Quotes from Duncan J. Watts

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.

In the United States, for example, two equally skilled and disciplined athletes—one a world-class gymnast and the other a world-class basketball player—are likely to enjoy wildly different degrees of fame and fortune through no fault or merit of their own.

Finally, even random differences in opportunities that arise early in one's career can accumulate, via the Matthew Effect, to generate large differences in outcomes over the course of a lifetime. Rawls's claim was that because the mechanisms of inequality are essentially accidents—whether of birth, or of talent, or of opportunity—a just society is one in which the adverse effects of these accidents is minimized.

Rawls's point was just that the rules of the game themselves should be chosen to satisfy social, not individual, ends. Bankers, in other words, are entitled to whatever they are able to negotiate with their employers, but they are not entitled to an economic system in which the financial industry is so much more profitable than any other.

common sense just "knows" what the appropriate thing to do is in any particular situation, without knowing how it knows it.7 It is largely for this reason, in fact, that commonsense knowledge has proven so hard to replicate in computers—because, in contrast with theoretical knowledge, it requires a relatively large number of rules to deal with even a small number of special cases.

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,

in order to teach a robot to imitate even a limited range of human behavior, you would have to, in a sense, teach it everything about the world.

Libertarian arguments about what would or would not be fair in a state of nature are simply irrelevant, because in a state of nature nobody would be getting a $10-million bonus.

The result is that we are tempted to infer a cause-and-effect relationship when all we have witnessed is a sequence of events. This is the post-hoc fallacy.

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.

It may be, in fact, that once a system has attained a certain level of complexity, there is no way to rule out the possibility of failure.29 If so, we need not only better tools for thinking about systemic risk, but also a better way of thinking about how to respond to systemic failures when they inevitably occur.

Together these three practices—identifying failure points, tracing problems to root causes, and searching for solutions outside the confines of existing routines—can transform the organization itself from one that offers solutions to complex problems in a centralized managerial manner into one that searches for solutions among a broad network of collaborators.29

Isaiah Berlin argued, the kinds of descriptions that historians give of historical events wouldn't have made much sense to the people who actually participated in them.

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.

Sandel therefore concludes that a just society is not one that seeks to adjudicate disputes between individuals from a morally neutral perspective, but one that facilitates debate about what the appropriate moral perspective ought to be. As Sandel acknowledges, this is likely to be a messy affair and always a work in progress, but he does not see any way around it.

In reality, the events that we label as outcomes are never really endpoints. Instead, they are artificially imposed milestones, just as the ending of a movie is really an artificial end to what in reality would be an ongoing story. And depending on where we choose to impose an "end" to a process, we may infer very different lessons from the outcome.

The real problem of prediction, in other words, is not that we are universally good or bad at it, but rather that we are bad at distinguishing predictions that we can make reliably from those that we can't.

Common sense, in other words, depends on what the sociologist Harry Collins calls collective tacit knowledge, meaning that it is encoded in the social norms, customs, and practices of the world.10

Complex systems are not really random in the same way that a coin toss is random, but in practice it's extremely difficult to tell the difference.

If the answer isn't clear to you, you're not alone—even mathematicians argue about what it means to assign a probability to a single event.

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.

There are also so many more corporations than governments that it's always possible to find success stories, thereby perpetuating the view that the private sector is better at planning than the government sector.

black swan event like the storming of the Bastille, in other words, the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to be the event itself.

The Halo Effect, in other words, turns conventional wisdom about performance on its head. Rather than the evaluation of the outcome being determined by the quality of the process that led to it, it is the observed nature of the outcome that determines how we evaluate the process.6