What do Karl Marx, Winston Churchill and a Hedgehog have in common?

It’s not just that they’re prickly. The Greek poet Archilochus wrote, "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient saying is now associated with two distinct ways of perceiving events that happen in life.

Hedgehogs believe in a single compelling vision for why things are the way they are are and what their purpose is, whereas foxes are happy to borrow elements from different ideologies to explain the world around them.

Where foxes are comfortable with ambiguity and draw on many ideas, hedgehogs interpret the world according to a singular worldview.

For Karl Marx communism could provide an elegant solution to the world’s problems in both the public and the private sphere. Similarly, Winston Churchill was described as a man who never let contradictory information interfere with his fixed ideas. In this sense, they were both hedgehogs.

Thinkers with these tendencies can rise to the top of their profession, particularly if they believe they are in a position of authority due to specific virtue. In my experience, nobody was ever that motivated by a leader whose grand vision was “it depends”.

If there is an overarching worldview that motivates you it can give you an unparalleled confidence in what you’re doing. One of the most interesting studies on how hedgehogs and foxes view the world was done by Phil Tetlock. He surveyed 284 experts making 28,000 political forecasts and found a fundamental truth – how you think matters more than what you think.

It did not matter whether they were conservative or liberal, optimist or pessimist, religious or atheist - hedgehogs committed to a single view of the world got their predictions wrong far more frequently than their flexible fox counterparts.

Better yet, when some were confronted with the fact that they were wrong they wittily responded it was merely that they were not right - yet.

Still, what does this mean for the average person? In the words of Stewart Brand: “The political expert who bores you with a cloud of “howevers” is probably right about what’s going to happen. The charismatic expert who exudes confidence and has a great story to tell is probably wrong.”

Nevertheless, there is one important caveat. Hedgehogs were sometimes more likely to predict highly unlikely events such as the horrific civil war in the former Yugoslavia and the collapse of the internet bubble.

The person who revived the concept of foxes and hedgehogs in the twentieth century and inspired the study was Isaiah Berlin. He wrote the essay The Hedgehog and the Fox in 1953 "as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something". To this day it is still one of his most popular essays.

For those fox like thinkers, perhaps there is some relief that ideological flexibility and borrowing from disparate disciplines is a useful way of looking at the world. This is why Nate Silver uses the logo of a fox for his opinion poll analysis website FiveThirtyEight. Famous fox like thinkers throughout history include Aristotle, Shakespeare, Erasmus and Leo Tolstoy. By taking the best elements of various subjects they enhanced their own thinking.

To conclude, sometimes it is worth asking what does the fox say? As Niels Bohr famously said prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. Both fox like and hedgehog like thinkers have their virtues, but it is crucial to understand that different ways of looking at the world should be celebrated not discouraged.