Name: How good are you at predicting the future? | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-09-17T20:05:10.000Z
Duration: 4 min 31 s
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Are you able to deeply focus on one specific activity, such as rolling up in a spiky ball and sleeping through the winter?

Or are you alert to changing circumstances and keep your eyes and ears open to new threats and opportunities?

My name's David Spiegelhalter, and I'm a statistician and fascinated by the problems of risk and prediction.

Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, after a famous poem by the Greek poet, Archilochus, who said, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Think of the people you know, either privately or public figures.

Are they hedgehogs, with one overarching way of looking at the world, through which they interpret all around them?

Or are they foxes, with no big principles of philosophy, who muddle along adapting to what turns up and changing their minds along the way?

Politicians, of course, tend to be hedgehogs.

But some are more pragmatic and foxy than others.

Now, who would you trust most to make predictions about the future?

A confident hedgehog or an uncertain and vacillating fox?

This was put to the test in a long series of experiments by political scientist, Philip Tetlock, who studied 284 experts, making 28,000 predictions about long term events.

Tetlock was looking at who predicted best.

And mainly it made no difference whether the forecaster was an optimist or a pessimist, conservative or liberal.

The only consistent pattern was how they thought, not what they thought.

He found that foxes were much better at predicting than were hedgehogs.

And hedgehogs were particularly poor at subjects at which they were experts.

They were just too confident in their forecasts.

A classic hedgehog was the historian Arnold Toynbee, who in 1947 was declared TIME magazine's Man of the Year.

Others wrote that he was the most renowned scholar in the world or a universal sage, largely because his great work, A Study of History, spoke to the biggest fear of the time that nuclear weapons were going to end civilization.

Toynbee made a confident and comforting prediction that this wouldn't happen.

Because it was an opposition to his self-proclaimed scientific theory of history.

Toynbee thought that Western civilization wasn't nearly done yet, because it hadn't reached the stage of universal government and a religious renaissance.

All 23 civilizations he had studied had done so before they collapsed, and so would the West.

He thought the golden age of universal government and religious observance would start around the year 2000.

His peers were skeptical and they were right.

Today Toynbee is hardly remembered, except perhaps as a classic hedgehog.

In his book, Future Babble, Dan Gardner identifies three characteristics of good forecasters.

They use multiple sources of information, are open to new knowledge and are happy to work in teams.

They have an insight into how they think and the biases they might have, such as seeking evidence that simply confirms pre-set ideas.

They have a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, admit errors and change their minds.

Rather than saying categorically what is going to happen, they are only prepared to give probabilities for future events.

Acknowledging, in the words of that great sage, Donald Rumsfeld, both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.

So when someone is telling you what is in store for you, the country, the world, just ask yourself, are they a hedgehog or a fox?