There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark on of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance — and, on the other side, those who 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.

-Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox

A recent Vox article called “The Man Who Bet Against Humanity — and Lost” tells the story of Paul Ehrlich, a man who, along with his wife Anne, wrote a book called “The Population Bomb.”

The Population Bomb starts with the lines “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” and it only gets cheerier from there.

You may be thinking Paul was a quack, but the book was a best seller and he would make the media rounds, including over 20 visits to The Tonight Show. On one of those visits Johnny Carson turned the entire hour long show over to him because he felt the message was so important.

If you know you’re history you’ll remember that hundreds of millions of people did not starve to death in the 1970s. Paul continued to make these predictions. From the article:

Ehrlich predicted that 65 million Americans would die of famine between 1980 and 1989. He told a British audience that by the year 2000, the United Kingdom would be “a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.” He said India — which was home to nearly 600 million people in 1970 — could never feed 200 million more people. He said US life expectancy would drop to 42 by 1980. On Earth Day 1970, he declared that “in 10 years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

Ehrlich continued to make (wrong) predictions until he passed at the age of 93. “In 2009 he told an interviewer that The Population Bomb was “way too optimistic.” In 2015 he said his language “would be even more apocalyptic today.” On 60 Minutes in 2023, at age 90, he told Scott Pelley that “the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

(I’m not going to get into the bet from the original article, I recommend reading the whole thing as it makes some fantastically good points about what wound up happening — and ends with a quote that I will also refer to eventually).

Hedgehogs and Foxes

The article references an essay by Isaiah Berlin called “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (quoted above).

The point of the article … well, it’s really about Tolstoy, but one of the main points is that some people have expansive worldviews and try to know something about a great many things, and some people have worldviews that are extremely focused on one thing. To use another metaphor, they have a hammer, and they view the world as nails.

Tetlock also quoted Berlin in Superforcasters, when he pointed out that Hedgehogs (like our friend Paul Ehrlich up above) are terrible at predicting things (which is what Paul basically spent his whole career doing). As he puts it:

[Hedgehogs] tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, altohugh they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters … others were cornucopian boomsters … As idealogically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.”

Sound like anyone we’ve read about recently?

Tetlock makes a really important point. Hedgehogs are usually wrong (in fact, they’re generally slightly less accurate than random chance), but they make for much better TV. They are entertaining. Convinced of the truth and even righteousness of their words they are persuasive in a way that foxes never are because foxes aren’t convinced. They recognize we live in a world of uncertainty.

And that’s why they don’t get to go on Johnny Carson for an hour. Because, even though they’re more correct, no one wants to see someone go up there on national TV and say “I mean, there’s some worrying signs here, but there’s some good signs too. It’s a complex picture and we can’t ever predict the future with 100% certainty.” That’s bad TV.

To put it another way, there’s a reason why Jim Cramer has a TV show (on which he frequently makes poor predictions) and Patrick Boyle is relegated to YouTube (where he generally refuses to make specific predictions).

(but you should watch Patrick — Informative and Hilarious)

The point is this. Hedgehogs are compelling, but frequently wrong. Foxes are less compelling, but more accurate. And honestly, just less panic inducing.

Something big is always happening

In February Matt Shumer wrote a blog post titled “Something Big is Happening” which went viral. In this post he basically says AI is bigger than Covid was, so buckle up, and then he gives some advice, some of which is fine and some of which is unhelpful — but most of it is incredibly alarmist and induced a sense of panic in some readers.

But go up to near the beginning of the article and you get this preamble:

I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in this space. I live in this world.

Spoken like a true hedgehog. And the post follows suit, making concrete predictions (in fact, he says “we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next” which is, when you think about it, a prediction) about what AI will to do the job market.

The loudest voices on the internet are hedgehogs because they get amplified for the same reasons that they make good TV. They’re entertaining — not enlightening.

Every apocalyptic prediction that comes out can be traced back to someone who “lives in this world.” Someone who has spent years “building an AI startup” or “investing in this space.” In other words, hedgehogs.

Don’t listen to them!

Instead, find foxes and listen to them. They will differ in a few ways:

• They’ll admit that the future is uncertain
• They’ll give both sides of a story (hedgehogs only believe there IS one side)
• They will have their own biases — hopefully they’ll call them out
• Their takes will be nuanced
• They will be kind of boring sometimes!

Back to the Vox article, Paul’s nemesis in the bet mentioned in the title was a man named Julian Simon, who was an economist at the University of Maryland and he believed — well, he DIDN’T believe hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation, for one thing.

Why didn’t he believe that? Let’s look at his most famous quote:

The ultimate resource is people — skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit as well as in a spirit of faith and social concern.

Julian Simon was WAY more right than Ehrlich ever was, but he didn’t achieve nearly the fame that Ehrlich did. And look at that quote — it’s touching, maybe even inspiring, but is it as memorable as “The battle to feed all of humanity is over”?

We are all drawn to these apocalyptic utterances by hedgehogs running tech companies, but there’s something we need to remember:

THEY’RE LESS ACCURATE THAN RANDOM CHANCE.

So yeah, find the foxes and listen to them — not only because they are almost guaranteed to be more accurate, but because they’re better for your mental health.