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Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer QUOTES

Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness. "

― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " Criticizing common sense, it must be said, is a tricky business, "

― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " The net result is that 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

14 " By providing ready explanations for whatever particular circumstances the world throws at us, commonsense explanations give us the confidence to navigate from day to day and relieve us of the burden of worrying about whether what we think we know is really true, or is just something we happen to believe. "

― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

15 " We’ll also adopt a fairly strict pay-for-performance model in which you get paid nothing in your bad years—no cheating, like guaranteed bonuses or repriced stock options allowed—but you receive a very generous bonus, say $10 million, in your good years. At first glance this arrangement seems fair—because you only get paid when you perform. But a second glance reveals that over the long run, the gains that you make for your employer are essentially canceled out by your losses; yet your compensation averages out at a very handsome $5 million per year. "

― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

16 " Commenting on an early paper by the Nobel laureate Gary Becker, the economist James Duesenberry famously quipped that “economics is all about choice, while sociology is about why people have no choices. "

― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

17 " To be sure that we are not just falling for the Halo Effect, we really need a different measure of performance altogether—one that assesses individual skill directly rather than by inferring it from outcomes that might be determined by forces beyond the individual’s control. "

― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

18 " Predicting black swans, in other words, requires us not only to see the future outcome about which we’re making a prediction but also to see the future beyond that outcome, because only then will its importance be known. "

― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

19 " Only once this story has been completed and agreed upon can we say what the relevant events were, or which were the most important. Thus it follows that predicting the importance of events requires predicting not just the events themselves but also the outcome of the social process that makes sense of them. "

― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer

20 " Predictions about complex systems, in other words, are highly subject to the law of diminishing returns: The first pieces of information help a lot, but very quickly you exhaust whatever potential for improvement exists. "

― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer