The authoritative book on this subject is Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment (2005). From his perspective as a psychology researcher, Tetlock watched political advisers on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. (Liberals were sure that Reagan was a dangerous idiot; conservatives were sure that the USSR was permanent.) The whole exercise struck Tetlock as what used to be called an “outcome-irrelevant learning structure.” No feedback, no correction.
So Tetlock took advantage of getting tenure at the University of California-Berkeley to start a long-term research project, now twenty years old, to examine in detail the outcomes of expert political forecasts about international affairs. He studied the aggregate accuracy of 284 experts making 28,000 forecasts, looking for pattern in their comparative success rates. Most of his findings were negative—conservatives did no better or worse than liberals; optimists did no better or worse than pessimists. Only one pattern emerged consistently.
Tetlock borrowed the hedgehog-fox distinction from essayist Isaiah Berlin, who gave as examples of single-minded hedgehogs Plato, Dante, Hegel, and Proust; as open-minded foxes, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Joyce. The aggregate prediction success rate of foxes is significantly greater, Tetlock found, especially in short-term forecasts. Hedgehog experts are not only worse prognosticators than fox experts (especially in long-term forecasts); they even fare worse than normal attention-paying dilettantes like you and me—apparently blinded by their extensive expertise and beautiful theory. Furthermore, foxes win not only in the accuracy of their predictions but also the accuracy of the likelihood they assign to their predictions; in this they exhibit something close to the admirable discipline of weather forecasters.
The value of hedgehogs is that they occasionally get right the farthest-out predictions, but that comes at the cost of a great many wrong far-out predictions. The charismatic expert who exudes confidence and has a great story to tell is probably wrong about what’s going to happen. The boring expert who afflicts you with a cloud of howevers is probably right. “There is an inverse relationship between what makes people attractive as public presenters and what makes them accurate in these forecasting exercises,” Tetlock told a San Francisco audience. He added that hedgehogs annoy only their political opposition, while foxes annoy across the political spectrum.
• As with political experts, so with environmental experts. Two celebrated commentators worth analyzing are Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001), and Amory Lovins. I once heard a Lomborg fan ask Jared Diamond what he thought of Lomborg’s book. Diamond’s answer, as I recall it, was: “The problem is, Lomborg argues from details. He says the ecological collapse of Easter Island offers no general lessons because it was due to the fragility of one kind of palm tree. Arguing with that kind of reasoning is like arguing with a Creationist about some inverted geology they’ve found in Texas that they say disproves Darwin. If you take the time to research their example and disprove their interpretation, you find out it doesn’t matter. They don’t care. They’ve found some other detail they think supports their theory.” (Diamond went on to praise Lomborg for his efforts to focus the world’s attention on eradicating malaria in Africa.)
Lomborg’s constant message, delivered with sweet reasonableness, is that environmentalists mean well, but they always exaggerate dangers. With his background in statistics, he drills happily into data, making his case with a profusion of details. That kind of expertise can make hedgehogs overconfident, Tetlock writes:They have so much case-specific knowledge at their fingertips, and they are so skilled at marshalling that knowledge to construct compelling cause-effect scenarios, that they talk themselves into assigning extreme probabilities that stray further from the objective base-rate probabilities. As expertise rises, we should therefore expect confidence in forecasts to rise faster, far faster, than forecast accuracy.
One scientist who has taken the trouble to refute Lomborg in his own mode is water conservationist Peter Gleick in a lengthy 2001 review of The Skeptical Environmentalist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Gleick meticulously dissects the book’s “selective use of data, misuse of data, misinterpretations, inappropriate precision, errors of fact.”
As for Amory Lovins, he doesn’t just argue from details, he backs up a truck full of numbers and citations and dumps them on you, saying that if you won’t master them, you can’t possibly argue with him. Events have proven him profoundly right about energy efficiency and conservation and wrong in his forecasts about nuclear power. I predict that he will maintain a hedgehog stance on that subject and never have a good word to say about nuclear (nor, I expect, will Lomborg ever have a good word to say about environmentalists). If I have the pleasure of being wrong about Lovins, I’ll bet his change of opinion develops around microreactors, which fit in with his views about distributed micropower.
Tetlock writes that hedgehogs deploy a routine set of excuses when proven wrong: “I was almost right”; “I was just off on timing”; “I made the right mistake” (right policy, wrong prediction); “Happenstance went against me.” Each excuse provides an opportunity to explain one more time the deep rightness of the original theory.
• Scientists are trained to be foxes. One outspoken voice on climate is Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider. In 1971 he wrote an influential paper that predicted global cooling, based on the previous three decades of cold weather and his model of how the increase of dust and particles in the air (called aerosols) from human activity might trigger an eventual ice age. In 1974 he publicly retracted the paper, having become convinced that his model overestimated aerosol effects and underestimated carbon dioxide effects. With better data and a better model, he reversed his position to extreme concern about global warming, which he maintains to this day.
