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Audiobook8 hours
Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer
Published by Penguin Random House Audio
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
By understanding how and when common sense fails, we can improve our understanding of the present and better plan for the future.
Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.
It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to be driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these "influencers" in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.
Watts' argument has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.
Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.
It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to be driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these "influencers" in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.
Watts' argument has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.
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Reviews for Everything Is Obvious
Rating: 3.922676907216495 out of 5 stars
4/5
97 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The book is very useful for Researchers, Marketers and of course sociologists. It would change your perception about what is “common sense”
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Well written, about the ways that common-sense doesn't really apply to complex social situations - but why we cling to erroneous common-sense explanations anyway.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eh. I enjoyed the chapter about "The Dream of Prediction", but the rest was pretty unsatisfying.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Engaging criticism of “common sense” and warning about our ability to narrativize what happened as if the sequence of events were itself causal. Maybe Apple is the most valuable company in the world because of Apple’s great decisions—but there are a lot of great decisions that didn’t turn out so well. That doesn’t mean we can never know anything, but it does mean that sociological causation is very different from physics-style causation. Watts ends up advocating for big data (it can generate patterns that are more reliable in aggregate than other kinds of predictions, at least in the absence of huge changes in behavior that are themselves hard to predict) and small-scale solutions. Instead of planning at a large scale, policymakers should look for what’s already working in a few places and try to react fast to new information–though this is of course easier said than done. In the process, he unfortunately misdescribes the “Race to the Top” education initiative, which he uses as an example of a good, market-based idea—he says it sets broad goals and lets individual school districts figure out how best to meet the goals, but actually it favors states that fire principals and teachers and substitute charters, exactly the kind of preconceived solution he crticizes elsewhere.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Watts shows us why human nature and behavior cannot be ruled by laws like the hard sciences. Watts and his buddies at Yahoo! Use the power of the Internet and social networking sites to test their theories. He finds out that a lot of things that we know and understand...we really don't.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is in two parts. Part One is brilliant and deserves five starts. Part Two is only partially successful and gets three stars.Part One, about how common sense and common-sense-like explanations fail to predict the future and tempt us to see cause and effect where it does not exist, is excellent. I've been a fan of the remarkable and revealing experiments Watts and others have carried out to back up what he says, and he successfully debunks many commonplace beliefs and business-course stories dressed up as theories. Our attempts to impose order and meaning on events of history - at both grand and local scales - mislead us into thinking we can use that knowledge to make successful decisions and chart courses, but Watts is very convincing that prediction is difficult, especially of the future.Part Two, which seeks to sketch out ways to make decisions after the debunking of so many current fads, is less successful. This is probably inevitable, in a book which is resigned to the role of luck and random chance. No quick fixes and magic bullets here.While the book is much truer, and wiser, than many business strategy books, Watts' book is unlikely to take off because it lacks the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the evangelical strategist. It is less "actionable" than some books because of its honesty. He's right, and that should count for much, but I suspect it won't in the end.