Foxes and Hedgehogs

Since you are aware of the fox and hedgehog dichotomy, you might be aware of Tetlock’s book and long-term study showing how foxes best hedgehogs in political prediction, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Although depth in specialties has its merits, I can see how that depth also leads to a kind of blindness, a ‘man with a hammer’ problem, while polymaths, or people with broad awareness can sometimes pull together diverse facts to form insights that are not bound by one’s expertise. Along the same lines, many insights in technology don’t come so much from depth, but by ‘cross-pollination’ of ideas, of taking the basic concepts of one specialty and applying them to a peripherally-related one.

This article goes to the point that the quants were part of the problem, which I don't disagree with, it's just how much they can be accountable for: Wall Street’s Math Wizards Forgot a Few Variables During the internet bubble, I read a book by a Yale professor, Schiller - he's had a company for the past few years that tracks the RE market - that was titled Irrational Exuberance. Schiller was credited with saying the markets had bubbled and would implode, and his academic analysis was based on market mania, behavioral economics. It was obviously true at the time, but I remember that a finance professor at Fordham didn't get around to reading it until 2 years later. The problem with numbers, with quant analysis, I think, is the illusion of certainty that comes from mathematical analysis. It often gives a definite number to things that are somewhat fluid, like probability.