Naturally, climate denialists mocked him about being so flexible (for political reasons, they assumed), just as an English legislator once chided John Maynard Keynes for reversing his position on money policy during the Great Depression. Keynes replied, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
“Whenever I start to feel certain I am right . . . a little voice inside tells me to start worrying,” one of Phil Tetlock’s respondents told him—a statement he considers “a defining marker of the fox temperament.” Another comes from the French fox Voltaire: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
Every interview with a public figure should include the question “What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?” The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility. Let me quickly furnish a partial list of things I’ve been wrong about in public. In the 1960s, I pushed communes as a path to the future, Buckminster Fuller domes as habitable, and cocaine as harmless. In the 1970s, I was sure the 1973 oil crisis would lead to police in the streets of the United States, that nuclear power was bad, and that small was always beautiful, villages especially. I was totally wrong about the Y2K bug in 2000. In 2003 I was so sure that a Democrat would win the 2004 presidential election that I made a public bet about it. Hey, I was just off on timing.
Fessing up aids learning. From these mistakes and others, I have learned to suspect my excesses of optimism and pessimism. Apparently I often think that societies catch on faster than they do, and that large complex systems are more brittle than they are. Bear in mind I might be wrong that way about climate. And many of my faulty opinions turn out to be based on ignorance; dismissing nuclear was one of those.
• One source of confusion for people is that the views of hedgehogs are strongly stated and strongly held, while the views of foxes are modestly stated and loosely held. Guess who gets audience share. What we need is more brazen foxes who don’t mind strongly stating their loosely held views (this book tries to be an example), and audiences that honor
honest opinion change. When some pontificator begins, “As I’ve always said, . . .” the right response is “Uh oh.”
Failure to acknowledge a mistake is paralyzing. During the Iraq War, a friend who consulted for the George W. Bush White House told me, “The Neoconservatives don’t even try to say they were right about Iraq anymore. They spend all their effort trying to prove they weren’t wrong. That means you never change policy because you can never have the discussion that begins, ‘Well, Plan A didn’t work. What have we got for Plan B?’ ” It’s a bad idea to appoint or elect hedgehogs to power positions.
The most powerful fox I’ve known personally was California governor Jerry Brown. He had a remarkable technique with protesters, based on sheer curiosity. Whenever he saw a lineup of demonstrators, he would walk over and engage them: “Tell me what you’re concerned about.” Someone would launch into their rant, and Brown would listen. After a bit he would interrupt, “Let me see if I got it. You’re saying that . . .” And he would state their position, often with greater clarity and eloquence than theirs. They would just melt. They’d been heard! He got it! They knew he probably wouldn’t change his position on the issue they were protesting, but, who knows, he might, because Governor Brown was famous for occasionally reversing his opinion and his policy, in response to events.
I used a variant of Brown’s approach in designing the debate format for the Seminars About Long-term Thinking I run for Long Now in San Francisco. We had one such debate on the Greening of nuclear power and another on synthetic biology. Whichever debater goes first holds forth for fifteen minutes and then is interviewed for ten minutes by the second debater, who has to conclude by summarizing the first debater’s argument to the first debater’s satisfaction: “You got it.” Then they reverse roles.
Audiences love it. They relish watching public figures struggle to state an opposing opinion right out loud, without sarcasm. Better still, the shared probe for depth of understanding of the issue replaces the usual win-lose mutual deafness of public debates. As a result, audience members find that the hard edges of their own opinions start to soften.
There is nowhere a good venue for honest debate about environmental issues. News media like loud fights between glib hedgehogs, not polite debate that reaches for depth. Environmentalist organizations don’t have enough money to host big conferences. Maybe some Green philanthropists could help with that. The most direct solution might be for scientific conferences, which are well funded, to invite more environmentalists to come and debate formally in their venue.
If Greens don’t embrace science and technology and jump ahead to a leading role in both, they may follow the Reds into oblivion. They need to become early adopters of new tools and adventurous explorers of new situations. Instead of always saying “No” and “Stop,” their strategy can be to affirm and redirect. They could give a new technology the benefit of the doubt—but never throw away their doubt—using it to shape the technology in gentler ways to better ends.
Rather than cherishing the role of romantic rebels and avoiding government, Green activists should leap into government, seeking to emulate the all-embracing government-run Green plans of New Zealand and the Netherlands. They can take inspiration from governmental foxes like Franklin Roosevelt, described thus by his contemporary Isaiah Berlin:Roosevelt stands out principally by his astonishing appetite for life and by his apparently complete freedom from fear of the future; as a man who welcomed the future eagerly as such, and conveyed the feeling that whatever the times might bring, all would be grist to his mill, nothing would be too formidable or crushing to be subdued and used and moulded into the pattern of the new and unpredictable forms of life into the building of which he, Roosevelt, and his allies and devoted subordinates would throw themselves with unheard-of energy and gusto.
It wasn’t just attitude. He made it work.
Live-linked footnotes for this chapter, along with updates, additions, and illustrations, may be found online at www.sbnotes.com.
