making sense of a fast changing unpredictable world
DESCRIPTION
Staying relevant and meaningful requires constant probing and ceaseless updating of your worldview.TRANSCRIPT
Making Senseof a Fast Changing
Unpredictable World
Heraclitus
• Πάντα ῥεῖ • Panta Rhei• Everything Flows
Hōjōki
The current of the flowing river does not cease, and yet the water is not the same water as before. The foam that floats on stagnant pools, now vanishing, now forming, never stays the same for long. So, too, it is with the people and dwellings of the world.
三十年河东,三十年河西• The Chinese saying "sometimes the river flows East
and sometimes the river flows West" is "三十年河东,三十年河西 ".
• It means things change with time and the situation, someone can not be successful forever and someone will not be hapless all the time, just like an English saying "Every dog will have his day".
• It is not only a metaphor pertaining to one's life, but also can be used to describe the changes in larger fields.
Zeitgeist
• Constant probing and ceaseless updating of your worldview
Philip Tetlock
• American political scientist and psychologist
• Fox and Hedgehog differences
Sir Isaiah Berlin
• British Philosopher• There are two kinds of
thinkers in the world: • Hedgehogs: who know
on big thing • Foxes: who dart from
idea to idea.
Reference
• fragment attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα
• "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing".
Comparison Examples
Hedgehogs• Plato• Lucretius• Pascal• Hegel• Dostoevsky• Nietzsche• Ibsen• Proust
Foxes• Herodotus• Aristotle • Montaigne• Erasmus• Moliere• Goethe• Pushkin• Balzac• Joyce
Accuracy in Forecasting
Tetlock draws heavily on this distinction in his exploration of the accuracy of experts and forecasters in various fields – politics– International affairs– Economics
in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
Studies
• Interviewed hundreds of experts and asked them to make prediction about the short-term future
• The next five years
Low Scorers Look Like Hedgehogs
• Thinkers who know ‘one big thing’ aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains.
• When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail
High Scorers: Foxes
• Skeptical of easy historical analogy
• More probabilistic in the their thinking
• Comfortable updating their models
• The more wide ranging their curiosity, the more accurate they tended to be
• Fast updating Foxes
Limits of KnowledgeCognitive Bias
We normally expect knowledge to promote accuracy, so if it was surprising to discover how quickly we reached a point of diminishing returns, it should be downright disturbing to discover that knowledge handicaps so large a fraction of forecasters.