The Rise of the Hedgehogs

Remember the Marshall McLuhan scene from Annie Hall? No? Well, here it is:

"Boy, if life were only like this". We rarely get the chance to call people on their opinions. Especially when it comes to opinions about the future. Rather than pulling out Marshall McLuhan from behind the scenery, I sometimes want to pull out a younger version of the person speaking. "Three years ago, you said x would happen but it didn't. Care to justify yourself to yourself?"

One man has got close to doing just this. Philip Tetlock is a US social scientist who asked experts (academics, journalists, policy makers) to make political, social and economic predictions about the future as part of an experiment. What would happen in the Soviet Union? In Europe? In South Africa? And then he waited to see if they were right. He began doing this in the mid-1980s and the results were published in Expert Political Judgment.

He noted a few interesting things:

• Experts are not that good at predicting complex phenomena. On average, they did better than chance. They did better than university undergraduates. They did not do as well as formal statistical models.
• Some factors that you might expect would make people better at prediction did not. It didn't matter whether they had a PhD or not. It didn't matter how many years of experience they had. Whether you were male or female didn't matter. It didn't matter whether they had access to classified information. It didn't matter whether they were left wing or right wing ideologically speaking.
• There was a slight negative correlation between the amount that an expert appeared in the media vs. their predictive performance. So the more that you see someone on TV, the less you should trust them. However this was a weak relationship.

So what did matter then? What makes someone a better predictor of the future than someone else?

So it turns out that it matters how you think about things. Tetlock distinguishes between "foxes" and "hedgehogs". Hedgehogs are:

Thinkers who know "one big thing", aggressively extend the exploratory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display  bristly impatience with those who "do not get it", and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters.

In contrast, foxes are:

Thinkers know many small things..., are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible "ad hocery" that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess...

Who does better at prediction? Well, the foxes win here. Not only do the foxes do better at prediction but  they were more likely to change their minds when events did not occur as expected and they less likely to engage in hindsight bias - i.e. misremembering both their own predictions and those of their rivals in a self-serving way.

Some hedgehogs do not view this apparent failure as a bad thing. One think tank resident told Tetlock:

"You play a publish-or-perish game run by the rules of social science... You are under the misapprehension that I play the same game. I don't. I fight to preserve my reputation in a cutthroat adversarial culture. I woo dumb-ass reporters who want glib sound bites."

These findings depress me. They don't depress me because I don't approve of fox-style thinking. I do. They depress me because fox-style thinking feels like it is out of fashion at the moment. Hedgehogs seems to rule the world. The recent behaviour within the US Congress and space given to Trollumnists in the Australian press are two examples. Of course, as a fox, I'm willing to accept that I might be wrong.   What do you think? Are things that bleak? How do we make the world a foxier place?

Source: scpetrel

Hell

For me, hell is a 90s indie disco in an English provincial town, at about 00:30 in the morning on a Thursday. Someone has just spit cider and black on my jacket and I can't find my friends. There's a leering face a few inches from mine yelling the lyrics to "Breakfast at Tiffanys" by Deep Blue Something*. Or it could be a mirror. I don't know any more.

*No, I am not linking to this.

Party Hard

The missus bought us tickets to see Pulp at the Horden Pavilion a couple of weeks ago. We only seem to see bands from the 90s these days. Admittedly she goes out to see a wider range of artists but I just can't be arsed. An insufficient number of rock venues offer table service. Middle-aged griping aside, Pulp soundtracked my early adulthood and their songs generate an range of responses in me as emotionally conflicted as the songs themselves.

My first exposure to them was back in the summer of 1993 when I saw them perform a trio of sweaty-palmed ditties on the telly. They were odd bunch. The guitarist and bass player were duking it out in some kind of "sexycool rock perv" competition under the careful gazes of the drummer and keyboardist. The guitarist with his flicky hair and occasional violining and Travolta-esque stances. The bass player grinding away at his instrument like he's just been released from solitary confinement and it's the first welcoming thing his groin has encountered. In most other bands, either would have been within groping distance of victory. However, both were doomed to runner-up status in the "sexycool rock perv" stakes by the antics of their singer.

Jarvis Cocker's stage presence was/is unique. Simultaneously warm and confronting. One minute cracking jokes with the audience (entertaining us, charming us, seducing us, the minx) and the next, ludicrously enacting his songs with high kicks, poses and the witchy waggling of his fingers. His whole, lanky body seems to consist of joints. Lyrically, he's obsessed with sex and relationships - with a preference for the grubby, dysfunctional and ill-fitting. It's a mark of his skill that he can fashion memorable stories from such a limited palate. And two of Pulp's most memorable songs (the two highlights of the evening for me) are not about sex so much.

Common People did include the offer of sex but it's a vitriolic anthem about the rich slumming it, about class, about getting it wrong and about being an outsider. Everyone in this song ends up an outsider: the girl from Greece who fails to fit in, the common people who watch their lives slide out of view, and the narrator himself - who may be called "common people" but doesn't relish that trajectory at all. And yet in indie discos across the land it became a communal anthem, feted by exactly the kinds of people that it mocked.

Sorted for E's and Wizz was another song narrated by someone on the edge of things, another outsider. This time it was the 80s/90s rave scene that gets pulled apart in story. The communal myth of the party ends and the narrator is left in field, alone and ****ed up. It's not an anthem, it's a queasy come down of a song.

Pulp's sound and Cocker's lyrics are consistently and deliberately "ill-fitting". Not quite right. This put them apart from their Britpop peers. Pulp could never write an anthem as vacant as Wonderwall or as calculating as Girls and Boys. For me this makes them all the more loveable.

I have no idea why the UK riots happened

Let me start off by saying that beating people up and/or robbing them is bad. Burning down other people's property and businesses is also bad. Are we agreed on that? Excellent.

I spent the first 28 years of my life living in the UK and 4 of those years were in London. So it was depressing to see parts of that city going up in flames. However events such as this rarely trigger just one emotion and after the depression faded, it was replaced by curiosity. How and why did the riots happen the way they did? And what does this mean for preventing a repeat of them?

I'm not a newspaper columnist, so I don't claim to have all the answers at my fingertips. Instead I have a whole bunch of questions:

• Who were the rioters and the looters?
• What prompted them to start acting up?
• How did they communicate with and influence each other?
• Did the actions of the police hinder or help the situation?
• What role did on-lookers play?
• What led people to stop rioting and looting?

As tempting as it might be to blame one cause ("criminality", "cuts") that fits a particular view of the world, events like this tend to have overlapping causes (whys) and mechanisms (hows). If you have a ready-made answer then please keep it to yourself. If you have an interesting question then please add it via the comments.