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Less science-curious adults were like hedgehogs: they became more resistant to contrary evidence and more politically polarized as they gained subject matter knowledge.
Those who were high in science curiosity buc...
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literal fox’s hunt for prey: roam freely, listen carefully, and c...
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The best forecasters are high in active o...
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They are also extremely curious, and don’t merely consider contrary ideas, they proactively cross disciplines looking for them. “Depth can be inadequate without breadth,” wrote Jonathan Baron, the psychologi...
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He made a point of copying into his notes any fact or observation he encountered that ran contrary to a theory he was working on.
Einstein worked with mathematical blinkers, immune to relevant discoveries, and unable to change his method of investigation.”
Beneath complexity, hedgehogs tend to see simple, deterministic rules of cause and effect framed by their area of expertise, like repeating patterns on a chessboard. Foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect.
There are unknowns, and luck, and even when history apparently repeats, it does not do so precisely.
In wicked domains that lack automatic feedback, experience alone does not improve performance.
Effective habits of mind are more important, and they can be developed. In four straight years of forecasting tournaments, Tetlock and Mellers’s research group showed that an hour of basic training in foxy habits improved accuracy.
One habit was a lot like the analogical thinking that helped the venture capitalists and movie enthusiasts in chapter 5 make better projections of investment returns and film revenues. Basically, forecasters can improve by generating a list of separate events with deep structural similarities, rather than focusing only on internal details of the specific event in question. Few events are 100 percent novel—uniqueness is a matter ...
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But there were plenty of examples of international negotiation failures, exits from international agreements, and forced currency conversions that allowed the best forecasters
to ground themselves in what usually happens without focusing narrowly on all the unique details of the present situation.
Hedgehog experts have more than enough knowledge about the minutiae of an issue in their specialty to do just what Dan Kahan suggested: cherry-pick detail...
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Skillful forecasters depart from the problem at hand to consider completely unrelated events with structural commonalities rather than relying on intuition based on personal e...
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They made a wicked learning environment, one with no automatic feedback, a little more kind by creating rigorous feedback at every opportunity.
sandy blond,
in the hole,
head gasket,
“There were charts [that several Thiokol engineers who wanted to postpone launch] did not imagine and did not construct that, if created, would have provided the quantitative correlational data required to sustain their position.”
Weick saw that experienced groups became rigid under pressure and “regress to what they know best.” They
found that “a common pattern was the crew’s decision to continue with their original plan” even when conditions changed dramatically.
The process culminated with more concern for being able to defend a decision than with using all available information to make the right one.
on the order of a
“We weren’t coming up with any real solution that would give us an advantage. I wanted a speed advantage, and the ability to leverage the weight and space for wounded soldiers,”
taken aback
broad swath
Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers showed that thinkers who tolerate ambiguity make the best forecasts; one of Tetlock’s former graduate students, University of Texas professor Shefali Patil, spearheaded a project with them to show that cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily.
With incongruence, “you’re building in cross-checks,” Tetlock told me. The experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice—whatever it happened to be—with forces that pushed in the opposite direction.
a sense of loyalty and cohesion did the job. The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction.
had, as Patil, Tetlock, and Mellers wrote, harnessed “the power of cross-pressures in promoting flexible, ambidextrous thought.” The subtitle of that paper: “Balancing the Risks of Mindless Conformity and Reckless Deviation.”
carbon copy
“The chain of communication has to be informal,” he told me, “completely different from the chain of command.”
told them I expect disagreement with my decisions at the time we’re trying to make decisions, and that’s a sign of organizational health,” he told me.
but I will give and receive information anywhere in the organization, at any time. I just can’t get enough understanding of the organization from listening to the voices at the top.”
bird’s-eye
“A paradox of innovation and mastery is that breakthroughs often occur when you start down a road, but wander off for a ways and pretend as if you have just begun,”
lucky. He arrived in a workspace that treated mental meandering as a competitive advantage, not a pest to be exterminated in the name of efficiency.
“I would argue, at least in medicine and basic science where we fill people up with facts from courses, that what is needed is just some background, and then the tools for thinking,” Casadevall told me. Currently, “everything is configuring in the wrong way.”
paper cut
flop-ridden,
Human creativity, he said, is basically an “import/export business of ideas.”
smash hit
“I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.”
It may very well be that if you were to take all the research funding in the country and you put it in Alzheimer’s disease, you would never get to the solution.
specialized goals with such hyperefficiency that they can say what they will find before they look for it.
The “free play” of intellects sounds horribly inefficient, just like the free play of developing soccer players who could always instead be drilling specific skills.
The wisdom of a Polgar-like method of laser-focused, efficient development is limited to narrowly constructed, kind learning environments.
“What’s gone totally is that time to talk and synthesize. People grab lunch and bring it into their offices. They feel lunch is inefficient, but often that’s the best time to bounce ideas and make connections.”