• 8 •
It’s All Gardening
Never pick your herbs from the first bush you come to.
—Thomas Banyacya, Hopi
Wilderness can’t take care of itself. It has to pay its way.
—ecologist Daniel Janzen
Ecosystem engineering is an ancient art, practiced and malpracticed by every human society since the mastery of fire. We would be fools if we repeat their mistakes and just as foolish if we ignore some of the brilliant practices that worked for them. But first we have to figure out what really happened, and that requires discarding some cute stories we like to tell ourselves about indigenous people.
Romanticism has been particularly unkind to American Indians. Most people get their ideas about Native American life from books like The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), The Education of Little Tree (1976), The Tracker (1978), Medicine Woman (1981), Buffalo Woman Comes Singing (1991), Spirit Song (1985), and Seven Arrows (1972). In the same category, but concerning Australian Aborigines, is Mutant Message Down Under (1994). These books sold in the millions; two were recommended by Oprah. They’re all bogus. The nearly universal tale is that of a white seeker taken under the wing of a native spiritual teacher who imparts ancient wisdom, and the reader is let in on the secret knowledge of the Yaqui, Cherokee, Apache, Cree, Crow, Chippewa, Cheyenne, or Australian aborigines. Each book has been condemned by the tribe in question as insulting fiction.
What is it the readers are longing for, and why do we settle so easily for lies? (I confess to being taken in by Carlos Castaneda’s first Don Juan book; his sequels were increasingly transparent New Age drivel.) I think we seek the wrong connection in these books. Esoteric knowledge, even when it’s genuine, is of little use outside the culture it’s rooted in, and to seek it from outside is a trespass. What is not in the books and is in the tribes is their groundedness. They know how to live where they live. That’s the lore worth learning. Many assume that because the Indian “wisdom” they see in popular books and movies is clearly phony, any real traditional knowledge is gone from the modern world. I have found otherwise.
• In 1963, after I left the army, I did some photography on assignment at the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon. The contemporary Indian reality I saw there was a revelation to me. So in the years following, I spent all my summers with various native communities—Wasco, Paiute, Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Taos, Jicarilla Apache, Papago (now Tohono O’odham), Ute, Blackfoot, Sioux, Cherokee, Ponca. I joined the Native American Church (which uses peyote as a sacrament), and I married an Ottawa Indian mathematician with raven hair, Lois Jennings. In the winters of those years, I performed a multimedia show called America Needs Indians in museums and nightclubs.
What was all that about? Playing Indian is not really an option when you’re with real ones; I guess I was learning how to be American in a way that had nothing to do with the Pledge of Allegiance. One freezing December night at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico, I saw ten-foot-high gods, the Shalakos, being welcomed into homes especially rebuilt to give them room to dance, while Mudhead clowns with assholes for eyes mocked everybody. The sacredness of the ceremony gave the comics their bite, and that bite paradoxically made the gods realer. I was shivering from more than cold.
Most North American tribes are matrilineal. I learned something about that at a peyote meeting. The vice president of the Native American Church in the 1960s was a Navajo named Hola Tso. When I showed up at his home, he extended the hospitality I found everywhere in Indian country and invited me to a meeting.
The format of the peyote meeting is a work of genius. Universal throughout North America, it is the opposite of esoteric knowledge. The officers of the meeting—roadman, cedarman, drummer, and fireman—do not have powers; they are administrators strictly, though with great art. Only one officer represents something larger, and that is held back till the end of the meeting. It’s a long night, progressing formally through midnight water call and the emotional crisis at three A.M. and the hard-w
on ascent toward dawn. As sunrise brightens the east-facing doorway of the hogan or tipi, a woman who is also Peyote Woman comes in, bearing food.
At Hola Tso’s meeting, the authority in her voice floored me. The fragrance of fresh fruit and fresh-cooked meat penetrated our heightened senses, but she wasn’t going to let us have any until we had heard what she had to say. She reminded us where the food came from (her). She reminded us where life comes from (her). She waited while that sank in. Then she passed the food. My young male mind was liberated by Peyote Woman.
All I got, of course, was tiny glimpses. It’s all still there: the banality of the “rez” that Sherman Alexie writes about, pan-Indian powwows that are half party and half showbiz, deeply patriotic military service, sacred places and secret ceremonies, the fraught opportunity of the casinos, many a prison, the endless jockeying with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a prospering art and craft market, the revival of tribal languages, and countless matters that a non-Indian like me has no inkling of. Native America is robust.
You can get a sense of its rootedness in specific landscapes with a stroll through Peter Nabokov’s Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places (2006). The book chronicles the political battles to protect sacrosanct land features like Blue Lake, near Taos Pueblo, and the Black Hills, precious to Lakota, Cheyenne, and Kiowa. With his own personal visits, Nabokov demonstrates why such places are worth defending, and how many there are on the land:A tally in 1980 by the California Indian Heritage Commission counted fifty-seven thousand old village, rock art, burial, food-and-plant collecting, spirit homes and prayer sites located across 70 percent of the state.
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