making sense of a fast changing unpredictable world

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Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

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Staying relevant and meaningful requires constant probing and ceaseless updating of your worldview.

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Page 1: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

Making Senseof a Fast Changing

Unpredictable World

Page 2: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

Heraclitus

• Πάντα ῥεῖ • Panta Rhei• Everything Flows

Page 3: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

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.

Page 4: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable 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.

Page 5: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

Zeitgeist

• Constant probing and ceaseless updating of your worldview

Page 6: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

Philip Tetlock

• American political scientist and psychologist

• Fox and Hedgehog differences

Page 7: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

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.

Page 8: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

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".

Page 9: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

Comparison Examples

Hedgehogs• Plato• Lucretius• Pascal• Hegel• Dostoevsky• Nietzsche• Ibsen• Proust

Foxes• Herodotus• Aristotle • Montaigne• Erasmus• Moliere• Goethe• Pushkin• Balzac• Joyce

Page 10: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

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?

Page 11: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

Studies

• Interviewed hundreds of experts and asked them to make prediction about the short-term future

• The next five years

Page 12: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

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

Page 13: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

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

Page 14: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World

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.

Page 15: Making Sense of a Fast Changing Unpredictable World