Duncan J. Watts > 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

“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

“something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Criticizing common sense, it must be said, is a tricky business,”
― 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

“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

“But during a crisis they wish to be treated as critical elements in a larger system to which their failure would pose an existential threat. Whether this latter claim is true because they are too big or too interconnected, or for any other reason, is actually not so important. The real point is that either they are libertarians, who should bear the full weight of their own failures as well as their successes, or else they are Rawlsians, paying their dues to the system that takes care of them. They should not be able to switch philosophies at their convenience.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“In order to be able to infer that “A causes B,” we need to be able to run the experiment many times.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“Targeted advertising of this kind is often held up as the quintessence of a scientific approach. But again, at least some of those consumers, and possibly many of them, would have bought the products anyway. As a result, the ads were just as wasted on them as they were on consumers who saw the ads and weren’t interested.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“But whenever we find ourselves describing someone’s ability in terms of societal measures of success—prizes, wealth, fancy titles—rather than in terms of what they are capable of doing, we ought to worry that we are deceiving ourselves. Put another way, the cynic’s question, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“The message of the previous three chapters is that commonsense explanations are often characterized by circular reasoning.”
― 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

“For much the same reasons, arguments about the so-called redistribution of wealth are mistaken in assuming that the existing distribution is somehow the natural state of things, from which any deviation is unnatural, and hence morally undesirable.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

“This tendency, which psychologists call creeping determinism, is related to the better-known phenomenon of hindsight bias, the after-the-fact tendency to think that we “knew it all along.”
― Duncan J. Watts, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer