Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us

I was intrigued by this book because in my career field (fitness and nutrition) there are a lot of "obvious" things people think they know are true when in actuality they're not at all. Saturated fat will clog your arteries and give you a heart attack. You must eat "healthy" whole grains in your diet. Red meat will cause cancer. You must exercise for an hour a day. The list goes on and on and all of these things comprise what is known as conventional wisdom. They're generally accepted by people as the "well duh" stuff of life. But what if all of these things that we think are so obvious really aren't? What if the REAL obvious is just the opposite of what you've believed to be true for most of your life? That's precisely what sociology professor Duncan Watts shares in EVERYTHING IS OBVIOUS ONCE YOU KNOW THE ANSWER. There's plenty of food for thought in the pages of this book that are well worth your while in exploring.

Duncan Watts has written an important and thought-provoking book on how ,,,

- Things that we think of as "common-sense" are actually quite complex, and our "common Sense" can often deceive our logic by applying simple causation to complex situations. For instance did the "Surge" in Iraq reduce the region violence or was it a much more complex combination of increased competency by the local police force, change in Iraqi leadership, and other unreported factors.

- We can't actually "Learn" from history since history does not provide us with testable situations. What does this mean? History only runs once... so we do not get the full array of potential outcomes.... we just see one. Therefore, we only learn about one of the possible outcomes - and since no two circumstances are absolutely identical we can not forward project conclusions. The best we can do is probable outcomes.

- influence - it may be a fallacy to assume that there is a select group of "influencers" who hold sway over the general public. While it may be true of Oprah (due to her role in media) it is not true over individuals. It is much more likely that chaos theory like scenarios determine the outcome of a scenario, product, or other thing

- Trying to improve models only offers slightly better predictability over very basic models. One of the examples shows that in predicting the outcome of NFL games simply picking the home team is *almost* accurate as any model that can be devised (when compared to complex Vegas models).

Lots of interesting examples to be sure, however "Everything is Obvious" is a very tedious read. I found myself interested in the examples but bogged down in the text. Rarely was I able to read more than 20 pages at one sitting So while I enjoyed the intellectual challenge I had a very difficult time retaining what I had read. While some books such as Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) is very readable and easy to digest - I had a much harder time with Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer. Call it writing style but "Everything is Obvious" reads much more like a classroom assignment.

Final Verdict - Very interesting material that is not presented in an interesting way... I know that doesn't make too much sense, but in my opinion the use of a ghost writer or other writer would have likely made this a full 5 star recommendation.

3 1/2 Stars

Read the other reviews for a more full picture of Everything is Obvious. I'm giving a +1 to the suggestion that if you have limited time, read Taleb's The Black Swan, which I found much more informative.

I was cooking with gas and enjoying the first 200 pages of Everything is Obvious, although I really had to sit on my editor's red pencil and not mark out all the extra words that could have been skipped. Watts never says in 10 words what he could say in 20.

Then I got to the chapter on Fairness and Justice, wherein Watts argues that it's unfair to sentence a drunk driver to prison for 15 years for KILLING FOUR PEOPLE because he might not have killed the people had they not been in the intersection when he came through. Readers, I was stopped in my tracks. I still can't get my head around this one. I just read One for the Road, a history of drunk driving and the effort to control it, and that helped explain a bit of Watts' position, but still, looking over EiO today, I'm baffled.

Google "Joseph Gray Victor Herrera" to get the story for yourself. Seventeen police officers were involved in a cover up attempt.)

Other reviewers have noted that EiO appears to have "left the tracks" in the second half. I stayed on for the ride, but I simply could not bear to read anymore after page 217. It's OK to drive drunk and kill people because most people who drive drunk don't kill people? We don't give 15 year sentences to people who drive drunk, we give life sentences to people who kill other people.

Until I got to Chapter 9, I remember this as being an engaging book. After I stalled out, I began to doubt every thing the author had written. YMMV.

Common sense is extremely valuable to us in our day-to-day interactions and situations. However, common sense can fail us seriously when we are dealing with people, places or things that are further away in time or place. For example, simply because something follows something else, we attribute causality to the first factor (post hoc ergo propter hoc). This may be harmless if we are guessing why Bob from accounting was rude to Jane from marketing, but can have serious implications when we try to determine whether a certain program reduces criminal recidivism. Maybe it did; maybe it didn't. But you can't just rely on common sense intuition to make your decision (and to possibly fund millions of dollars for a program that is not really having an impact). The book has examples throughout of this phenomenon where we apply common sense to areas where its use may actually be deceptive or even harmful. This is an important resource for policy makers and others who may make decisions that impact others in a significant way.

Scientist are always saying they are close to computers that can "think' like people. This book shows just how wrong they are. It is amazing the mental gymnastics we use to convince ourselves that something is "common" knowledge. This book shows why we are a messed up species, how our own instincts can lead us down the wrong path and how some people can be so wrong in a right way. You see how culture affects our "common thinking" and what thinking "outside the box" really means. This book shows just how complex we are as a group and how hard to impossible it is to predict behavior. It is a little deep, you may have to let each chapter sink in and as with any good philosophy book, you may find yourself arguing out loud as you read it.

