PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION PREDICTIONS: HEDGEHOGS AND FOXES

GENERAL INTRODUCTION:

Information technology and scientific progress are all around us. Humans have made remarkable progress in forecasting and predictions, especially in presidential elections. Gone are the days when Literary Digest was the sole predictor of winners and losers in presidential elections. The paper folded up because it failed to predict the 1936 presidential election. Then, Gallop Poll took over with overwhelming predictive power, and the 1936 election ushered in President Roosevelt.[1]  However, the Gallop poll also has its limitations when looking back at recent presidential elections, especially over the last twenty years.  Human errors are unavoidable even with the advent of computers and digital technology. Some predictions have succeeded, and some have woefully failed. The 2000 and 2016 presidential elections are recent examples of where political pundits, experts, and talking heads have gotten things wrong.  Learning and coming to terms with the knowledge of our world requires epistemological vigilance and humility. We can learn a bit from the ancients and even some traditional societies.

AFRICAN EPISTEMOLOGY:

Julius Caesar and Macbeth were required readings in my final years in the boarding school. For one reason or the other, I was thrilled as a youth by the predictive acumen of the soothsayer who warned Julius Caesar to beware of the Ides of March. The same goes for the admonition of witches to both Macbeth and Banquo (I played Macbeth in the school drama and once in a while, some of his verses and scenes would pop up in my head after many years).

These Shakespearean figures remind me of the household where I grew up. My mother Maria was wholeheartedly for Jesus. She would pray and pray until something happened; I had said in an earlier posting that I feared her prayers more than the discipline of my father. She prayed me into existence. My father was from a different temperament; he believed Jesus was too slow in answering human problems. Shortly after I finished high school, he took me to a diviner as to what was next to pursue in my young life: to go abroad or remain in the country. At that time, I got an organizational scholarship to go to India and Dad said, “Do not do anything yet until we visit the diviner at Iwo.”[1] She was a female diviner and in less than three minutes of sitting down without my dad saying a word, she said: “he would go to a foreign country but not the current one he is planning for. He would go to “real white man’s country.” I was stunned, furious but curious; how did she know the difference between India and the White man’s country? By all calculations, she never had a day in Western education. Did my father contact her beforehand?  This was not the age of smartphones yet. My dad was a man of few words; he simply said: “Boy, you heard what the diviner said: go to India at your own risk.  I knew better not to disobey him. It was a revelation in African epistemology and the predictive power of oracular divination. The diviner was right: two years later, I was in a “white man’s country.”

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NATE SILVER: SPORTS AND POLITICAL PREDICTIONS

Nate Silver is a prominent sports and political analyst, statistician, and writer whose predictive power has dominated the landscapes.  He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the FiveThirtyEight website and podcast.[1] Additionally, he is the author of the best-selling, book Signal and Noise[2] which is rooted in statistical predictions.  Nate Silver rose to national prominence by his prediction of the 2008 presidential election, correctly predicting the outcome of forty-nine out of fifty states.  The book honed on the importance of differentiating between the signal (useful data) and the noise (irrelevant or misleading data). The author covers topics and issues on politics, poker, baseball, economics, and meteorology where he debunked overreliance on computers and big data. While underscoring the importance of data, the significance of human judgment in analysis and interpretation cannot be overstated.  He strikes me as an excellent researcher in both quantitative and qualitative approaches.  I am particularly impressed with his reference to hedges and foxes, a title he borrowed from a book written by Isaiah Berlin where he used the book as a guide to developing the right attitude to making better predictions. He asserted: “Be foxy.”[3]

FOXES AND HEDGEHOGS:

Depending on the topic, I would often use the differences between hedgehogs and foxes to interact in classes about learning methods and individuals in the academic and political world who were characterized as either hedgehogs or foxes according to Isaiah Berlin who was a former Professor of History at Oxford University.[1]  The first time I alluded to the metaphor of hedgehogs and foxes in class,[2] I asked if anyone had seen or observed any of the two animals. Everyone in the class was familiar with or had seen foxes; only one young girl raised her hand and told me she had five hedgehogs.  Without any prompting, she brought two of the hedgehogs to class the following class period. It was my first time seeing one myself.  I observed that if you touch the hedgehog on the nose, it just coils into a ball. It was a very practical way to compare and contrast the two animals vis-a-vis educational learning theory.[1]   

Berlin divides thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through a single defining idea, and foxes who rely on and draw upon a wide variety of experiences and ideas. It underscores the use of animal metaphors to explore complex worldviews. It was an expatiation of Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. Berlin, from the book borrowed from Greek poet, Archilochus who asserted: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  This is the central core of the book.

