Month: October 2022

Can you explain why the world is the way it is? How things like the economy works? What things affect how your life turns out? No? Not surprising really.

We all rely on our mental model of the world to understand how it works. It’s how we comprehend the risks we face in the world; emotional, social, financial, physical risks. We want how we perceive the world to be as close to how it actually works as possible so we can make better, safer, decisions.

If we believed that all drivers pay attention to pedestrians and do all that they can to keep them safe, we might not look both ways before crossing the road. If we believed that cryptocurrencies can make us rich, we might invest our life savings in bitcoin. The things we believe about how things work in the world affect the decisions we make.

But we don’t often examine those beliefs or consider how we created them.

Sir Isaiah Berlin, a Russian-British social and political theorist and philosopher, wrote of the metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog. He took the idea from the Greek poet Archilochus who said: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ These are two ways of looking at the world, of explaining what causes things to be the way they are.

Foxes, so the metaphor goes, know a bit about lots of things. They consider lots of often unrelated and even contradictory ideas and pieces of information as they build up their view of the world. They don’t attempt to make it all fit into a single coherent picture and are sceptical about big explanations. They know that when something happens, it’s because lots of things happened, and the explanation is never simple. Foxes succeed in creating an understanding of how the world works by accepting how complex and uncertain things are.

Hedgehogs, on the other hand, have only one way to deal with the world. They are invested in one big idea, or a single explanation of how things work. They are the experts. When a hedgehog looks at the world they only take in the information that fits their worldview, and they ignore anything else. Hedgehogs win big when the world turns out to actually work the way their big idea said it would, but this is rare.

It isn’t what they think that separates the fox and the hedgehog, it’s how they think.

There might have been a time when our world was slow-moving enough for one big idea about how things worked to be close enough to the reality. That was the time of the hedgehogs. Then, it made sense to have a particularly static view of the world. It made sense to be biased towards what we already believed and be quick to discount information that doesn’t fit. That worldview had conviction and certainty. It felt safe.

But that’s not the world we find ourselves in today.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of the hedgehog. But sticking to a single narrative about the way the world works, especially as our world becomes ever more complex, interconnected and uncertain, makes it almost impossible for our understanding to be even close to how things actually are.

Berlin recognised that thinking about ways of seeing the world as two broad classifications is an over-simplification and, if pressed too hard, becomes absurd. That’s the fox speaking. It says, foxes and hedgehogs might provide an informative way of looking at how we think about the world, but don’t take it as the one big idea to hang everything on. If it’s useful, use it. And when it isn’t, go looking for other points of view.

Being a fox is hard. Being pragmatic about our beliefs, examining our opinions, looking for evidence that our view of the world is incomplete, these are hard things to do. Questioning things, especially things that seem to fit what you already believe, and even more so if everyone around you agrees risks confusion and uncertainty. But, it is essential to continually reassess and recalibrate our understanding of how the world works if we want a worldview that helps us deal with the modern world.

Be more fox.