Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

Oct 19, 2012 Aaron Arnold rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: politics, favorites, economics, science, read-in-2012

This is frequently described as a book on common sense, which it is, but more importantly it's an investigation on human cognitive limits more generally and also a call to radically restructure the discipline of sociology in light of modern advances in technology. Sociology often gets made fun of in the hierarchies of academic disciplines, but Watts argues that there are reasons why sociology seems so vague and unscientific: not only are sociological problems very complicated in ways that physic...more This is frequently described as a book on common sense, which it is, but more importantly it's an investigation on human cognitive limits more generally and also a call to radically restructure the discipline of sociology in light of modern advances in technology. Sociology often gets made fun of in the hierarchies of academic disciplines, but Watts argues that there are reasons why sociology seems so vague and unscientific: not only are sociological problems very complicated in ways that physics problems like orbital mechanics are not, but in addition to the fact that only now do we have the ability to run experiments to truly test our long-held prejudices about ourselves and how society works, our problem-solving skills are themselves subject to those same prejudices. It's a tall order, and though inevitably the chapters pointing out problems are stronger than the chapters suggesting ways to do better, I think this is an excellent synthesis of a lot of good information and a solid guide to outlining future research directions.

That human beings have cognitive biases is well-known, especially to readers of any Dan Ariely or Daniel Kahneman book, but the thing about them is that even if you know what they are and how they work, you're almost guaranteed to fall prey to them constantly anyway. "Common sense" is a powerful tool for navigating the complexities of life, but common sense is often just shorthand for a set of fallible mental shortcuts whose workings are almost invisible to us, and whose failures are only excusable by the fact that everyone else has all the same failures too. We use many heuristics to guide us through life, and those rules of thumb are often incoherent (Watts gives examples of proverbs that contradict each other like "look before you leap" vs "he who hesitates is lost"). This extends even down to the level of deeply held and supposedly universal beliefs about justice - when you play the ultimatum game or other simple exercises in game theory with people from different cultures, people behave in strikingly different ways due to cultural norms, and those cultural norms are themselves very difficult to clearly articulate or justify. His brief discussion of the extent to which what we think of as universal institutions like the market system vary dramatically throughout time reminded me a bit of Karl Polanyi's insights about how embedded capitalism is within culture and how unnatural in a way that is.

But the main issue is that "common sense" simply isn't designed to solve the kinds of sociological problems we now find ourselves encountering. Here Watts goes on a brief tour of some sociocultural phenomena like performance-based financial incentives, and how baffling the evidence is that they do anything at all. Not only are the effects relative to your peers (i.e. a $10,000 bonus can still be disappointing if everyone else got $20,000), but they're also relative to where you were before, and the bar for what prompts additional effort can keep being raised. Even high-value bonuses in both relative and absolute terms can have little effect on performance if what's being measured is unclear or easily gamed (think teachers being paid more for student achievement or Wall Street bankers paid for paper profits), and yet even after mounds of evidence undermining the case for simple performance metrics, it is guaranteed that you will hear someone think that the "common sense" insight that paying someone more will automatically result in better quality is essentially irrefutable.

Other examples are no less interesting. Watts poses some simple questions about the Mona Lisa: what makes the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Would the Mona Lisa's qualities have been apparent at 1700 when it was painted? What are the features that we currently consider it as having that no other painting does? Are there other paintings that share similar qualities, whether by da Vinci or someone else? Why aren't they as famous? Steady investigation shows that attempts to justify the painting's #1 ranking are either specious, examples of circular reasoning - "the Mona Lisa is the best because it has the qualities of the Mona Lisa [e.g. style, composition, brushwork, the smile, etc] and not something else" - or simply arbitrary, because as he shows, the Mona Lisa was not actually acclaimed with its current status as Best Painting Ever until a dramatic theft attempt in the early 20th century. The real reason it's the Primo Painting is basically that SOME painting has to be, and it really is arbitrary to some extent which one ends up with the top spot.

