empowering citizens. But those reforms uncorked bottled-up forces in the republics outside of Russia, where the system had lost legitimacy. Starting with Estonia declaring its sovereignty, the forces blew the Soviet Union apart. Both camps of experts were completely taken by surprise at the swift end of the USSR, and their predictions about the course of events were terrible. There was, however, one subgroup within the experts that managed to see more of what was coming.
Unlike Ehrlich and Simon, they were not vested in a single approach. They were able to take from each argument and integrate apparently contradictory worldviews. They agreed that Gorbachev was a real reformer, and that the Soviet Union had lost legitimacy outside of Russia. Some of those integrators actually foresaw that the end of the Soviet Union was close at hand, and that real reforms would be the catalyst.
The integrators outperformed their colleagues on pretty much everything, but they especially trounced them on long-term predictions. Eventually, Tetlock conferred nicknames (borrowed from philosopher Isaiah Berlin) that became famous throughout the psychology and intelligence-gathering communities: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,” and the integrator foxes, who “know many little things.”
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.
Incredibly, the hedgehogs performed especially poorly on long-term predictions within their domain of expertise. They actually got worse as they accumulated credentials and experience in their field. The more information they had to work with, the more they could fit any story to their worldview. This did give hedgehogs one conspicuous advantage. Viewing every world event through their preferred keyhole made it easy to fashion compelling stories about anything that occurred, and to tell the stories with adamant authority. In other words, they make great TV.
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Tetlock is clearly a fox. He is a professor at Penn, and when I visited his home in Philadelphia I was enveloped in a casual conversation about politics he was having with colleagues, including his wife and collaborator, Barbara Mellers, also a psychologist and eminent scholar of decision making. Tetlock would start in one direction, then interrogate himself and make an about-face. He drew on economics, political science, and history to make one quick point about a current debate in psychology, and then stopped on a dime and noted, “But if your assumptions about human nature and how a good society needs to be structured are different, you would see this completely differently.” When a new idea entered the conversation, he was quick with “Let’s say for the sake of argument,” which led to him playing out viewpoints from different disciplines or political or emotional perspectives. He tried on ideas like Instagram filters until it was hard to tell which he actually believed.
In 2005, he published the results of his long study of expert judgment, and they caught the attention of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a government organization that supports research on the U.S. intelligence community’s most difficult challenges. In 2011, IARPA launched a four-year prediction tournament in which five researcher-led teams competed. Each team could recruit, train, and experiment however it saw fit. Every day for four years, predictions were due at 9 a.m. Eastern time. The questions were hard. What is the chance that a member will withdraw from the European Union by a target date? Will the Nikkei close above 9,500? What is the likelihood of a naval clash claiming more than ten lives in the East China Sea? Forecasters could update predictions as often as they wanted, but the scoring system rewarded accuracy over time, so a great prediction at the last minute before a question’s end date was of limited value.
The team run by Tetlock and Mellers was called the Good Judgment Project. Rather than recruit decorated experts, in