Have you run across Berlin's old saw about the hedgehog and the fox? The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

A lot of my colleagues, like a lot of politicians, are hedgehogs. They know one thing (it may not be all that big). They know it well enough. But when they're asked to connect it up with other things, as publishers and publics do, they're really at a loss. Just can't do it.

It's easy to make them look dumb, but really it's that they're narrow. We actually have unreasonable expectations of such folks; because they're professors they're supposed to know everything about everything. I have people assume all the time that because I'm a historian I know all about the Civil War (usually in the context of a request for validation of some plainly wacky theory about it), and I have to say nope, I know about as much as most amateurs about that because I'm a historian of Europe (and not Europe in general either, yaddayadda).

And I get that look like, what good are you. Well, for a lot of things not much. I'm good for what I'm good for and not for what I'm not, and explaining the academic division of labor where the details of that make sense would bore both of us. It's actually really hard not to 'learn' to just bluff in those situations.

I'm a fox and one of the things I know is this. My hedgehog friends don't, because the mismatching agendas of interpersonal dynamics and the sociology of knowledge are not the big thing they know. I'm not above the kind of verbal pantsing you describe, but the version of it I think is most valuable is not the complete demolition but instead figuring out exactly what those hedgehogs do know, use it for what it's worth, and ignore the rest because it's just flailing.

Hi Carl,

I am familiar with Berlin's fable, but perhaps as interesting, and more current, is Philip Tetlock’s newer book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”. I've referenced or alluded to it or Tetlock in earlier posts: Science Class, Overconfidence, Credulous Foxes, The Pansy Left and It's Not Noise.

But that's one facet of the subject of problem solving, especially group problem solving, that has long fascinated me and includes the work of Scott Page and Lu Hong as well as James Surowieki. The paper Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers by Page and Lu Hong is especially interesting. See Independent Cacophony, Tag Teams and, oh hell, just Google the site for all of those keywords if you are intrigued since there are a great many. A fun and informative introduction is Cosma Shalizi's article about the paper, Heuristic Diversity, Your Key to Knowledge, Wealth and Power (Dept. of "Yay Team!"), but my link rotted. Maybe Cosma still has a copy squirreled away somewhere. If you don't know him you should.

But, I'm no expert in this. Cosma may be, or at least can run a very good bluff.

When us eggheads can't baffle you with bullshit, we can hide a forest in the trees. Check out this computational tour de farce: "Lexical Analysis of
2008 US Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debates — who's the Windbag?" ( http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/debates/ ).

Harrumph, your dog just ate my homework when I clicked the pdf link. Oh well, what was I saying again?

Cosma. I love Cosma, link him on my site. For chuckles about smart people with indifferent interpersonal skills I like his student evaluations. Thanks for the links to get me deeper into your site. I always learn.

It's comforting to see that you too know many things that you can't quite keep straight when you click into rant mode. There's nothing in your references that justifies bashing poor knuckleheads who have maxed out their meager gifts with supreme efforts of mediocre hyperspecialization. They're good for some data; they just shouldn't be making decisions of any consequence is all (neither should we, or any one person). Since pulling carts is no longer an option, stashing these one-trick ponies in academia where they can do little real harm is probably better than letting them run numbers for the mob on Wall Street. In fact, stashing people who would be a drag out in the world is mostly what our education system is for, the more so the 'higher' you get. But that's a long discussion about divisions of labor and carrying capacities and I've gotta go have coffee with me mate.

Hi Mike,

The Lexical Analysis paper does try to discover something about the candidates' abilities to think and speak, but seems to focus mainly on their "personality, outlook and their policies." It is their politics more than their mental abilities that is measured.

I wonder if it is valid to infer anything about a candidate's inner mental life from their political stance during a campaign? They are so highly groomed by handlers and their points are so focus grouped and polled that in some sense I always feel like I'm listening to a PR team rather than a person, and that I really know very little of their character as a consequence.

VALID! My point exactly!

The speechifying only makes it worse. We seem to be implicitly swallowing the inference

speaking ability --> inner mental life --> leadership

which boggles my puny mind. I wish I had Joe Biden's IQ...

The meta-point that I'm always supporting Carl is that individual expertise is of much less value than others seem to think, and that there are methods to improve performance which all involve team efforts, but that even then the results are decidedly meager compared to the magnitude of the task.

And so, we should avoid grand projects and highly leveraged bets, preferring multiple parallel efforts, experimentation and stepwise refinement, hedge strategies, fall back positions and modesty.

This isn't timidity, it's clear eyed engagement with reality rather than blind abdication to mystical visions. Individuals and small groups are free to bet the farm on fantasies, but there are many such bets. Some work, some don't, we learn from the experiments. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That means that subsidiarity in national and international politics is more rational, that centralizing authority and control is a river boat gambler's irresponsible ambition, and that those who are sincerely interested in progress ought to be the most vocal advocates for distributed approaches.

The principle generalizes. We, the whole world, may still fail. That leads to the SF notion that we need to diversify further and colonize other worlds too.

