Sublime

“Who experts were—professional background, status, and so on—made scarcely an iota of difference,” Tetlock concludes. “Nor did what experts thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, realists or institutionalists, optimists or pessimists.” But “[h]ow experts thought—their style of reasoning—did matter.” The critical variable turned out to

Management psychologist Philip Tetlock concludes from his research that there is an inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and single-minded specialisation. Drawing from Isaiah Berlin's ‘fox and the hedgehog’ analogy, he contends that the fox – the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic a

In Tetlock’s analysis, the foxes—attuned to a wide range of potential sources, willing to admit uncertainty, not devoted to an overarching theory—turned out to be significantly better at predicting future events than the more single-minded experts. The foxes were full spectrum; the hedgehogs were narrowband.

My colleague Phil Tetlock finds that forecasting skill is less a matter of what we know than of how we think.

Foxes, Tetlock found, are considerably better at forecasting than hedgehogs.

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh