Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee

Of course, not all of these predictions are wrong. Tetlock found that some people, whom he calls “superforecasters,” really are able to consistently generate forecasts more accurately than chance would predict. They tend to take in information from many sources and, perhaps more important, show an ability to adopt multiple viewpoints when looking at a situation. Less accurate forecasters, meanwhile, tend to have one fixed perspective that they always use in their analyses (both ardent conservatives and diehard liberals, for example, tend to make lousy political predictions). Tetlock calls the former group (the more successful, multiperspective predictors) “foxes,” and the latter “hedgehogs”; he takes these labels from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus’s aphorism “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.”*** A piece of guidance, then, is to rely on foxes instead of hedgehogs wherever possible. Foxes can be spotted by the multidimensional, multiperspective reasoning and analyses they present. They can also be spotted by their track records. People with verifiable histories of accurate prediction are likely to be foxes.