This has dramatic implications for any field where ranking depends on somewhat subjective factors (i.e. almost all fields). Music immediately leaps to mind, and Watts relates experiments he's run where people are asked to rank random songs both independently and also with the ability to see what other people have ranked those songs. Unsurprisingly, herd behavior and "trendiness" arises immediately when the equivalent of a Billboard chart is introduced to the experiment, which is something I've noticed myself when using software like last.fm that provides statistics on the music I listen to. Social network technology can just as easily be used to reinforce traditional hierarchies as to eliminate them. People ending up liking things simply because other people like them, and the implication is that many universally acclaimed bands are acclaimed not so much for any intrinsic merit as simple network effects. The same logic, with the slight complication of timing, extends to other "why this and not that" cases like Facebook's success and MySpace's failure, Minitel and the Internet, VHS and Betamex, etc etc. A slight initial random push might be enough to one product the edge over another in the cumulative advantage race, and only retrospectively are people able to offer countless competing and equally arbitrary theories on what that initial push was.

One implication of this line of reasoning that seems to disturb people is that a lot of life, including huge multi-billion dollar phenomena like why Harry Potter is so popular and not so many other superficially very similar YA series, is basically random. To put it another way, outcomes in a wide range of human endeavors that seem to depend greatly on human initiative follow simple statistical distributions that can also describe things like the outcomes of coin flips. What does that say about the common sense understanding of our own "specialness" or of our intuition that the world is divided into a few very influential people and many ordinary people? What does that say about our ability to predict the future to the extent that we follow strategies that leverage "specialness", as in trying to find "the next Harry Potter" or "the next Apple", or by trying to advertise to influential people in the hopes that they will influence their followers? After all, if you knew just the right social levers to push, you could do just about anything. Since we all know that special people are out there, waiting to be found, how do we identify their specialness and find them?

The problem is that in many cases, the special people, or the levers of history, are only able to be identified after the fact. As an example, Watts picks on Malcolm Gladwell for trying to figure out why Paul Revere is so famous while a guy named William Dawes, who went on a seemingly very similar ride at the same time, is virtually unknown today. Gladwell says that Revere was a "connector", a man unusually well-suited to his task of warning all the people on his route as opposed to the undistinguished Dawes; Watts says that nothing about Revere's current fame was destined at all, and if their routes had been swapped there's absolutely no reason to think that we wouldn't have identical "one if by land, two if by sea" poems about Dawes instead. Revere was simply in the right place at the right time, and it was only after the fact that people decided there must have been something unusual about him and his place in such a dramatic event in US history. The same story holds true with music or books: every book publisher in the world would love to be able to find "the next JK Rowling", but all save the lucky one couldn't even find the original JK Rowling, who was rejected many times. To many ostensibly well-trained people, there just wasn't anything about her work that seemed to stand out among the countless manuscripts of fantasy young adult novels they read every year (related quick prediction: Rowling's new non-fiction novel is probably pretty decent, but has a 0% chance of ever being placed in the canon alongside her Harry Potter work).

This is at root due to the fact that our brain is hard-wired to look for patterns and narratives even in realms where those metaphors are fundamentally inapplicable. History is another great example. Take the idea of the storming of the Bastille being a central event in the French Revolution, worthy of becoming the central national holiday of France. Could someone have known at the time that that particular event among all the chaos of the Revolution would have been so influential? Obviously not, but this means that all history is essentially a competition in storytelling, and that prediction in the Laplacian sense of perfect foreknowledge is impossible even if Newtonian physics were true. This notion has obvious relevance for important institutions like futures markets or business more generally. Rather than repeat myself, I'll just say that in the business sections Watts reiterates that people fall prey to all the same issues of mis-narrating history, learning the wrong lessons from the past, engaging in circular reasoning about why certain things are successful, believing that people are more special than they are, and assuming due to the halo effect that what is doing well now must have all sorts of other great attributes. (As a related note, David Romer had an excellent paper in 2006 called "Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Professional Football" discussing how coaches systematically fail to maximize their expected points by failing to go for it on 4th down, simply because there are prevailing irrational norms about what constitutes acceptable risk; this predates the infamous Patriots 4th-and-2 against the Colts in 2008 but is still worth reading).

