An “excellent and provocative review”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2011/06/an-uncertain-world-ii-adapt-by-tim-harford.html. The nub of the critique:

bq. Tetlock divided his experts into foxes (good at many things) and hedgehogs (good at one thing) and argued that hedgehogs are over-confident because they “reduce the problem to some core theoretical scheme’… and they used that theme over and over, like a template, to stamp out predictions”. And that’s exactly what Harford does here. He sees evolution as a fox-like strategy (trying many things and selecting a few) but doesn’t notice that at the level of individual species, evolution gives us both foxes and hedgehogs, and both do perfectly fine. Once the contradiction at the heart of the book is clear, it is not surprising that the book itself cherry picks examples where trial-and-error has succeeded, or where eggs-in-one-basket has failed. But such stories, while entertaining, make a notoriously shaky foundation for any kind of general structure, and so it proves here.

Or, to put it a little more abstractly, mechanisms of evolutionary selection and processes of wilful experimentation are not the same thing. Read the whole thing. I’m also looking forward very much to Tom’s forthcoming take on Duncan Watts’ _Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer_, which I liked a lot (although I suspect that Kieran might have some “sharp words to say”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/papers/presumed-consent.pdf about Watts’ discussion of the effect of presumed consent defaults on organ donations).