Quotes from Duncan J. Watts

scenario planners attempt to sketch out a wide range of these hypothetical futures, where the main aim is not so much to decide which of these scenarios is most likely as to challenge possibly unstated assumptions that underpin existing strategies.18

When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious, then, as Lazarsfeld put it, "something is wrong with the entire argument of 'obviousness.' "5

In other words, our perceptions of who influences us may say more about social and hierarchical relations than influence per se.

In other words, the shift from "predict and control" to "measure and react" is not just technological—although technology is needed—but psychological.

What it means, though, is that the law of the few is not one, but two hypotheses that have been mashed together: first that some people are more influential than others; and second, that the influence of these people is greatly magnified by some contagion process that generates social epidemics.

The reason is simply that when influence is spread via some contagious process, the outcome depends far more on the overall structure of the network than on the properties of the individuals who trigger it.

Just as forest fires require a conspiracy of wind, temperature, low humidity, and combustible fuel to rage out of control over large tracts of land, social epidemics require just the right conditions to be satisfied by the network of influence.

When we hear about a large forest fire, of course, we don't think that there must have been anything special about the spark that started it. Indeed, such an idea would be laughable. Yet when we see something special happen in the social world, we are instantly drawn to the idea that whoever started it must have been special also.

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.

Even though the Kim Kardashians of the world were indeed more influential than average, they were so much more expensive that they did not provide the best value for the money. Rather, it was what we called ordinary influencers, meaning individuals who exhibit average or even less-than-average influence, who often proved to be the most cost-effective means to disseminate information.

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.

In a network of tens of millions of users, ten thousand retweets doesn't seem like that big a number, but what our data showed is that even that is almost impossible to achieve. For practical purposes, therefore, it may be better to forget about the large cascades altogether and instead try to generate lots of small ones. And for that purpose, ordinary influencers may work just fine.

It is ironic in a way that the law of the few is portrayed as a counterintuitive idea because in fact we're so used to thinking in terms of special people that the claim that a few special people do the bulk of the work is actually extremely natural.

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.

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

In order to be able to infer that "A causes B," we need to be able to run the experiment many times.

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?

But rather than producing doubt, the absence of "counterfactual" versions of history tends to have the opposite effect—namely that we tend to perceive what actually happened as having been inevitable.

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." In

It sounds as if we're assessing the quality of a work of art in terms of its attributes, but in fact we're doing the opposite—deciding first which painting is the best, and only then inferring from its attributes the metrics of quality.

But really what we're saying is that the Mona Lisa is famous because it's more like the Mona Lisa than anything else.

Biology doesn't really have universal laws either, and yet biologists still manage to make progress.

On a crowded train, for example, it's no big deal if you're squeezed in against other people. But if someone stands right next to you when the train is empty, it's actually kind of repellant

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.