And while this book may not have all the answers, it does ask the right questions to get people thinking.

I get these types of books for counterintuitive insights into human behavior. Unfortunately most everything in this book was pretty common place with few real insights. Maybe it was a hazard of the topic but ultimately very little information stayed with me long term. For a more revealing look at human nature you might want to take a look at The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, which I found intriguing and memorable.

Though I am not necessarily a René Descartes fan, reading `In Everything is Obvious' one surely comes away realizing that we really do not know much. That is only after something has become fact do we really know it. Of course this sounds very logical and even `Common Sense', but the author reminds us throughout the book that common sense has a remarkable knack for peppering over complexity. Complexity with respect to emergent conditions, or results, because the behavior of the whole can not be easily related to the behavior of the parts.

In the chapter `History Is Not Such a Good Teacher After All`, the author reminds us that history is actually just a one-off event. There could be many different historical facts but we only know of the one. This is pointed out in the discussion of creeping determinism where we pay less attention than we should to things that did not happen. For example, since we are mostly concerned with success, it seems pointless, or uninteresting, to worry about the absence of success.

To vividly point this creeping determinism, or `abstract blindness' I am reminded of the WWII bombers that returned from German bomb runs. The ones that returned were all shot-up and full of holes. The General asked, `what can we do to protect the bombers'? A smart mathmatican said put extra armor where there are "no" holes. Where There are No Holes! When looked thru the lens of abstract blindness, one realizes that the bombers that did not return were the ones with holes in them that no one could see.

All in a good book that starts out fast but tapers off about halfway thru to the end as it ventures into, though appropriate, government planning that results in unintended consequences of common sense ideas.

A lot of social science books are fluffy, jokey, easy reads. First, they name groups of people and phenomenons to introduce into the lexicon, and then they teach you how to use this information to your advantage. If that's what you're looking for, you're not going to like this book. Duncan Watts does not candy-coat, and he does not hawk.

The cover of Everything is Obvious may be friendly and cute, but what's inside is provocative. And, everything he says is backed up by exhaustive research. So when he tells you you can't trust your own common sense, it's not an argument. It's just plain true.

Other books of its kind will change what you think. This book will change the way you think.

This book brings together material from a wide variety of disciplines: logic, argumentation theory, decision theory, theory of causation and counterfactuals, philosophy of science, epistemology, physics, metaphysics, psychology, statistics, artificial intelligence, complex systems, and sociology. Unfortunately, the problems that the author tackles in this book may require a formal treatment.

Watt's reveals the many ways that our explanations for "what happened" simply aren't correct. The answer may be "obvious" but it's often wrong, and few people understand the criteria or reasons for challenging accepted wisdom.

This book lights the way.

Well played, Duncan J. Watts. I have just purchased and read a book that told me things I already knew. Does not common sense dictate that one reads for the sole purpose of learning things he does not already know?

It often seems the things that interest us most about each other are the things that make us hate each other. Or dislike. Or at the very least dismiss...

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The book is well written with lot of meat. However this book is not as fun to read as Freakanomics. Several readers have reviewed the quality of meat, so dont want to dig up again.

Well written, little boring ...My one liner.

I got this book via vine voice before publishing date. But Sorry it took this long to finish the book .

I enjoyed the first half of this book very much. It addresses what common sense is, and various ways in which it can fail us, with some very interesting freakonomics-like examples. The author does a very good job of helping the reader recognize when common sense may be getting in the way of objective, scientific analysis.

The second half would have been better if the author followed more of his own advice. That half presented "uncommon sense," what he recommends we substitute where common sense is intrinsically inadequate. However, his recommendations invariably lean toward the left side of the political spectrum, especially in chapter 9, "Fairness and Justice."

A book review is neither long enough nor the proper forum to rebut all the book's arguments, but for just one example, when discussing the idea of local knowledge, wherein people closest to a problem are often able to propose the best solutions, the author frames potential solutions mainly as an issue of how to filter the relevant parts of that knowledge to make it more useful to central planners. The conservative framing, how to push more decision making authority into small local governments, isn't even mentioned. In a book purporting to teach people to scientifically avoid such biases, if omissions like that are unintentional, it undermines its credibility. If intentional, it undermines its objectivity.

I happened to finish this book on the day Congresswoman Giffords was shot. The reaction to that tragic event undoubtedly affected my reaction to this book, which is why I waited a few days to try to give myself a little distance before writing the review. If, like me, you have ever been confused how liberals can attribute such a huge amount of blame to a person's environment rather than their own responsibility for their own choices, this book will help you understand. I still don't agree, but I understand better what their thought process is. I recommend this book to conservatives for that reason. I challenge liberals to read it and play devil's advocate whenever they come across a self-affirming statement.