The hedgehog and the lobotomist

Megan McArdle has been writing and, in greater depth, speaking lately about Walter Freeman, the popularizer of the icepick lobotomy. She’s not trying to reform his reputation so much as she seems to be trying to redeem some meta-cognitive lesson from his career, horrible as it was.

Most of us probably have the idea that Freeman was a tireless self-promoter who was callous to the people whose supraorbital bones he broke (the “icepick” was technically known as an “orbitoclast”) en route to their frontal lobes. McArdle complicates that image quite a bit, though. She talks about his multiple trips around the country where he followed up with patients, many of whom seemed to regard him very warmly. She talks about how he worked to desegregate the DC Medical Society. But she also talks about how he kept advocating for his procedure despite its 5% mortality rate and its frequent failures.

McArdle uses the metaphor of Oedipus to explain Freeman’s continued belief in the transorbital lobotomy — specifically the part where Oedipus gouges out his own eyes after discovering that he’d unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. “There are some mistakes no one can live with, no matter how innocently they were made,” she writes. Thus, Freeman walked into the Oedipus trap, where he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge his mistakes because doing so would mean he couldn’t live with himself.

The first lesson McArdle draws from this cleverly named phenomenon is, to me, disappointing. Freeman’s story should teach us, she writes, “not to rush past the point of no return — to move by inches, rather than leaps, when the stakes are high.” This isn’t the corrective we need right now. The culture of maximizing safety without respect for opportunity costs has become dominant enough that it represents a trap of its own.

Her second point, though, deserves more consideration. Don’t bind your own fate too closely to any one project, she writes: “Freeman didn’t only perform lobotomies; he was the operation’s foremost advocate. This […] meant that if lobotomy fell into disrepute, so would Walter Freeman.”

This isn’t just advice to guide the reader’s own career choices. Implicit in her telling of Freeman’s story as I read it is the advice that we shouldn’t trust people who focus all their energies on a single endeavor. Many people put their reputations and sanity on the line, like McArdle says about Freeman. But there are people who live and die by these obsessions too, people like George Eastman who, at the end of his career, left behind a suicide note reading, “My work is done. Why wait?” For someone with such a singular focus, other people are a distraction.

Writers and thinkers have created typologies to describe this sort of fixation and its opposite, the dilettante’s more peripatetic enthusiasm. The most famous of these is the hedgehog and the fox. As best as I can tell, the story has gone from normative to descriptive back to normative. It seems to have begun by encouraging focus: the animal with a single strategy — a hedgehog in the typical telling — is the one who survives while their less-focused friend meets an unwelcome fate. Millenia later, Isaiah Berlin’s essay brought this dichotomy back into the popular imagination by treating the zoological pair as two ends of a judgment-free continuum. In the years since, though, the fox might have finally gotten the upper hand. Philip Tetlock saw superforecasters as foxes, for example, which might have prompted the creation of Julia Galef’s more explicitly normative scout versus soldier.

We’d be giving up a lot if we simply stopped trusting those people called hedgehogs. The path from idea to execution is rarely straightforward, and we need people who will see their fixations through that turmoil. Kati Karikó is a hedgehog who saw the potential of mRNA therapeutics since 1989 and kept pushing to the creation of the COVID vaccine, with almost no institutional encouragement for her research. Similarly, a hedgehog spent over 30 years of his life pushing forward the ideas behind Avastin, and a hundred thousand or so colon cancer patients per year have him to thank for their longer lives.

Hedgehogs are responsible for basically every social movement too. Peter Singer’s obsession with utility likely led to the effective altruism movement, which has done a lot of good, even as he’s faced a lot of very charged criticism. As an irredeemable fox, that’s maybe the most alien part of the hedgehog mindset: if I were to try to launch a new movement, I’d have to wait for other people to get on board, and it’d drive me crazy to think about what else I could be doing while I waited for them to come around to my perspective.

For all the Karikós and Singers of the world, I think a less polite but not entirely unfair word for a hedgehog is “ideologue.” Kevin Kelly writes that you know you’ve fallen into an ideology when your opinions on one subject are predictable from your opinions on another, unrelated subject. What could be more similar to a hedgehog’s “one big thing” that they know?

Kelly takes it for granted that falling into ideology is bad, but it’s worth being explicit why: ideology is bad because it blinds you to information that could change your mind. It’s like a universal heuristic that keeps you in the automatic mindset that Kahneman calls “system 1”. Then, precisely because you’re acting as if you’ve created a grand unifying theory, you lobotomize 4,000 people — or worse, wage a war, lead a country into famine, and so on, all because you can’t steelman another perspective well enough to admit that you might be wrong.

I think it’s safe to say, then, that hedgehogs’ costs and benefits are much higher variance than foxes’. When they get things wrong, their drive ends up hurting others, but there’s a lot that would go undone without their power of sticking to a thing. There’d never be a real revolution in a world of foxes, but we also need ways to avoid the greatest costs of hedgehogs.

The relevant question, then, is: do we make it too easy or too hard to be a hedgehog? My vote is for “too easy.” In particular, there’s a culture around expertise that encourages people to carve niches for themselves. Once you’re in a niche, it’s hard to move into another one and you’ve gotta defend your territory, otherwise people stop consulting you and you become irrelevant. This dynamic causes the very notion of expertise to have an ideological tinge to it, as we’ve seen in the “follow the science” wars of 2020 - 2021.

I can think of a couple tweaks we could make to encourage fox-like behavior, assuming we decide that’s something we want to do.

One idea is to develop social media that downrates within the discovery algorithm repeated posts from an individual on the same topic. It could use document similarity metrics to identify posts on the same topic and add a penalty for proximity within time and the count of posts on other topics in between. In other words, it’s fine to have ideas that you come back to again and again, but you’ve gotta step away from them, think about other things for a while, and have something fresh to say.

I could also imagine large funders adopting standards about how long they would support research on the same topic. There’s plenty of room for experimentation on how this is done, but as a first sketch of this idea, we could say that an individual can’t be funded for the same topic for more than a decade — how we define a specific topic is probably unique to each field and would be an area for expert input. The decade timeframe is enough to dig deeply into an area and produce information that’s valuable to others, but it’s not enough to become eminent. The goal would be to get highly productive and insightful researchers to spread their talents to new areas that are under-investigated, while also preventing the phenomenon of science advancing one funeral at a time. It could also promote collaboration, as researchers looking for new topics can pick up from those who’ve exhausted their funding in that area — they can combine their learnings from those different areas and develop a much more interdisciplinary perspective.

The advantages of living in a world with hedgehogs are undeniable, but so are their costs. The story of Walter Freeman reminds us that those can’t easily be separated. You can’t have a highly persistent advocate with unshakeable faith without also having someone who is very hard to… well, shake when they need shaking. I’m not exactly advocating for fox maximalism here, but instead some thought about whether we should add safeguards to encourage the less dangerous styles of being a hedgehog.