We live in a culture of magpies

We’ve observed that some clever Foxes do masquerade as Hedgehogs, but not the other way around. Or perhaps, some Foxes merely admire the Hedgehog. Isaiah Berlin, in his great essay hypothesized that “Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog.”

Isaiah Berlin, drawing on the Greek poet Archilochus, wrote, "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing," to illustrate a fundamental distinction in human thinking and behavior. Berlin used this metaphor to categorize writers and thinkers into two groups: foxes, who pursue a wide variety of interests and perspectives, adapting to comple

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The highly specialized hedgehogs knew “one big thing,” while the integrator foxes knew “many little things.” […] Foxes, meanwhile, “draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction,” Tetlock wrote. Where hedgehogs represent narrowness, foxes embody breadth. […]