Quotes from Duncan J. Watts

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.

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.

something is wrong with the entire argument of 'obviousness.

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.

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.

Creeping determinism means that we pay less attention than we should to the things that don't happen.

Together, creeping determinism and sampling bias lead commonsense explanations to suffer from what is called the post-hoc fallacy.

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.

people systematically overestimate both the pain they will experience as a consequence of anticipated losses and the joy they will garner from anticipated gains.

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

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.

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

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.

The net result is that common sense is wonderful at making sense of the world, but not necessarily at understanding it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mintzberg's emergent strategy, Peretti's mullet strategy, crowdsourcing, and field experiments—are really just variations on the same general theme of "measuring and reacting.

The real problem with relying on experts, however, is not that they are appreciably worse than nonexperts, but rather that because they are experts we tend to consult only one at a time.

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.

This is the strategy paradox. The main cause of strategic failure, Raynor argues, is not bad strategy, but great strategy that just happens to be wrong. Bad strategy is characterized by lack of vision, muddled leadership, and inept execution—not the stuff of success for sure, but more likely to lead to persistent mediocrity than colossal failure.