Customer Reviews

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a personal review - if you haven't come across similar material I think it's a very recommendable read.

I'm a big fan of Duncan Watts' work on Small Worlds, but I did not get as much as I would have liked from his latest pop-sci offering. Some of the material I found new, such as Grannovetter's intriguing threshold hypothesis as to why some mobs gel into mass action and others do not, and he had a very good discussion on the use of online networked communities as social science laboratories, with some interesting results generated from twitter, Facebook and email. And, as is necessary for this kind of a book, there are a number of illustrative anecdotes, such as why BetaMax and Discman failed in the market, but iPod succeeded or Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" - which I just tried out after reading the book, or Zara's approach to marketing. If nothing else it makes for good entertainment and fodder for conversation.

However much of the book hinges around the nature of workable explanations, and I'm surprised that in his wanderings Watts did not come across Herbert Simon's well known The Sciences of the Artificial and his key notion of "satisficing" (we tend to stop at explanations that work sufficiently well, not those that are necessarily true); or the idea of "magical thinking" in allegedly primitive societies; or Donald Norman's The Psychology Of Everyday Things, which looks at the relationship between internal models vs the real world, all of which would have added greater depth to the themes Watts was pursuing.

Then there's the catchy title. If you read Watts carefully one finds that knowing the answer has the effect of increasing the one's confidence in a particular explanation, but that doesn't necessarily make things obvious, in particular when the material requires mathematics, statistics and long chains of reasoning. There's some good material on rational choice but Dan Arielly (who gave the book a good review on the back cover) and John Paulos I've found have done better. Nor does he confront conspiracy theorists, where the answer is used to select the "facts".

So yes, it's enjoyable, but I was hoping for more original results from Watts own work. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

"Everything is Obvious" by Dr. Duncan J. Watts suggests that we are on the brink of a new age of social scientific discovery with profound implications for business, politics and culture. Dr. Watts brings an interesting and rare critical discipline to the soft science of sociology due to his PhD's in the hard sciences of theoretical and applied mechanics. Dr. Watts shares insights gained from his academic and professional experiences including his role as a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research. Accessibly written for general interest readers, Dr. Watts' enlightening book gives us many good reasons to get excited about sociology.

Although Dr. Watts rarely acknolwedges it, his book represents an implicit refutation of Malcolm Gladwell's pseudo-scientific The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Dr. Watts charges Mr. Gladwell with employing an obvious kind of circular logic where a particular social, cultural or artistic phenomenon is heralded simply due to the fact of its success (while ignoring how dozens of others that possessed the same attributes failed). In fact, Dr. Watts argues that answers to the riddles of history are usually not well understood in the moment; it is only with the benefit of hindsight that historians can piece together the relevant factors that might have produced noteworthy events. For example, Dr. Watts argues that Paul Revere was probably no less influential than the thousands of others who branched out to spread the news of the impending British approach; to the extent that the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow might have assigned credit to a single person from the chaos of a complex event, one is engaged in the art of storytelling, not science.

Dr. Watts engages us by discussing a number of case studies that frequently challenge the conventional wisdom. For example, Dr. Watts debunks the idea that the presence of key individuals like Kevin Bacon are necessary to bridge six degrees of social separation. Using Twitter to test the Kevin Bacon hypothesis, Dr. Watts found that ordinary people were able to make all of the necessary connections to deliver messages to specific individuals located in various countries around the world. While common sense but erroneous shorthand constructs such as the Kevin Bacon hypothesis might be helpful in bringing comfort and order to individuals living in a complex world, Dr. Watts contends that together we must do better if we wish to engage in meaningful social planning and decision making.

Why should we care about any of this? For one, Dr. Watts' analysis reframes how we might view matters of social equity. As his experiments frequently prove, the libertarian philosophy makes little sense in a world that is highly dependent on shared responsibilities and mutual interactions; with implications in the way we might collectively decide how to reward the labors of corporate CEOs and bankers on the one hand, and ordinary workers on the other. For another, Dr. Watts demonstrates the validity of both top-down and bottom-up perspectives on matters of public policy. As the ability to harvest and analyze data from search engines like Google and Yahoo! as well as social networking sites such as Facebook continues to improve, Dr. Watts believes that social scientists will be better able to tap the wisdom of local communities to find solutions to global problems. In this manner, Dr. Watts hopes that sound science can do more than simply help motion picture studios better predict the potential box office for a film in a specific community; rather, he hopes that the public will attain the knowledge it needs to demand social justice.

I highly recommend this intriguing and important book to everyone.

If you are an individual who often finds themselves challenging common conceptions, you will love this book! It speaks to the reasons why what we call common sense isn't, the fact that so-called experts are no more accurate in their perceptions and predictions than the public overall, AND will challenge the way you look at the world in the future.

