Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer [ハードカバー]

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.