Quotes from Duncan J. Watts

The problem, in fact, is not that there is anything wrong with evaluating processes in terms of outcomes—just that it is unreliable to evaluate them in terms of any single outcome.

If the first type of commonsense error is that our mental model of individual behavior is systematically flawed, the second type is that our mental model of collective behavior is even worse.

The source of the outrage, remember, isn't that bankers got paid lots of money—because we always knew that—but rather that they got paid lots of money for what now seems like disastrously bad performance.

The third and final type of problem with commonsense reasoning is that we learn less from history than we think we do, and that this misperception in turn skews our perception of the future.

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.