On one hand, Nate Silver, borrowing from Berlin noted that “hedgehogs are type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas as governing principles about the world and who see these ideas as key to the running of societies. He gave the example of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Malcolm Gladwell.  On the other hand, foxes are crappy, cunny, and ubiquitous creatures who believe in a plethora of little ideas, and personalities of this bent take a multitude of approaches to a problem. These are multi-disciplinary gurus who are versed in many areas. Nate provided a table to further illustrate his point, and it is worthy of reference here:

ATTITUDES OF FOXES AND HEDGEHOGS

HOW FOXES THINK:

• Multidisciplinary: incorporation of many ideas from many disciplines

• Adaptability: find or pursue multiple approaches to a problem.

• Self-Critical: willingness to acknowledge mistakes and make amends.

• Tolerant of complexity: seeing the universe as complicated.

• Cautious: express predictions in probabilistic terms with qualifying opinions

• Empirical: reliance more on observations than unchangeable theory.

HOW HEDGEHOGS THINK:

• Specialized: spend the bulk of time on one or two great problems.

• Stalwart: sticking with the same idea overall using new data to refine the original model

• Stubborn: mistakes are blamed on bad luck - or just having a difficult day.

• Order-seeking: sees the world as being governed by a simple relationship once the signal is observed from the noise.

• Confident: very. reluctant to change; believe in the sometimes infallibility of predictions.

• Ideological: solutions to many day-to-day problems as part of the grand scheme of

  things.

Silver concluded from the foregoing that foxes are better forecasters while hedgehogs are weaker ones.  He gave concrete examples using guests on television and some television programs to corroborate these two categories. As a class exercise, I would ask students which of the current or past political leaders in the US can be seen as foxes or hedgehogs from the two categories. I sometimes also ask them to classify some of the textbooks they read under these two categories. The result is sometimes very comical hearing these young minds express their opinions. I remember one student opined that both President Biden and the former President Trump are hedgehogs. On the other hand, Obama was classified under the category of a fox.  I would normally end the exercise by underscoring the fact that there are some foxes and hedgehogs in every one of us, so we should not be too pedantic or dogmatic about these two categories.

CONCLUSION: W.E.B. DU BOIS: FOX OR HEDGEHOG

From Berlin’s classification of thinkers into hedgehogs or foxes, I strongly believe that Du Bois would be classified as a fox for the following reasons:

1.      He was multidisciplinary and multi-faceted in intellectual activities: studied Latin, Greek, and the classics among many other subjects.

2.     He was a sociologist, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, and writer in many areas including religion throughout his life.

3.     He addressed issues of race relations, economics, philosophy, and politics his concept of double consciousness was a product of immersion in the psychology of human behavior.  Some argue that he borrowed this concept from William James.

4.     His global outlook is exemplary, pursuing many ends often unrelated. He traveled to many countries of the world irrespective of whether it was classified under the Eastern or Western bloc.  His relevance today in our ever-changing world cannot be overstated. Certainly, he cannot be pigeonholed as a hedgehog burrowing down on one single overarching idea.

From the foregoing, I concur with Nate Silver that our leaders, experts, and thinkers, should be “foxier” based on the above characteristics than being a hedgehog especially when it comes to complex situations. The need to avoid looking for a bigger shovel when leaders find themselves in a nasty hole and yet continue to dig deeper cannot be overstated. Such a mindset does not augur well for the nation or the world.

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[1] Babbie, E. (2015). The basics of social research (7^th ed.). CENGAGE Learning Custom Publishing.

2. Iwo town was about a one-hour drive from my hometown of Ibadan. As a young boy, I was shocked to see cars parked in front of the house of the diviner; even more shocking still were some important personalities I knew from Ibadan in the political and business arena coming out of the building.  I later found out that Iwo town was renowned for people seeking extraordinary powers to overcome life’s struggles. My dad was a firm believer in the saying “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” He would go to any length to protect his son.

3. https://fivethirtyeight.com/tag/politics-podcast/

4. Silver, N.  (2012). The signal and the noise; Why so many predictions fail – but some don’t? Penguin Press.

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6. Berlin, I. (1953). The hedgehog and the fox: An essay on Tolstoy’s view of history. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

7. I was a lecturer in sociology at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton Colorado where this experience with students took place.