Comments on: Quiz: Fox or Hedgehog?

By: Lecture Notes on Model Thinking I | Model Practice

Lecture Notes on Model Thinking I | Model Practice — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:38:43 +0000

[...] Are you a hedgehog or a fox?: Try the quiz on Overcoming Bias and this is Philip E. Tetlock: Wikipedia Share:TwitterLike this:LikeBe the first to like this [...]

By: Please fasten your seatbelt and try to beat the market « The Market Monetarist

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:28:48 +0000

[...] were playing “the-winner-takes-it-all” game. Erik and Michael in other words used what Philip Tetlock (inspired by Isaiah Berlin) has called a Hedgehog strategy – contrary to a Fox strategy. [...]

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:49:29 +0000

May I be presumptuous enough to mention a modest piece I’ve written about the Berlin zoological society (also quoting Tetlock at some length)? Here’s a link:

http://www.historyaccess.com/isaiahberlin'she.html

By: Steven Nickeson

Steven Nickeson — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:58:08 +0000

The warrior/poet Archilochus is said to be the first to write. “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Note that Archilochus did not write “The fox knows many small things…” nor did Berlin in his essay. (Does the inserted “small” indicate a bias on Tetlock’s part?) That Berlin listed Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin and Tolstoy as foxes indicates that he was not concerned with “small” knowledge and his subjects on the fox side of the ledger could be more accurately described by the word “polymath” instead of one who “tends to be uncertain,” etc. Berlin used the Achilochus quote as an entry into an examination of Tolstoy’s theory of history. His categories line up with Pluralism (foxes)– Monism (hedgehogs), or Structuralism (hedgehogs)– Post-Structuralism (foxes). Tetlock is using the line for an entirely different analysis. If his book were not about political predictability, one could conclude (based on the above test) that he was a management consultant or personal coach. His categories are more in line with Jungian personality typology where “Perceiving” describes one who prefers an open ended perspective (Tetlock foxes) while “Judging” describes the one who continually moves toward closure (Tetlock Hedgehogs); in fact some of the above questions read like they were lifted from a Myers-Briggs test. What Achilochus meant by the original no one knows, the line is only a fragment.

By: Elise Weaver

Elise Weaver — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:03:47 +0000

I looked back at Isaiah Berlin’s essay, and I think he has a different definition of hedgehog than the scoring on Tetlock’s questions would imply.
Berlin lists Plato, Dostoevsky, and Dante as hedgehogs, for instance.

By: Hal Finney

Hal Finney — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:13:17 +0000

The follow-up posting is here:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/11/foxes_vs_hedgho.html

By: Nancy Overman

Nancy Overman — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:06:46 +0000

Could you direct me to the posting where you “post[ed] more shortly describing how these cognitive styles fared in Tetlock’s data”?

By: Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 01:25:34 +0000

Bias enumeration

Via Chris F. Masse, theres a new blog you should subscribe to, Overcoming Bias. Robin Hanson is blogging there and Im equally excited to see Hal Finney blogging as well. I previously called Finney a great signal-to-noise enhancer (search …

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 14:36:08 +0000

Tetlock’s book is a powerful classic, well worth closer attention, but I agree that this particular quiz of his is kind of doofy. Better to focus on the meat of his analysis.

By: Guy Kahane

Guy Kahane — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 11:10:00 +0000

I agree that we would want to know quite a bit more about the psychological credentials of this little questionnaire–e.g. does it have external validation? how does it correlate with other personality traits?

Some of the questions seem to me to test, not whether one is a fox, but whether one is a Hamlet (or perhaps more accurately, suffering from a ‘weak’ frontal lobe). Must foxes, in Berlin’s sense, be indecisive?