I'm not sure that all types of prediction are necessarily equal; off the top of my head, I would say that a book like The Limits to Growth, with its carefully-sourced numbers and logical formulae, should be looked at as a more credible forecast than a hedge fund prospectus. However, even if most attempts at predicting the future fail, and it seems best to just stick to simple models like always betting on the home team (which at a 58% success rate is within 3% of the best and most sophisticated algorithms you can concoct), there are important things you can do to reduce the failures, and hence resolve some of the issues raised in the rest of the book. It's not like you can act like the future is completely random; we have a drive to speculate for a reason. Here is where Watts is, predictably as it were, a little less helpful. Some useful sanity-check tools are aggregation of knowledge as opposed to relying on too few sources of information, encouraging experimentation rather than blindly staying the course, relying on local knowledge where possible rather on too much top-down direction (here Watts has a more level-headed take on this Hayekian principle than Tim Harford did in Adapt), and always trying to rely on measurement when rather than on intuition and "common sense" even if this is ultimately a somewhat Sisyphean goal.

With that, Watts transitions to the Big Picture. Knowing that common sense can mislead us is all when and good, but what new principles can we use to guide us in the future? Societies are big and complicated things, and merely saying that we can't trust common sense isn't good enough, especially when it comes to subjects like justice and fairness. So Watts moves in the direction of Justice as Fairness, explicitly advocating a Rawlsian view of designing institutions to maximize equity, contra Nozick. I agree with him, and I agree that the concepts explored in the book support the idea that social institutions should be designed with the least-well-off in mind, as well as that the "lemon socialism" behavior of the wealthy lately of acting like you are a special person on the upside and a helpless victim on the downside is both offensive and unjust. Acknowledging that we are members of a society and not a million Masters of the Universe is an old insight, but well-placed here, because now that we are beginning to have the technology to measure and analyze trends and social movements in great detail and in real time, we are also beginning to be able to subject foundational questions of justice to statistical analysis. Alexander Volokh had a great law review article in 1997 titled "n Guilty Men" which analyzed different societies' takes on the concept of "it is better to let X guilty people escape justice than to let one innocent person be punished" - Watts would argue that we are getting to the point where we could try to actually calculate that normative value.

Obviously that grandiose dream has many precedents - Watts mentions Auguste Comte, as one of many - and even more detractors. The idea that you could calculate something like justice seems absurd. Yet it certainly seems like more and more touchy subjects of the past are being re-examined with something approaching a scientific spirit. Dan Ariely and Michael Norton published a study in 2005 titled "Building a Better America-One Wealth Quintile at a Time" that polled people about income inequality that asked people what they thought a fair distribution should be. The results showed that most people, even rich people, supported a much more equal society than the one we have now. What role should that result play in discussions over redesigning the tax code? Is the only appropriate avenue for discussion about income during salary negotiations between each individual un-unionized employee and a hiring manager, or can/should we design broader institutions to better-implement more scientific notions of justice? These and many other questions that before belonged in the backs of philosophy and sociology books are finally able to be looked at with data, analysis, and experimentation - this book is a great overview of some good questions and hints of their answers. I'll be thinking about it for a while.(less)

2 likes · like · see review

Feb 12, 2013 Ethan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Deep. A bit philosophical. Takes on 'common sense' explanations of social phenomenon like influencers and tipping points. Also describes some of his own very cool research (though you gotta go elsewhere for more details of it).

A couple of my favorite nuggets:

When a forest fire breaks out, we never wonder what made that spark so unique. We only wonder how much dry tinder was lying around the forest and how long the drought had been. But when a video goes viral or a brand takes off, we ONLY wonder...more

like · see review

Mar 29, 2012 Deb rated it 4 of 5 stars

*Well, that's just obvious!*

It's just common sense, right? Think again!

