Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [71]
Likewise, when we look to the past, we do not feel any confusion about what we mean by the “events” that happened, nor does it seem difficult to say which of these events were important. And just as the uniqueness of the past causes us to think of the future as unique as well, so too does the apparent obviousness of past events tempt us into thinking that we ought to be able to anticipate which events will be important in the future. Yet what these commonsense notions overlook is that this view of the past is a product of a collective storytelling effort—not only by professional historians but also by journalists, experts, political leaders, and other shapers of public opinion—the goal of which is to make sense of “what happened.” Only once this story has been completed and agreed upon can we say what the relevant events were, or which were the most important. Thus it follows that predicting the importance of events requires predicting not just the events themselves but also the outcome of the social process that makes sense of them.
FROM COMMON SENSE TO UNCOMMON SENSE
For the purpose of going about our everyday business, none of this confusion may cause us serious problems. As I argued earlier, common sense is extraordinarily good at navigating particular circumstances. And because everyday decisions and circumstances are effectively broken up into many small chunks, each of which we get to deal with separately, it does not matter much that the sprawling hodgepodge of rules, facts, perceptions, beliefs, and instincts on which common sense relies forms a coherent whole. For the same reason, it may not matter much that commonsense reasoning leads to us think that we have understood the cause of something when in fact we have only described it, or to believe that we can make predictions that in fact we cannot make. By the time the future has arrived we have already forgotten most of the predictions we might have made about it, and so are untroubled by the possibility that most of them might have been wrong, or simply irrelevant. And by the time we get around to making sense of what did happen, history has already buried most of the inconvenient facts, freeing us to tell stories about whatever is left. In this way, we can skip from day to day and observation to observation, perpetually replacing the chaos of reality with the soothing fiction of our explanations. And for everyday purposes, that’s good enough, because the mistakes that we inevitably make don’t generally have any important consequences.
Where these mistakes do start to have important consequences is when we rely on our common sense to make the kinds of plans that underpin government policy or corporate strategy or marketing campaigns. By their very nature, foreign policy or economic development plans affect large numbers of people over extended periods of time, and so do need to work consistently across many different specific contexts. By their very nature, effective marketing or public health plans do depend on being able to reliably associate cause and effect, and so do need to differentiate scientific explanation from mere storytelling. By their very nature, strategic plans, whether for corporations or political parties, do necessarily make predictions about the future, and so do need to differentiate predictions that can be made reliably from those that cannot. And finally, all these sorts of plans do often have consequences of sufficient magnitude—whether financial, or political, or social—that it is worth asking whether or not there is a better, uncommonsense way to go about making them. It is therefore to the virtues of uncommon sense, and its implications for prediction, planning, social justice, and even social science, that we now turn.
PART TWO
UNCOMMON SENSE
CHAPTER 7
The Best-Laid Plans
The message of the previous chapter is that the kinds of predictions