henry copeland:

Clouds or clocks?

There has long been disagreement among social scientists about how scientific social science can be, and the skeptics have argued that social phenomena are more cloudlike. They don't have Newtonian clocklike regularity. That cloud versus clock distinction has loomed large in those kinds of debates. If world politics were truly clocklike and deterministic then it should in principle be possible for an observer who is armed with the correct theory and correct knowledge of the antecedent conditions to predict with extremely high accuracy what's going to happen next. If world politics is more cloudlike–little wisps of clouds blowing around in the air in quasi random ways–no matter how theoretically prepared the observer is, the observer is not going to be able to predict very well. Let's say the clocklike view posits that the optimal forecasting frontier is very close to 1.0, an R squared very close to 1.0. By contrast, the cloudlike view would posit that the optimal forecasting frontier is not going to be appreciably greater than chance or you're not going to be able to do much better than a dart-throwing chimpanzee. One of the things that we discovered in the earlier work was that forecasters who suspected that politics was more cloudlike were actually more accurate in predicting longer-term futures than forecasters who believed that it was more clocklike. Forecasters who were more modest about what could be accomplished predictably were actually generating more accurate predictions than forecasters who were more confident about what could be achieved. We called these theoretically confident forecasters "hedgehogs." We called these more modest, self-critical forecasters "foxes," drawing on Isaiah Berlin's famous essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox."
- edge.org