This book explores the three main types of common sense errors: systemically flawed mental models of individual behavior, even more flawed models of collective behaviors, and misrepresentations of past events which result in us learning less from history than we think we do. The book does a powerful job in exposing the reality that common sense convinces us that we know more than we really do. (Warning: this truth may be mor...more

2 likes · like · see review

Nov 03, 2011 Al Bità rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book starts off reasonably well: the first half is devoted to giving us many examples of the failure or inadequacy of 'common sense' to explain or predict the world we live in. The most interesting underlying concept, for me, is that in this world, ALL knowledge is generated and developed for the purposes of prediction: we collect data, develop hypotheses to back up certain patterns we perceive or deduce from that data, and then use these patterns (usually in the form of mathematical formul...more This book starts off reasonably well: the first half is devoted to giving us many examples of the failure or inadequacy of 'common sense' to explain or predict the world we live in. The most interesting underlying concept, for me, is that in this world, ALL knowledge is generated and developed for the purposes of prediction: we collect data, develop hypotheses to back up certain patterns we perceive or deduce from that data, and then use these patterns (usually in the form of mathematical formulae) to predict what the future will bring, thus allowing us to devote our resources to benefit most from our predictions. The fact that in reality such predictions often can and do go disastrously wrong; and then when we re-examine the actual results, we then fool ourselves into believing that of course, what resulted was 'common sense'. Watts points out that with such hindsight our vision is always 20/20, but that is an illusion, and if we take it seriously, a delusion as well.

It is in the second half of the book, when our sociologist author starts talking about thinking differently, that the work becomes more an apologia for sociology, but using modern technological capabilities to enable us to predict the present. It is perhaps an attribute to the cleverness of the writing that we could easily actually accept that phrase: predicting the present. What he really seems to be arguing about is that, through the use of such technologies as the Internet, Twitter Facebook, Google, Yahoo! etc. we can cheaply and very quickly establish vastly huge 'data' bases on the preferences of the individual subscribers at any one time, and from which data applied probability theory will 'predict' how these preferences will result in specific purchases 'now'. Note there is nothing 'predictive' about this: it is merely extensive data collection at an incredibly fast rate; the normal distribution curve based on this data will then take the normal standard deviation as being the area which will provide the greatest 'dividends' to any company willing and able to provide the desired products quickly and immediately to satisfy those preferences. This will thus no doubt give the illusion that the result has been 'predicted', but in fact it hasn't been. Since this is exactly the same process as the very techniques used in the first part of the book, which the author argues is basically useless, one can hardly trust, in my opinion, in any long-term benefits of this new strategy. It is the speed of the technology that creates the illusion that one is identifying the most profitable products, and as long as we can quickly respond to these ephemera quickly enough, all will be well in market-town. This, too, is 'common sense'.

Our author wants this 'speed-up' ability to be perpetually and continually used by sociologists as a kind of groundwork for the development of a 'science' for the future, and that all corporations worth their salt should make extensive use of this as the necessary basis to establish sociology as a justifiable and real science. He is wrong. It seems to me that instead he is putting his trust in instant immediate response on all levels which, in reality, will be forever 'instantly' changing practically day by day, and which will become increasingly more ephemeral and illusory as a result. What he is proposing is scientism, not science; and serious social dangers lie therein.

What I think the book was saying in the beginning is that all predictions as to how or why people act on the information available to them is inherently fallible; the conclusion would be that we should stop doing it, since it is all pretty much a waste of time and money. The same conclusion should be applied to the author's proposed 'solution' — so for me this book ends up by cutting the ground from under its own feet.(less)

2 likes · like · see review

Jul 22, 2011 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

If you are only a reader of fiction, you probably will not like this book. If however you have some interest in the psychology of human behavior, this may appeal to you. It is well suited for those of us who have some background training and or experience in clinical trials, study groups, and statistics. The text is a bit dry, but not so much so that it is difficult to read. The author does a reasonably good job in explaining how and why people decide to do what they do and form the opinions the...more

3 likes · like · see review

Jun 11, 2012 Joe rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book reviews the systematic mistakes many people make when applying common sense to figure out the reasoning or rationale behind particular happenstances. The book is well-organized and presents the arguments in a thoughtful and, ultimately, convincing manner.

