Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [0]
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Watts, Duncan J., 1971–
Everything is obvious : once you know the answer /
Duncan Watts. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Thought and thinking. 2. Common sense. 3. Reasoning.
I. Title.
BF441.W347 2011
153.4–dc22
2010031550
eISBN: 978-0-385-53169-6
Jacket design by Laura Duffy
Jacket Photographs © George Diebold Photography / Getty Images
v3.1
For Jack and Lily
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE A Sociologist’s Apology
PART I COMMON SENSE
CHAPTER 1 The Myth of Common Sense
CHAPTER 2 Thinking About Thinking
CHAPTER 3 The Wisdom (and Madness) of Crowds
CHAPTER 4 Special People
CHAPTER 5 History, The Fickle Teacher
CHAPTER 6 The Dream of Prediction
PART II UNCOMMON SENSE
CHAPTER 7 The Best-Laid Plans
CHAPTER 8 The Measure of All Things
CHAPTER 9 Fairness and Justice
CHAPTER 10 The Proper Study of Mankind
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
About the Author
PREFACE
A Sociologist’s Apology
In January 1998, about halfway through my first year out of graduate school, my housemate at the time handed me a copy of New Scientist magazine containing a book review by the physicist and science writer John Gribbin. The book Gribbin was reviewing was called Tricks of the Trade, by the Chicago sociologist Howard Becker, and was mostly a collection of Becker’s musings on how to do productive social science research. Gribbin clearly hated it, judging Becker’s insights to be the kind of self-evident checks that “real scientists learn in the cradle.” But he didn’t stop there. He went on to note that the book had merely reinforced his opinion that all of social science was “something of an oxymoron” and that “any physicist threatened by cuts in funding ought to consider a career in the social sciences, where it ought to be possible to solve the problems the social scientists are worked up about in a trice.”1
There was a reason my roommate had given me this particular review to read and why that particular line stuck in my head. I had majored in physics at college, and at the time when I read Gribbin’s review I had just finished my PhD in engineering; I had written my dissertation on the mathematics of what are now called small-world networks.2 But although my training had been in physics and mathematics, my interests had turned increasingly toward the social sciences and I was just beginning what turned out to be a career in sociology. So I felt that in a sense I was embarking on a miniature version of Gribbin’s proposed experiment. And to be honest, I might have suspected that he was right.
Twelve years later, however, I think I can say that the problems sociologists, economists, and other social scientists are “worked up about” are not going to be solved in a trice, by me or even by a legion of physicists. I say this because since the late 1990s many hundreds, if not thousands of physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and other “hard” scientists have taken an increasing interest in questions that have traditionally been the province of the social sciences—questions about the structure of social networks, the dynamics of group formation, the spread of information and influence, or the evolution of cities and markets. Whole fields have arisen over the past decade with ambitious names like “network science” and “econophysics.” Datasets of immense proportions have been analyzed, countless new theoretical models have been proposed, and thousands of papers have been published, many of them in the world’s leading science journals, such as Science, Nature, and Physical Review Letters. Entire new funding programs have come into existence to support these new research directions. Conferences on topics such