Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [143]
14. See Tversky and Kahneman (1983) for details.
15. For evidence of confidence afforded by stories, see Lombrozo (2006, 2007) and Dawes (2002, p. 114). Dawes (1999), in fact, makes the stronger argument that human “cognitive capacity shuts down in the absence of a story.”
16. For example, a preference for simplicity in explanations is deeply embedded in the philosophy of science. The famous Ockham’s razor—named for the fourteenth-century English logician William of Ockham—posits that “plurality ought never be posited without necessity,” meaning essentially that a complex theory ought never to be adopted where a simpler one would suffice. Most working scientists regard Ockham’s razor with something close to reverence—Albert Einstein, for example, once claimed that a theory “ought to be as simple as possible, and no simpler”—and the history of science would seem to justify this reverence, filled as it is with examples of complex and unwieldy ideas being swept away by simpler, more elegant formulations. What is perhaps less appreciated about the history of science is that it is also filled with examples of initially simple and elegant formulations becoming increasingly more complex and inelegant as they struggle to bear the burden of empirical evidence. Arguably, in fact, it is the capacity of the scientific method to pursue explanatory power, even at the cost of theoretical elegance and parsimony, where its real strength lies.
17. For Berlin’s full analysis of the differences between science and history, and the impossibility of remaking the latter in the image of the former, see Berlin (1960).
18. See Gaddis (2002) for a warning about the perils of generalizing, and also some examples of doing just that.
19. George Santayana (1905).
CHAPTER 6: THE DREAM OF PREDICTION
1. See Rosenbloom (2009).
2. See Tetlock (2005) for details.
3. See Schnaars (1989, pp. 9–33) for his analysis and lots of entertaining examples. See also Sherden (1998) for additional evidence of the lousy forecasting record of futurologists. See also Kuran (1991) and Lohmann (1994) for discussions of the unpredictability of political revolutions; specifically the 1989 collapse of the East Germany. And see Gabel (2009) for a retrospective look at the Congressional Budget Office’s Medicare cost predictions.
4. See Parish (2006) for a litany of intended blockbusters that tanked at the U.S. box office (although some, like Waterworld, later became profitable through foreign box office revenues and video and DVD sales). See Seabrook (2000) and Carter (2006) for some entertaining stories about some disastrous miscalculations and near-misses inside the media industry. See Lawless (2005) for some interesting background on the publisher Bloomsbury’s decision to acquire Harry Potter (for £2,500). General information about production in cultural industries is given in Caves (2000) and Bielby and Bielby (1994).
5. In early 2010, the market capitalization of Google was around $160B, but it has fluctuated as high as $220B. See Makridakis, Hogarth, and Gaba (2009a) and Taleb (2007) for lengthier descriptions of these and other missed predictions. See Lowenstein (2000) for the full story of Long-Term Capital Management.
6. Newton’s quote is taken from Janiak (2004, p. 41).
7. The Laplace quote is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace’s-demon.
8. Lumping all processes into two coarse categories is a vast oversimplification of reality, as the “complexity” of a process is not a sufficiently well understood property to be assigned anything like a single number. It’s also a somewhat arbitrary one, as there’s no clear definition of when a process is complex enough to be called complex. In an elegant essay, Warren Weaver, then vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, differentiated between what he called disorganized and organized complexity (Weaver 1958), where the former correspond to systems of very large numbers of independent entities, like molecules in a gas. Weaver’s point was that disorganized complexity