Most interesting, though, is Duncan's discussion around predictions - why predictions are inaccurate, why we don't accurately analyze our predictions after-the-fact, and the impossibility of anticipating "black swan"-type of events.

Sel...more

like · see review

Aug 31, 2011 Paula rated it 4 of 5 stars

Whenever I hear (or read) an otherwise intelligent person deriding a social psych experiment-- e.g., "I can't believe someone had to *research* whether the media causes poor body image in teenage girls! Everybody *knows* it does!"--I weep for humanity. The tools of social science are imprecise, and what "everybody knows" is often wrong, or not proven by studies, or rendered inconclusive by the data. That's why we do studies, that's why we keep the research and the conversation going when studies...more

2 likes · like · see review

Oct 06, 2012 Koen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Buku ini diawali dengan beberapa kasus di mana orang2 penting, seperti penulis John Gribbin, serta senator AS, menganggap riset sosiologi bukan hal yang penting, misalnya sepenting riset fisika. Riset di bidang fisika tentu amat penting. Namun agak lucu kalau menganggap riset sosial itu tak penting dengan alasan — menurut mereka — bahwa hasilnya bisa ditebak dengan logika biasa, tanpa harus melakukan riset yang luas. Di dekade kedua abad ke-21 ini, dengan analisis yang cukup banyak mengenai jeja...more Buku ini diawali dengan beberapa kasus di mana orang2 penting, seperti penulis John Gribbin, serta senator AS, menganggap riset sosiologi bukan hal yang penting, misalnya sepenting riset fisika. Riset di bidang fisika tentu amat penting. Namun agak lucu kalau menganggap riset sosial itu tak penting dengan alasan — menurut mereka — bahwa hasilnya bisa ditebak dengan logika biasa, tanpa harus melakukan riset yang luas. Di dekade kedua abad ke-21 ini, dengan analisis yang cukup banyak mengenai jejaring sosial, kita mulai tahu bahwa banyak hal yang lebih menarik di riset ilmu sosial, selain sekedar memainkan urusan game theory yang banyak berfokus di urusan insentif, motivasi, dan nilai2. Tapi banyak yang tetap menganggap, penelitian fisika memberikan hasil yang luar biasa, dan menembus batas pikiran sederhana (common sense), sementara ilmu sosial tidak menghasilkan hal2 di luar itu. Masalahnya memang, kalau ilmu sosial itu sederhana, mengapa masalah sosial tak mudah dipecahkan? Soalnya bukan pada resource yang akan terlalu besar untuk memecahkan masalah itu, tetapi benar2 pada ketidaktrampilan kita memahami manusia, sebagai individu maupun masyarakat :D.

Penulis lalu memberikan contoh2 kecil. Paul Lazarsfeld pernah membuat riset pada para prajurit di Perang Dunia II. Ia memaparkan beberapa hasil. Misalnya, penemuan nomor 2: “Pemuda dari pedesaan umumnya memiliki semangat lebih baik dalam ketentaraan daripada pemuda perkotaan.” Reaksi kita? Tentu saja. Itu masuk akal. Pemuda desa lebih terbiasa dengan lingkungan yang keras, kerja keras, gotong royong, dll. Tapi lalu Lazarfeld mengatakan, “Ups. salah baca. Maksudnya, pemuda dari perkotaan umumnya memiliki semangat lebih baik.” Reaksi kita? Haha. OK. Tetap bisa dipahami. Pemuda kota lebih biasa hidup bersesakan, kerja dengan birokrasi panjang yang tidak pasti, penuh tata cara yang mudah berubah, dll. Semuanya masuk akal. Tapi, jika kedua hasil yang berlawanan itu masuk akal, maka ada yang salah dengan urusan “masuk akal” itu: itu masuk akal hanya setelah dijelaskan hasilnya. Yang kita sebut sebagai akal sehat, common sense, sebenarnya tak mampu menyusun prediksi; selain hanya menyusun alasan atas sesuatu yang diketahui hasilnya.

