Sublime

Beware the Herd

“The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Commenting on Tetlock's thesis, Oxford neuroscientist Anders Sandberg reaffirmed, ‘the manager solves manageable problems, a leader solves unknown problems. The leader probably has to be a kind of polymath. I would be very worried about a hedgehog leader’. Indeed, one of the world's leading futurists Ray Kurzweil insists on the need for the leader

Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, “relate everything to a single central vision” through which “all that they say and do has significance.” Foxes, in contrast, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way.” The distinction was simple but not frivolous: it offered “a point of view from which

philosophic outlook, they tend to be: CAUTIOUS: Nothing is certain HUMBLE: Reality is infinitely complex NONDETERMINISTIC: What happens is not meant to be and does not have to happen In their abilities and thinking styles, they tend to be: ACTIVELY OPEN-MINDED: Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be protected INTELLIGENT AND

more than a 5% reduction in risk. It delivers certainty. Both 0% and 100% weigh far more heavily in our minds than the mathematical models of economists say they should.8 Again, this is not surprising if you think about the world in

Imagine that your chance of being right is three percent, and your corresponding chance of being wrong is ninety-seven percent. Each opposing view, however, has only a two percent chance of being right, which of course is a bit less than your own chance of being right. Yet there are many such opposing views, so even if yours is the best, you’re

It has been found, in study after study, that random selection from a sufficiently large group of people – given the appropriate contextual knowledge – produces better answers to complex problems than the appointment of a narrow group of experts.