Hedgehog And Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, by IsaiahBerlin

ISBN 1566630193 , quoting Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

To oversimplify, hedgehogs are people who have one big idea that explains everything and applies in all situations. "History is a conflict between capital and labor." Hedgehogs are prone to wanting to work things out from first principles [like mathematicians].

: I'm a mathematician. I'm also definitely a fox rather than a hedgehog, though I plead guilty to liking to work things out from first principles. -- GarethMcCaughan

Foxes are people who know lots of little things that apply in particular situations. While there may be some grand organizing principle behind them, in practice that principle isn't used. Foxes think it's perfectly reasonable to spend one's life lovingly describing new species of beetles.

Patterns, I think, appeal to foxes. Hedgehogs seem to think they're sloppy and disorganized. If this were true, mathematicians couldn't be hedgehogs...

Um, presumably this notion was created by a Hedgehog ...

Now in fact there are two types of people. I call them simple and sophisticated. Simple people think there are two types of people. Sophisticated people don't. Now, me, I'm sophisticated. Oh, and I lied. Okay, there are 3 types of people: simple people, sophisticates, and cretans ... amongst our people are such diverse kinds as hedgehogs, foxes, simpletons, sophists, cretans, pythons, and ... oooo aaaa!

How does this relate to the idea that some people are ModelMakers, while other people are StampCollectors? It seems to me that the obvious, although not necessarily tight, association is of fox with ModelMaker and hedgehog with StampCollector.

Actually it seems to be the other way around. The fox knows many things, and hence is a StampCollector. The hedgehog knows one big thing - one assumes that's the model.

I'm also a mathematician, but in contrast with Gareth's claim, I appear to be a hedgehog. I'm intensely unhappy when all I have are facts. If they don't fit in with the models I already have, I can neither remember nor use them.

[Sounds like you are a Mapper, not a Packer. See MappersVsPackers.]

PS: And why fox, and why hedgehog?

Hedgehog may come from the fact that hedgehogs are known for doing only one thing, and doing it really well -- rolling up in a ball and sticking its spines out. As evolution has borne out, this one-size-fits-all solution works well enough for the hedgehog.

Presumably, only a Hedgehog would be happy with the one big idea that this single binary variable tells you something useful about everyone on the planet?

The reason is that foxes are traditionally known to be clever tricksters (we say that they have "de har drabbats av kitsune-sjukan") but if they were to eat a hedgehog they would get stung. kisses.

In the ProgrammersStone, there's the metaphor of MappersVsPackers. I like the ModelMakersVsStampCollectors metaphor as well. The HedgehogAndFox doesn't work for me.

Seems to me its a rather hedgehog style idea to think that you can reduce the way people study history or anything down to ThereAreTwoKindsOfPeople.

Ditto. Life is far too complicated to be reduced down to One Big Idea. Even when you assiduously model everything. Even when you like big ideas.

CategoryBook CategoryPsychology