Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [142]
19. For details of the models, see Watts and Dodds (2007).
20. The original Bass model is described by Bass (1969).
21. See Gladwell (2000, p. 19).
22. A number of people interpreted this result as a claim that “influentials don’t exist,” but that’s actually not what we said. To begin with, as I’ve discussed, there are so many different kinds of influentials that it would be impossible to rule them all out even if that was what we intended to do. But we didn’t intend to do that. In fact, the whole point of our models was to assume the existence of influentials and see how much they mattered relative to ordinary individuals. Another misconception regarding our paper was that we had claimed that “influentials don’t matter,” but that’s not what we said either. Rather, we found only that influentials are unlikely to play the role described by the law of the few. Whether or not influentials, defined somehow, can be reliably identified and exploited in some manner remains an open question.
23. See Adar and Adamic (2005); Sun, Rosenn, Marlow, and Lento (2009); Bakshy, Karrer, and Adamic (2009); and Aral et al. (2009) for details.
24. For details of the Twitter study see Bakshy et al (2010).
25. For the anecdote about Kim Kardashian’s $10,000 Tweets, see Sorkin (2009, b).
CHAPTER 5: HISTORY, THE FICKLE TEACHER
1. A number of sociologists have even argued explicitly that history ought to be a scientific discipline with its own laws and methods for extracting them (Kiser and Hechter 1998). Historians, meanwhile, have been more circumspect regarding the scientific status of their discipline but have nonetheless been tempted to draw analogies between their own practices and those of natural scientists (Gaddis 2002).
2. See Scott (1998) for a discussion of what he calls metis (the Greek word for “skill”), meaning the collection of formal decision procedures, informal rules of thumb, and trained instinct that characterized the performance of experienced professionals.
3. For more on creeping determinism and hindsight bias, see the classic article by Baruch Fischhoff (1982). Philosophers and psychologists disagree over how strong our psychological bias to think deterministically really is. As Roese and Olson (1996) point out, people frequently do engage in counterfactual thinking—imagining, for example, how things might have worked out “if only” some antecedent event had not taken place—suggesting that commonsense views of causality are more conditional than absolute. A more correct way to state the problem, therefore, is that we systematically overweight the likelihood of what happened relative to the counterfactual outcomes. For the purpose of my argument, however, it is sufficient that we do the latter.
4. See Dawes (2002, Chapter 7) for the full story of Flight 2605 and analysis.
5. See Dawes (2002) and Harding et al. (2002) for more on school shootings.
6. See Gladwell (2000, p. 33)
7. See Tomlinson and Cockram (2003) for details on the SARS outbreaks in the Prince of Wales Hospital and the Amoy Gardens apartment complex. Various theoretical models (Small et al. 2004; Bassetti et al. 2005; Masuda et al. 2004) have subsequently been proposed to explain the SARS epidemic in terms of superspreaders.
8. See Berlin (1997, p. 449).
9. Gaddis (2002), in fact, makes more or less this argument.
10. For the full argument, see Danto (1965).
11. For the full story of Cisco, see Rosenzweig (2007).
12. See Gaddis (2002).
13. See Lombrozo (2007) for details of the study. It should be noted that when told in simple terms the relative probabilities of the different explanations, participants did in fact choose the more complex explanation at a much higher rate. Such explicit information, however,