Everything is Obvious Quotes

“What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“common sense is wonderful at making sense of the world, but not necessarily at understanding it.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“people systematically overestimate both the pain they will experience as a consequence of anticipated losses and the joy they will garner from anticipated gains.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“In any given situation we know the point we’re trying to make, or the decision we want to support, and we choose the appropriate piece of commonsense wisdom to apply to it.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“when we challenge our assumptions about the world—or even more important, when we realize we’re making an assumption that we didn’t even know we were making—we may or may not change our views. But even if we don’t, the exercise of challenging them should at least force us to notice our own stubbornness, which in turn should give us pause.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“we routinely explain social trends in terms of what society “is ready for.” But the only way we know society is ready for something is because it happened. Thus, in effect, all we are really saying is that “X happened because that’s what people wanted; and we know that X is what they wanted because X is what happened.”5”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Bad things happen not because we forget to use our common sense, but rather because the incredible effectiveness of common sense in solving the problems of everyday life causes us to put more faith in it than it can bear.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Common sense, in other words, is not so much a worldview as a grab bag of logically inconsistent, often contradictory beliefs, each of which seems right at the time but carries no guarantee of being right any other time.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“For example, the “theory of relative deprivation” states that people feel distressed by circumstances only inasmuch as their hardship exceeds that of the people around them.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“If it’s true that bankers are paid too much, in other words, the solution is not to get into the messy business of regulating individual pay—as indeed the financial industry itself has argued. Instead, it is to make banking less profitable overall,”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Much of life, however, is characterized by what the sociologist Robert Merton called the Matthew Effect, named after a sentence from the book of Matthew in the Bible, which laments “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“The problem, in fact, is not that there is anything wrong with evaluating processes in terms of outcomes—just that it is unreliable to evaluate them in terms of any single outcome.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Plans fail, in other words, not because planners ignore common sense, but rather because they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behavior of people who are different from them.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Margaret Thatcher was famous for having said “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Birds of a feather flock together, but opposites attract. Absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight is out of mind. Look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Together, creeping determinism and sampling bias lead commonsense explanations to suffer from what is called the post-hoc fallacy.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Creeping determinism means that we pay less attention than we should to the things that don’t happen.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“psychologists have shown that an individual’s choices and behavior can be influenced by “priming” them with particular words, sounds, or other stimuli. Subjects in experiments who read words like “old” and “frail” walk more slowly down the corridor when they leave the lab. Consumers in wine stores are more likely to buy German wine when German music is playing in the background, and French wine when French music is playing. Survey respondents asked about energy drinks are more likely to name Gatorade when they are given a green pen in order to fill out the survey. And shoppers looking to buy a couch online are more likely to opt for an expensive, comfortable-looking couch when the background of the website is of fluffy white clouds, and more likely to buy the harder, cheaper option when the background consists of dollar coins.11”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Criticizing common sense, it must be said, is a tricky business,”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“It must have been a magical time to be alive when the universe, so long an enigma, seemed suddenly to have been conquered by the mind of a single man. As Pope himself said, Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.1 For the next three centuries, the knowledge of mankind would swell inexorably, sweeping before it the mysteries of the world.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Roughly speaking, it is the loosely organized set of facts, observations, experiences, insights, and pieces of received wisdom that each of us accumulates over a lifetime, in the course of encountering, dealing with, and learning from, everyday situations.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Making the right prediction is just as important as getting the prediction right.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“And knowing this, it’s tempting to take the next step of assuming that this future trajectory has in some cosmic sense already been determined, even if it has not yet been revealed to us. But this last step would be a mistake. Until it is actually realized, all we can say about the future stock price is that it has a certain probability of being within a certain range—not because it actually lies somewhere in this range and we’re just not sure where it is, but in the stronger sense that it only exists at all as a range of probabilities. Put another way, there is a difference between being uncertain about the future and the future itself being uncertain. The former is really just a lack of information—something we don’t know—whereas the latter implies that the information is, in principle, unknowable. The former is the orderly universe of Laplace’s demon, where if we just try hard enough, if we’re just smart enough, we can predict the future. The latter is an essentially random world, where the best we can ever hope for is to express our predictions of various outcomes as probabilities.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“The difficulty that we experience in trying to think about the future in terms of probabilities is the mirror image of our preference for explanations that account for known outcomes at the expense of alternative possibilities.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“if we want to understand why people do what they do, we must understand the incentives that they face, and hence their preference for one outcome versus another. When someone does something that seems strange or puzzling to us, rather than writing them off as crazy or irrational, we should instead seek to analyze their situation in hopes of finding a rational incentive.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“APPENDIX KEY POINTS IN THE BOOK”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Biology doesn’t really have universal laws either, and yet biologists still manage to make progress.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“science.” If much of what sociology has to offer seems like common sense, in other words, it is not just because everything about human behavior seems obvious once you know the answer. Part of the problem is also that social scientists, like everyone else, participate in social life and so feel as if they can understand why people do what they do simply by thinking about it. It is not surprising, therefore, that many social scientific explanations suffer from the same weaknesses—ex post facto assertions of rationality, representative individuals, special people, and correlation substituting for causation—that pervade our commonsense explanations as well.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Sandel therefore concludes that a just society is not one that seeks to adjudicate disputes between individuals from a morally neutral perspective, but one that facilitates debate about what the appropriate moral perspective ought to be. As Sandel acknowledges, this is likely to be a messy affair and always a work in progress, but he does not see any way around it.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer