough depth of complexity, everything is. And so, those who say things like, this is the secret, or these 12 steps will transform X, or this is why this happened and this is what will happen, are perhaps the hedgehogs of this world, with their spines out, using their one strategy to avoid being attacked. And to the contrary, those who say things like, perhaps, or it depends, or you might consider, or this is what worked for me, are much more likely to be closer to something real, true, or honest. Maybe, maybe not.