Para politisi yang mencoba mengatasi masalah kemiskinan merasa telah paham mengapa manusia bisa miskin. Penyusun marketing plan menyusun kampanye dengan anggapan bahwa mereka tahu apa yang diinginkan target pasar, dan bagaimana membuat target itu tertarik lagi. Penyusun kebijakan atas kualitas pendidikan, kesehatan, dll, merasa paham atas efek skema insentif. Kesalahan pertama dalam meramalkan (dan mengubah) perilaku adalah bahwa kita mengira manusia digerakkan faktor2 seperti insentif, motivasi, dan nilai2. Sementara, banyak hal2 lain yang justru sengaja atau tidak turut mempengaruhi keputusan akhir: cara berkomunikasi (bentuk komunikasi, pilihan kata, latar musik, bentuk font, warna), atau hal2 lain yang cukup banyak. Kedua, pemodelan kita atas perilaku kolektif lebih buruk lagi. Ada berbagai warna interaksi internal di dalam kelompok yang masing2 pagarnya tak mesti tegas: alur kuasa dan pengetahuan sungguh cair, dan tak mudah diramalkan hanya dengan melihat elemen2nya. Kita cenderung menyederhanakan dengan menganggap kelompok sebagai individu, bernama crowd, market, karyawan, dll. Atau memilih representasi tak jelas seperti pemimpin, influencer, dll. Baru akhir2 ini dipahami bahwa penyederhanaan seperti itu bukan saja kurang tepat, tapi sungguh2 meleset.(less)

1 like · like · see review

Apr 13, 2013 Nick rated it 5 of 5 stars

Freakonomics has a lot to answer for -- a whole series of books arguing against our pathetic, puny common sense and assumptions about modern life and for probability-based thinking. Drug dealers actually live with their mothers and make less than the minimum wage -- that sort of thing. This book is another in the series, and a good one. The author points out that most of our explanations for why things are or why they happen are circular. We say, for example, that the Mona Lisa is a magnificent...more

like · see review

May 17, 2011 Manonpinkcorner rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: econ-policy-psych

Reasons why I liked this book (on account of my confirmation bias):

1. Watts thinks Malcolm Gladwell is an idiot
2. His criticism of Nassim Taleb's "Black Swan" events
3. Great summaries of various behavioral economics/policy/psychology/sociological experiments
4. Further proof that Nozick was wrong and Rawls/Sandel are right (obviously)

7 likes · like · see review

Feb 27, 2012 Chris Wood rated it 3 of 5 stars

We don't think how we think we think -- "Everything is Obvious" dives into how we interpret the world, make decisions, and how we are unknowingly influenced. Watts makes us reexamine simple decision making scenarios, and then with references to Gladwell's "The Tipping Point," add's additional layers of social or group of complexity. The controllable variables set out in lab tests often become irrelevant when we try to sell into our markets containing millions of other influences. Although some q...more

like · see review

Jan 31, 2013 Malin Friess rated it 2 of 5 stars

Duncan Watts argues that our common sense is not as good as we think it should be. When we trust our common sense we often make bad predictions.

His support:

We are duped into believing the Mona Lisa is such an extraordinary painting or Shakespeare such amazing writing. The Mona Lisa is small and average work for Da Vinci. We study these works as masterpieces and eventually it becomes self fullfilling.