However, if you are a politician wanting to take credit for actions that caused change in the world, or an expert wanting to convince others that you have the answers they need, you might want to give this book a pass. It will not support anything you want it to support.

From the first page to the last, I found myself grabbing ideas, underlining them, writing notes in the margin, and totally, totally enjoying this challenging book.

Since I had recently encountered the Amazon Mechanical Turk, I was thrilled to hear both its history (it was created by Amazon to help identify duplicates in its merchandise listings) and current possible applications both in science and in marketing. Several trials within the book were done using this new potential for hiring a wide range of groups and individuals in order to test the theory and application of the points.

In fact, while the first half of the book focuses on why the models we use to examine past events and predict future trends don't work because of the complexity within individuals and even more within groups, the second half of the book offers solutions, not for long-term predictions, but for predictions of understanding the "near future" as well as what Dr. Watts calls "predicting the present." Most of these involve ways of taking advantage of internet capabilities including social networks and search engines, to map current events.

A quick example is a test concerning the use of search engines to look up flu, flu symptoms, and treatment turned out to be nearly as accurate in tracking the spread of flu in areas as tracking them through the CDC.

If you are in business, this book uses the business model of Zara (a Spanish clothing manufacturer) to demonstrate how businesses can be more effective using a "reactionary" strategy to succeed in today's world. Zara has modeled its business plan to monitor trends that are actually happening and to immediately react to them. This is the opposite of the current strategy of planning and implementing what businesses expect is the future.

In my profession, understanding the past is more important than projecting future trends, and I found Dr. Watt's insights into this area of thought to be among the most challenging I have faced since I received my Master's Degree. Why and how did individuals change history, and even more, are these individuals simply aberrations, or was history ready for them, and anyone would have done.

An example (not from the book) involves Hitler's plan for a master race. We might denigrate the Nazis for their methods, however during this same time frame, the United States was conducting its own Eugenics program, in which certain individuals were sterilized to prevent them from breeding into our gene pool. Both came from the same concepts (survival of the fit and the evolution of humankind), both were (in today's perceptions) wrong, and yet they both happened.

Obviously the uniquenesses of the two countries flavored how this particular scenario played out, but the actions were based on the same information, and responded to by individuals who felt that they were acting based upon conclusions about past events.

While obviously, this is a wonderful textbook for Sociologists, Scientists, and Historians, not to mention many other fields of science, I appreciate the practical implications for business, marketing, teaching, and for those studying for the pastorate (or already involved).

Whew - I am very glad to having been snowed in for a time to be able to spend time with this book, but it is not one to read lightly or take lightly. If you are planning on reading this book, grab your pens and highlighters and plan on some heavy-duty thinking about thinking!!!!

I am keeping this book (and all of my notes concerning it) to reread at least once a year to remind me that you can't make assumptions about the past based upon the results, that it is easy to discard all of the possibilities that didn't happen as impossible, to remind myself that just because two things happened at the same time do not mean that there is a cause and effect relationship ... and that I should never rely upon my own knowledge or a single expert in making an important decision.

Hindsight is 20-20. Everyone knows that, but disregards it. Predictions are difficult and likely to be inaccurate (except in trivial areas like weather and traffic). But everyone can explain the event in retrospect. It's obvious.

Common sense furnishes standard explanations of lots of things, and we tell ourselves stories (or the news tells us stories) to explain past events. But what if those obvious explanations are wrong? There's no way to validate most of them, and alternate explanations are easy to come up with once you think about it. No matter who won the Best Actor oscar, it's easy to explain. But if one of the other actors won, that explanation would make just as much sense.

Duncan has written a wonderful book exploring this paradox. He's great on exposing the problem. His examples are fascinating and original - no retreads of the same old behavioral economics insights here.

What to do about it? I don't know, and neither does Duncan. Alas. The condition is much easier to describe than to ameliorate. Don't expect prediction to get more accurate soon, and don't expect any policy solutions either.

But do read this well-written and insightful book. It may help you avoid a few of the more obvious mental traps, and to examine the conventional wisdom and explanations more carefully.

The core claim of this book is that many of our common-sense explanations of social behavior are demonstrably wrong. Our common sense rests on all kinds of cognitive and inferential biases, and rests on a kind of determinism that is inappropriate for a probabilistic, networked, socially determined world. For example, the uniqueness of the past makes us think that the future will be equally unique. But our predictions should really be probability distributions, and since we only replay the future once, they are fundamentally impossible to test.

Watts clearly imagines this as a kind of sociologist's response to popularizations of other disciplines, such as economics. His core message is that social science is messy and hard. That latter point bears repeating: the natural scientists in my life believe that social science is easy. But if that were true, we'd already know everything, right? Or all we'd need is a natural scientist to use their superpower skills for research in the social sciences to give us all the answers. That doesn't work, and as Watts points out, it's rocket science that's easy.

