Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

by David Epstein

Hedgehog experts were deep but narrow. Some had spent their careers studying a single problem. Like Ehrlich and Simon, they fashioned tidy theories of how the world works through the single lens of their specialty, and then bent every event to fit them. The hedgehogs, according to Tetlock, “toil devotedly” within one tradition of their specialty, “and reach for formulaic solutions to ill-defined problems.” Outcomes did not matter; they were proven right by both successes and failures, and burrowed further into their ideas. It made them outstanding at predicting the past, but dart-throwing chimps at predicting the future. The foxes, meanwhile, “draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction,” Tetlock wrote. Where hedgehogs represented narrowness, foxes ranged outside a single discipline or theory and embodied breadth.