Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> Our logo depicts a fox (we call him Fox No. 92) as an allusion to a phrase originally attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” We take a pluralistic approach and we hope to contribute to your understanding of the news in a variety of ways.

As commenters pointed out in an earlier New York Mag article (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/nate-silver-int...) and that Silver alludes to via hyperlink, the "hedgehog vs. the fox" quote could be interpreted as coming out in favor of the hedgehog:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Archilochus

> The fox knows many tricks; and the hedgehog only one; but that is the best one of all.

I think if 538 had picked a hedgehog as its mascot, it would still make sense: it's the pundits/prognosticators who have "many tricks", whereas Silver is proposing just one good trick -- empirical data analysis -- which happens to be effective and valuable in all contexts.

Nate Silver discusses the Fox/Hedgehog division in his excellent "The Signal and the Noise" frequently, and he largely takes on the meaning proposed by Phillip Tetlock in his book on expert political judgement.

The idea that Tetlock puts forward is that pundits divide into two categories, Foxes and Hedgehogs. Hedgehogs explain the world and make predictions according to one large all encompassing principle. Foxes don't, and apply different principles to different circumstances. Tetlock concludes, and Silver endorses this, that Foxes are better at understanding the world than Hedgehogs.

An example might be the (proposed) principle that free markets lead to increased prosperity. A hedgehogy capitalist might state the above as a broadly applicable principle. A foxy capitalist might opt for something like: "yes, many times increased freedom makes us prosper, but sometimes it doesn't, it depends, let's talk about the specifics".

I take this to be an argument about complexity. The fox side of the argument is roughly that the world is more complex than most people allow for, and one principle or world view will usually not cover an area of knowledge well.

>I take this to be an argument about complexity. The fox side of the argument is roughly that the world is more complex than most people allow for, and one principle or world view will usually not cover an area of knowledge well.

I don't think there is a clear division between those two. Both, the fox and the hedgehog use only one view– their own to seperate signal from noise. The fox side is just more open to integrating conflicting point of views into their worldview.

What I mean to say is that in the end both use only one trick, one skill- filtering information. This of course doesn't mean that the metaphor is wrong, just that it's wrong to think that the fox doesn't filter information the same way the hedgehog does.

BTW, this reminds me of something from Laozi "Through what do I know the nature of all things? Precisely through them." While the things are many, the principle of understanding them through themself remains singular.

I really find this type of verbal meta- rearranging to be incredibly unhelpful. It reminds me strongly of arguments that atheism is a religion, or that abstaining from a choice is a choice. It's a kind of word-lawyering that never improves my understanding, only muddying the meaning in the previous formulation. Perhaps it's just me.

Considering the (lack of) alternatives I fear that using language to argue about meaning in language is the best I can do :S.

But seriously, I think talking about what _exactly_ something is meant to represent isn't "lawyering", it's essential for a serious discussion. I got another quote, too: "The boundaries of our language are the boundaries of our thoughts".

Telepathy would propably be better though, I agree.

Let's reduce the fox's many points of knowledge down to a single principle, to make him more symmetrical with the hedgehog. Ok, why?

Chunky bacon, of course.

It seems likely that there is a way to cram disjoint types of information filtering into this mental framework.

It's more an issue of domains, and how they're defined.

Phillip Tetlock was in turn referencing the work of Isaih Berlin in his famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (1953) which as far as I know is where this old Greek aphorism acquired it's modern meaning.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hqz8

>> quote could be interpreted as coming out in favor of the hedgehog:

Silver is adopting an analogy to describe modern journalism, and the analogy largely fits. Traditional political pundits spent a lot of time in 2012 crafting narratives that fit with what they felt was blowing in the wind. In this case of using the analogy the hedgehog sucks.

However, Archilochus was definitely praising the idea of the hedgehog in his poem. A good analogous English saying would be, "Better a live chicken than a dead duck".

It's just branding.

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