“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”
—Isaiah Berlin in The Hedgehog and the Fox
I’m a fox. I am endlessly fascinated by studying new subjects and by making bridges across the gaps between those subjects I know. I could never write a know-it-all book or blog about one single subject because I don’t know any singular big thing. I know a little about a lot of things and quite a bit about how all those things hook up.
Is it a weakness, to be a fox? To prefer broad over deep learning? To be able to pick up any programing language or tool quickly and deploy it with some effectiveness but to be unable to claim expertise in a single one? I don’t think so. For one thing, foxes may make better predictions than hedgehogs:
Low scorers [in forecasting] look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory 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, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), 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. [From Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip Tetlock, cited in The New Yorker.]
That means in the context of deciding what software to build and how to build it, a fox is likely to make better predictions than a hedgehog would about what users will like or how a particular software architecture may meet future needs. Also, I know from managing software teams that though you can’t do without the subject-matter and tool experts, the well-rounded generalists are the ones you think of almost every time an other than ordinary project comes up.
Are you a fox or a hedgehog? Which do you think the world respects the most? Which do you think the world needs more of?
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[...] Serial enthusiasts, also known as foxes, aren’t fully appreciated in our culture. We like hedgehogs, a.k.a. experts, better; in fact, we want to be them. No one has ever written a blog post titled “How to Be a Dilettante” (I checked). And yet, what would the world do without us? Some of the most interesting thinkers today–Malcom Gladwell, Steven Levitt, and Virginia Postrel, for example–are more fox than hedgehog. They draw on broad knowledge of many subjects to get at underlying patterns of meaning. [...]