Our common sense is a poor predictor as it should have been obvious that Facebook and Yahoo and...more

like · see review

Sep 08, 2011 Peter rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: popular-science, psychology, audiobooks, read-in-2011

For most people (including me), it is surprisingly difficult to seriously consider the possibility that one is wrong about something. All the more so when the topic at hand is thought to be commonsense, as plain as the proverbial nose on your face. Personally, I find it kind of scary to reconsider that type of idea. Looking back a few centuries, I feel a certain sympathy for people who were being told for the first time that the earth revolves around the sun. What could be more obvious than that...more

like · see review

Aug 02, 2011 Kaput rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, non-fiction, really-enjoyed

Follows in the well worn path of Freakonomics, The Tipping Point and Nudge(all are mentioned and discussed) in trying to make complex subjects more generally accessible. Easy to understand anecdotes and selective research abound as it tries to find itself as wide an audience as possible. This was occasionally confusing as I wasn't always sure whether this book was aimed at individuals or corporations and governments(probably both)

Shows how easy we can be fooled into thinking we have the answers...more

1 like · like · see review

Oct 10, 2011 Joseph rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

the book can be broadly separated into 2 parts

(a) how common sense fails us (i) personal level - how we usually think only in term of incentive etc vs circumstantial explanation as to why someone does something (e.g. default setting) (ii) societal level - how the problem at the personal level gets compounded into a bigger problem - we tend to simplify explanations like taking/understanding society as a whole (e.g. explaining market as 1 person, the economy as 1 person) etc (iii) history - and ho...more

1 like · like · see review

Aug 30, 2011 Jenny rated it 2 of 5 stars

I always like the reminder of how powerful defaults are. The more common sense we have, the easier it is to navigate our daily lives, because common sense is really how the world (or our environment) operates. However, common sense does not translate to complex systems (like politics, the economy, etc.) and we all try to apply common sense to complex systems anyway. I liked the quote from Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the lig...more

like · see review

Aug 04, 2011 Darrenglass rated it 4 of 5 stars

In this book, Watts writes of lots of examples of where our common sense lets us down -- and where we fail to let it down -- and various social science approaches to thinking about this subject. There are lots of books that have come out in recent years in this genre that lives on the border between economics and psychology (Freakonomics, The Numerati, The Black Swan (shudder) and the Malcolm Gladwell oeuvre all fsll into these niches to various extents) . And like many of these books, I really...more

like · see review

Sep 25, 2011 Gil rated it 5 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this perspective on the concept of obviousness and the futility of strategy. The author works at Yahoo! Labs and is a researcher in the field of Behavioral Economics (one the areas of psychology I enjoy reading about).

Duncan explains why hindsight is 20/20, and what this means to people who try to make decisions based on evidence. It seems so obvious -- but reality is far from obvious when you inspect it carefully. Although it is a book about business strategy, it is also a book about...more

like · see review

Aug 26, 2011 Jeremy rated it 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed Everything is Obvious. Watts's thesis is that "common sense" is a wonderful tool for making sense out of what has happened, but that it is not good at grasping the true reality behind complex things.

As an example, he talks about how we refer to "the market" in near-human terms, saying things like "the market reacted to the Fed report" or "the market fell because of bad housing data". These explanations simplify things far too much - "the market" is a huge, complex system of peop...more

like · see review

Oct 15, 2011 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was great at first. I read his original book "Six Degrees" and was enjoying this one almost as much. The second half of the book completely lost focus, though, as he jumped around between unrelated points and kept complaining that social scientists aren't given enough credit.

The concepts shared in the book about how outcomes of events seem so certain after the fact, how "common sense" can be completely wrong, and how we often learn the wrong lessons from history were very interesting....more

like · see review

Apr 10, 2012 Marc94 rated it 4 of 5 stars

The author of this book clearly knows what he is talking about. He provides an interesting point of view, as he has a PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics and he was professor of sociology at Columbia University for four years. The natural and social sciences tend to be pitted against each other, yet he knows both sides.
I love the ending of the book, when he says that the internet will be like Galileo's telescope in opening up the field of astronomy, but in this case, it will be for sociolog...more

like · see review

Jan 02, 2012 Laura M rated it 3 of 5 stars

My son and I had to laugh as we read this, because everything the author said was obvious - once he pointed it out! Fun examples of how the opposite of everything we "know" can be presented to make just as much sense as what we originally believed. Maybe we are just wired to try to make sense of everything we encounter, perhaps as a survival mechanism.

