Experts and integrators

Good article on how the experts get broad trends wrong, while the integrators do far better. Experts even tend to get trends wrong in their own field given more information, as they use it to support their pet theories.

"One subgroup of scholars, however, did manage to see more of what was coming […] they were not vested in a single discipline. They took from each argument and integrated apparently contradictory worldviews. […] The integrators outperformed their colleagues in pretty much every way, but especially trounced them on long-term predictions. Eventually, Tetlock bestowed nicknames (borrowed from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin) on the experts he’d observed: The highly specialized hedgehogs knew 'one big thing,' while the integrator foxes knew 'many little things.'"

"Hedgehogs are deeply and tightly focused. Some have spent their career studying one problem. Like Ehrlich and Simon, they fashion tidy theories of how the world works based on observations through the single lens of their specialty. Foxes, meanwhile, “draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction,” Tetlock wrote. Where hedgehogs represent narrowness, foxes embody breadth. Incredibly, the hedgehogs performed especially poorly on long-term predictions within their specialty. They got worse as they accumulated experience and credentials in their field. The more information they had to work with, the more easily they could fit any story into their worldview."