Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer Kindle Edition

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.

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.