In this view the "knuckleheads" do have value but it is in proportion to the variety of ways that their widely communicated discoveries are used by all of us other knuckleheads. That's why I semi-diligently mine the nets for information. Someone may discover something, or part of something, that I may have a notion about how to use, or improve, to accomplish my objectives. I speak about it since my failures and successes may be of use to someone in pursuit of their own objectives.

My opponents are the dark-siders, those who seek to raise a mob and force others to do their bidding. This reduces diversity of thought and action and so is a threat to society in the medium and long term if not always in the short term.

We've drifted a long way from "glibness", but conversations are like that sometimes.

Gary, I agree with you completely which is why it's such a pleasure to come here and kibitz and also why I find blogging worth doing in general. You make me/us smarter, as I think good relationships often do. Of course the amplification of ignence in an echo-chamber is always also possible, which is why I try to attend to and understand people I don't agree with also.

You're right, orthodoxies are the enemy. The big ones are bad, but in some ways it's the little compartmentalized ones that are worse. It's one thing to divide the labor, it's another thing to discipline and punish interactions among fields. The sweet spot is somewhere between insular expertise and fatuous dilettantism. Glibness can be attached to either pole of that continuum, but I don't automatically distrust it - I rely on people who can express themselves clearly to teach me the things I don't know.

Sorry to move this here, but the old posts you sent me to don't allow comments. In "Science Class" you quoted Menand on Tetlock: "If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union or the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes."

Yes. This post reminded me to look again at Garfinkel's Forms of Explanation (1981) to which I try to return every so often to keep me honest. In a discussion of what he calls "redundant causality" (and marxists call 'overdetermination') he distinguishes microexplanation (how something happened specifically) from macroexplanation, the field of other ways the same thing could have happened. His point is that only in retrospect is it easy to close down explanation to reductive trajectories. Such explanations are actually tautological.

If this is true where a determinate outcome is guaranteed by multiple contingent causal mechanisms, how much more so where outcomes are themselves contingent? As a teaching historian I might find this very embarrassing if I believed that dumb old marketing line about learning from the mistakes of history so we don't repeat them.

In this context glibness is a defense mechanism against the horror of contingency. It's a comfort, and costs little since we're going to have to muddle through the scatter plot no matter what. You're right to see this as essentially a religious function.

And this from Scott Page on Tetlock: "The hedgehogs dig in their little paws, rejecting any scenario inconsistent with their worldview. And the foxes? They fall victim to their open-mindedness and cannot distinguish the reasonable from the ridiculous. Instead, Tetlock suggests that pundits should get regular scorecards based on how well they predict."

It's interesting that in certain spheres in which punditry is immediately commoditized this is in fact the case; indeed they publish the scorecards themselves as marketing copy. A trivial example is fantasy sports, a guilty pleasure of mine in which the ability to predict future performance from past performance is decisive. There are in fact fantasy 'experts' who dazzle the yokels with glib truisms, gut feelings and flashy coinages. Then there are the actuarial data crunchers, who are a lot less 'fun' to read but offer a much better return on investment.

The advantage of sports is that they are so highly conventionalized that the effective variables can easily be extracted and exhaustively tested, which means that you can configure a 'team' for long-term performance with a high degree of confidence. In shorter runs the probabilities collapse into local contingencies like injuries and 'off nights', which makes the playoffs wicked frustrating.

The problem with prediction in less conventionalized settings is that the profusion of variables and contingency of their interactions can be chaotic, yielding local regularities that are not reliably predictive. Hume pointed this out long ago, and it's the topic of Taleb's The Black Swan.

So yeah, we're betting. "Some work, some don't, we learn from the experiments. Lather, rinse, repeat." Best to keep the bets modest. The problem / opportunity is that in real dynamical systems the outcomes of decisions are macroscopically non-linear, so even 'small' bets or n+1 previously safe bet can trigger disproportionate consequences. Which might keep a control freak awake at night unless they're properly soothed by fantasy sports, the stock market, and other artificially linear distractions.

Busy day for me. I'll respond with more care later but I'll leave this here now.

"Oddly perhaps, a comment I once heard by Peter Fisher in a discussion forum which included Myron Scholes (of LTCM infamy) comes to mind."

If a random bolt of lightning hits you when you're standing in the middle of the field, that feels like a random event. But if your business is to stand in random fields during lightning storms, then you should anticipate, perhaps a little more robustly, the risks you're taking on.

That's from an old post from the spring of '04, back when Taleb was not quite famous, there were still people around who knew what LTCM meant, and John Brockman was promoting him.

But for now, I have to get back out in the field.

Later. OK, I dodged the lightning bolts for one more day of field work.

I'll call your Page quote and raise you a Shalizi quote.

The story is told of many giants of modern physics, but most plausibly of Heisenberg, that, on his death-bed, he remarked that the two great unsolved problems were reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, and turbulence. "Now, I'm optimistic about gravity..."

If people must find analogies for society, ecosystems, etc., from physics and engineering, turbulence is probably a better one than feedback.

This speaks to your perceptions that improbable things happen as well as that they can arise from seemingly innocuous events that have happened many times before with no comparable consequences. Cosma does go on to discuss some hope for getting a better understanding of turbulence in physical systems, though it isn't clear to me how well this will apply to living systems with autonomous agents.

I only have questions.