Did not finish this book. I got bogged down in it - the last third didn't seem nearly as interesting as the beginning.

like · see review

Dec 01, 2012 Phil Simon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: business, curent-affairs

Everything is Obvious is exactly the kind of book that makes people uncomfortable. And that's exactly why everyone should read it. Watts shows that we don't know nearly as much as we think we do. Written in a much more accessible style than [[ASIN:0141034599 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable]], Everything is Obvious should be required reading for leaders of industry and government. In a nutshell, it shows that we don't know jack--and why.

like · see review

Jul 24, 2012 Joe Rowan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Not quite as in-depth as I wanted it to be; I guess I've got used to my non-fiction books being pitched at a slightly more challenging level (and yes I know how boastful it sounds). A lot of it was not as earth-shattering as Watts possibly expected it to be, and many of the things he discusses are relevant to business strategies, which aren't really of much personal interest to me at all. But still, it had some interesting points to make about how we plan for the future and the general role of t...more

like · see review

Oct 02, 2011 Kevin Connery rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Good, but overly padded, and contains some political-esque rants that don’t necessarily support his premise. The core premise is that social sciences are inherently different than the physical sciences, and that the usual approach of scaling individual or small-group behavior to larger groups is inherently flawed, far beyond mere ‘off by a bit’ or ‘oversimplified’ would tolerate.

like · see review

May 14, 2013 Voracious rated it 4 of 5 stars

Lots of interesting material from a physicist turned social scientist. Good, simply expressed argument about the banking industry post-bailout p. 241. Discusses the "Matthew Effect" (to those who have, more will be given) on our perceptions. Plus the halo effect. Points out tendency towards circularity in explaining phenomena. And mistaking correlation for causation.

Argues that prediction in business is too unreliable, and makes the case for "measure and react" - test ideas on small scale and bu...more

like · see review

Apr 13, 2011 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2011

The book goes on over a set of examples to discuss, not the obvious as the title says, but how the recent changes in society and the abundance of data is changing the role of Sociology in modern science.

The book is well written in a simple language that proves helpful to understand some advanced topics (that are usually developed in the Notes section) but as I already knew some of the stories, the successive repetition seemed a bit exasperating at times (the book success example is annoying).

like · see review

Jun 09, 2011 Kevin rated it 3 of 5 stars

There are no answers here. Just criticisms of previous "answers" to sociological questions and problems. Ultimately, it was unsatisfying because it never has any ideas for what we do now (unless you are a sociologist). The book is billed as for laymen but, other than as a general discussion of sloppy thinking, it's not very useful.

like · see review

Sep 08, 2011 Dirk rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: interaction-technology, marketing-sociology

I am in two minds about this book. On the one hand it makes some interesting observations and in particular when turning to the current obsession of social media marketing with measuring 'influence' is worthwhile reading. In these chapters the strength and expertise of Watts come through. On the other hand however I was very surprised and dismayed at Watts' ignorance of 100 years of sociology of the everyday and common sense. To write a book about 'common sense' without any reference to this hug...more

like · see review

Aug 01, 2011 Dave rated it 2 of 5 stars

I found this book to be thoroughly disorganized, choppy, and nearly impossible to follow. There are some interesting ideas buried in here about common sense, worldviews, and decision-making, but there is no discernible thread of argument that might give us a new way of thinking about thinking. What a disappointment.

like · see review

title link	preview: Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer
avg rating	preview: Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer Goodreads rating: 3.74 (665 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9206187-everything-is-obvious?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1333578252l/9206187.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9206187-everything-is-obvious?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts[/url]

Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (10)

Genres

Readers also enjoyed similar books

Books by Duncan J. Watts

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About Everything is Obv...

Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

combineOther Editions (10)

Genres

Readers also enjoyed similar books

Books by Duncan J. Watts

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About Everything is Obv...

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (10)