Chapter by chapter, his book goes through the reasons why it's hard to understand social outcomes. He talks about complexity, history, experiments, simulations, and many other research tools. The book is always lively , full of interesting ideas, and drawing on a wide literature.

As a social scientist, much of this was familiar to me, but many things were not. It would make good reading for first-year grad students before they arrive on campus, getting them to think about the intellectual enterprise. If you're in business, policy, administration, or other fields that need to solve problems, Watts gives you a bunch of ideas about how to think critically about your thinking.

Unfortunately, Watts doesn't have all the answers. Or all that many answers, really. He gives you a box full of tools that can help you think uncommonly about social problems. But you'll have to select the right tools yourself.

Though I am not necessarily a René Descartes fan, reading `In Everything is Obvious' one surely comes away realizing that we really do not know much. That is only after something has become fact do we really know it. Of course this sounds very logical and even `Common Sense', but the author reminds us throughout the book that common sense has a remarkable knack for peppering over complexity. Complexity with respect to emergent conditions, or results, because the behavior of the whole can not be easily related to the behavior of the parts.

In the chapter `History Is Not Such a Good Teacher After All`, the author reminds us that history is actually just a one-off event. There could be many different historical facts but we only know of the one. This is pointed out in the discussion of creeping determinism where we pay less attention than we should to things that did not happen. For example, since we are mostly concerned with success, it seems pointless, or uninteresting, to worry about the absence of success.

To vividly point this creeping determinism, or `abstract blindness' I am reminded of the WWII bombers that returned from German bomb runs. The ones that returned were all shot-up and full of holes. The General asked, `what can we do to protect the bombers'? A smart mathmatican said put extra armor where there are "no" holes. Where There are No Holes! When looked thru the lens of abstract blindness, one realizes that the bombers that did not return were the ones with holes in them that no one could see.

All in a good book that starts out fast but tapers off about halfway thru to the end as it ventures into, though appropriate, government planning that results in unintended consequences of common sense ideas.

By the time you finished 'Freakonomics', if you were new to this sort of thing you may have been convinced that you had seen the light and had obtained a whole new appreciation for looking at things - rational, quantitative, and "motivation based." It may have seemed that there were few social problems that couldn't similarly be examined using the economists' toolbox of theory and regression analysis that levitt trotted out.

"hold on there, a moment" replies this book, "everything is obvious", whose most interesting aspects resolve around the failures of "common sense" and our ability to delude ourselves with every manner of cognitive bias, including, notably, post-hoc rationalization. watts tells the story of a mega-study done after ww2 of returning US soldiers and their experiences in the war and how it was revealed that soldiers from rural backgrounds had an easier time of adapting to military life. with me so far? make sense? can you see why that might be? well, you might, but it's nonsense actually, the data showed that urban soldiers had an easier time of it, and yet in that brief instant if you're like most people you probably came up with a set of explanations as to why the notion that rural soldiers had an eaiser time of it somehow made intrinsic sense--your 'common sense' had actually just been made to fit the data, erroneous as it was.

there are a lot of tales like this, and the description of failures of common sense in the opening chapter are two are the payoff of the book. beyond that, for much of the book, the material is very much interesting, though i suspect that most readers will have seen it before - things like descriptions of cognitive biases and so forth that have been covered if not better, then at least first in books such as those by Temple University Professor John Allen Paulos, amongst many others. It's in general good reading, though the part on the 'degrees of separation' is a tough and, as far as I could tell, somewhat pointless slog (the only part of the book where i skipped a few pages). There are a few good descriptions of how the author utilized the internet to do some clever research. The last chapter (or close to it) on Justice and Fairness is near and dear to my heart, and I highly recommend it.

This book is an easy read, filled with good examples. Despite being a bit stale in the middle, I still give it five stars. Worth a read.

I don't usually read sociology books, but the title of this book piqued my curiosity and I am glad it did! This is a refreshing and easy to read book that tackles the application of common sense as a catch-all when it comes to dealing with problems and issues at a larger scale.

And by large scale the author refers to complicated problems in society, economy, politics, business, and the like. The author does not disavow common sense as it applies to individual persons dealing with the small things we deal with in every day life (and for the most part we don't even pay a lot of attention to). One great example was cleaning up a room. It is a fairly simple common-sense task for a human, but to a robot, figuring out what to clean, what to throw away, what goes where, the whole thing is a big nightmare for the robot. This, the author says, is where common sense excels for individuals.

However, when we as a society or an organized group of people (such as a corporation) try to use common sense reasoning to solve economic, social and political problems, predict how a new product or movie will do, we often have a #fail. There are so many factors to consider, so many variables, so many things that are not known until well after the fact (and sometimes not even then), so many things we subconsciously ignore, that common sense is simply not well-equipped to deal with this and can often lead us in the wrong direction. I can't really do the book justice by trying to summarize it in a couple of paragraphs here.

