Caltrop Consulting
Independent Security Counsel
The Company of Peasants
The Company of Peasants
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Michel de Montaigne, in his sprawling observational philosophy of mid-16thC life contained in his book ‘Essais’, said: 'I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.' This eschewing of ‘expertise’ may seem familiar, Michael Gove’s famous line ‘I think the people in this country have had enough of experts...’ has entered the BREXIT Zeitgeist, however, a more studied opinion may be had from the work of political science writer and psychologist Prof. Philip E. Tetlock in his book: ‘Expert Political Judgment’[1]. Here he examined the forecasting ability of 284 experts in specific political domains and measured the results over 20 years. What he found was that, more often than not, an expert is hardly any better at prediction than a chimp throwing darts, and those that did predict events well were predominantly less expert in a specific field but had a wider range of knowledge; as The New Yorker puts it: “The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.”[2].
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To partly explain this phenomena, Tetlock draws heavily on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’[3], this essay divided thinkers and writers into two types, the eponymous ‘fox’ and ‘hedgehog’. The Hedgehog is someone who applies theoretical frameworks and who sticks with a line of argument, and who also believes strongly in their own forecasts. The Fox though, has an eclectic approach, they examine many hypotheses, and are more inclined to think probabilistically and holistically rather than ideologically or dogmatically. As Archilochus originally puts it "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing", and those that know of many things seem to predict more accurately, not only through diversity of experience but also through a humility to admit when they are wrong as new information comes to light and also not to be too overconfident in their assertions. Indeed, ‘humility’ was one of the main characteristics looked for in recruits by Sir David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Service, as without it, one becomes incapable of learning effectively.
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Of course, we should be mindful that the Tetlock study was done in the domain of the social sciences and not in the ‘hard’ sciences; we should also bear in mind ‘Chesterton’s fence’, in that we don’t want to throw baby, bathwater and bath out in haste to stick the finger up to ‘experts’; that they have something to say is beyond doubt, but that something should be perhaps be a cautious part of a wider whole.
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9/11 and the Arab Spring, perhaps the major cataclysms of the past 20 years have not been ones that have been predicted – so what use does ‘predictability’ have in the context of a chaotic world when even deterministic non-linear systems have the limited shelf life of a butterfly’s wing-flap? What use does anything predicated on predictive assertion – such as a standard Risk model – have? And what detrimental effects may be added to a system by adding complexity of safeguard rather than refining to a simplicity of understanding?
1. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nPfWDgAAQBAJ&dq=Expert+Political+Judgment&lr=
2. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/12/05/everybodys-an-expert