The second part of the book focuses on suggestions on what might work, but as you might expect with something like this, there is no silver bullet. With the author being a former physicist, there is an emphasis on data and numbers, but they are not presented as a silver bullet, more as a valuable tool. If you are a fan of physics, you will also appreciate the various cross-discipline analogies and examples.

Despite the author being a physicist-turned-sociologist, this is one of the easiest books to read. Not because it is simplistic or dumbed down, but because it just flows organically. I was actually reading this in parallel to The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos and going from Parallel Universes to this book was like doubling my reading speed. It was like running on a track with hurdles and then the hurdles disappeared!

For the more research-oriented folks, there is a list of notes in the back of the book with more details and additional references. The notes are cross-referenced from the main text of the book, so if you are interested you can jump back, and if not, you can just ignore the little numbers.

Duncan Watts has written an important and thought-provoking book on how ,,,

- Things that we think of as "common-sense" are actually quite complex, and our "common Sense" can often deceive our logic by applying simple causation to complex situations. For instance did the "Surge" in Iraq reduce the region violence or was it a much more complex combination of increased competency by the local police force, change in Iraqi leadership, and other unreported factors.

- We can't actually "Learn" from history since history does not provide us with testable situations. What does this mean? History only runs once... so we do not get the full array of potential outcomes.... we just see one. Therefore, we only learn about one of the possible outcomes - and since no two circumstances are absolutely identical we can not forward project conclusions. The best we can do is probable outcomes.

- influence - it may be a fallacy to assume that there is a select group of "influencers" who hold sway over the general public. While it may be true of Oprah (due to her role in media) it is not true over individuals. It is much more likely that chaos theory like scenarios determine the outcome of a scenario, product, or other thing

- Trying to improve models only offers slightly better predictability over very basic models. One of the examples shows that in predicting the outcome of NFL games simply picking the home team is *almost* accurate as any model that can be devised (when compared to complex Vegas models).


Lots of interesting examples to be sure, however "Everything is Obvious" is a very tedious read. I found myself interested in the examples but bogged down in the text. Rarely was I able to read more than 20 pages at one sitting So while I enjoyed the intellectual challenge I had a very difficult time retaining what I had read. While some books such as Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) is very readable and easy to digest - I had a much harder time with Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer. Call it writing style but "Everything is Obvious" reads much more like a classroom assignment.

Final Verdict - Very interesting material that is not presented in an interesting way... I know that doesn't make too much sense, but in my opinion the use of a ghost writer or other writer would have likely made this a full 5 star recommendation.

3 1/2 Stars

"Everything Is Obvious..." is an incredibly worthwhile read. I intend to refer it to as many friends and acquaintances as I can gather.
That being said, I must admit one profound disagreement.
In one of the later chapters, Mr. Watts seem to demonstrate sympathy for former New York police officer Joseph Gray after his five-to-fifteen year sentencing for second-degree manslaughter, which was passed upon him after his drunk driving resulted in the deaths of three people. He claims that the man was more a victim of bad luck and that one should hesitate before applauding the sentence when considering how many other drunk drivers "have gotten away with it."
Mr. Watts, sir, you just don't get it.
The issue isn't one of "getting away with it" or bad luck. Drunk-driving isn't an offense for philosophical or political reasons: when one is intoxicated, his physical and mental capacities are measurably impaired. That's not opinion or prejudice; it's fact. If one could consume a case of beer with no more injury to his faculties than if he were to down a case of 7-Up, there wouldn't be a problem. It's not the drunkenness that's the issue; it's the effects of the drunkenness.
One of the major points of this book is that common sense does not work in complex, multi-faceted and distant situations. Its merits come into play only when assessing simple, closer-to-home episodes.
What can be a better example of the proper use of applying common sense than not allowing intoxicated people from maneuvering multi-ton machines in the midst of dozens of other people operating similar machinery, or just simply walking?
Driving an automobile is not a right; it's a privilege. One has to prove him or herself responsible enough to deserve such a license.
I would even claim that getting intoxicated is not a right; it's also should be regarded as a privilege. And society does not owe anyone the benefit of the doubt when he or she gets loaded.
The laws against drunk-driving are not arcane ones. They have been openly around for decades. Mr. Gray, himself, probably handed out tickets to intoxicated people.
Who knows how many times Mr. Gray had previously "gotten away with it", driven a car while stoned and somehow made it to his destination without any mishap?
It was the last time, unfortunately, that resulted in the deaths of three innocent individuals and the emotional wreckage of a husband and father.
Mr. Gray is not a victim of anything; he deliberately drank himself into a stupor, he deliberately put himself behind the wheel of a car, and then he deliberately drove it out. The fact that other people do likewise yet avoid gross mishaps is irrelevant.
Personally, I would have handed the scoundrel a thirty-year sentence.