If you have sometimes felt that common sense sometimes made no sense at all, you can take comfort in the fact that you are not alone in feeling that way. In his new book
Everything is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer (Crown Business, 335 pages), sociologist and physicist Duncan J. Watts argues that although we rely on common sense to understand the world, common sense is in reality an endless source of just-so stories that can be tailored to any purpose. “We can skip from day to day and observation to observation, perpetually replacing the chaos of reality with the soothing fiction of our explanations,” he says.
Watts draws on the latest scientific research to show how common sense reasoning and history mislead people into believing that they understand more about the world of human behavior than others. This, he says, is why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems often don’t succeed. He then argues that we can make ourselves better at understanding the present and at planning the future only by understanding how and when common sense fails.
In “The Trouble with Common Sense,” a review that came out in the June 24, 2011 issue of
The New York Times, Nicholas A. Christakis says
Everything is Obvious is a “penetrating and engaging book” that primary aims to debunk “methodological individualism,” the notion that one has not fully succeeded in explaining some social phenomenon until one is able to explain it “exclusively in terms of the thoughts, actions and intentions of individual people.” In the book, Watts argues that no matter how well people might understand the parts of the phenomenon, they won’t necessarily get a complete understanding of the whole phenomenon—a state of affairs that makes common sense unreliable.
Read an excerpt of Duncan Watts’ Everything is Obvious in the Random House website now!Read Nicholas A. Christakis’s “The Trouble with Common Sense” in The New York Times now! TO BE VIEWED, THIS PARTICULAR BOOK REVIEW NOW REQUIRES A NEW YORK TIMES SUBSCRIPTION ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Duncan Watts is a professor of sociology at Columbia University and a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research. A former officer in the Royal Australian Navy, he holds a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University. He is the author of
Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness and
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. His research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in such journals as
Nature,
Science,
Physical Review Letters, and the
American Journal of Sociology.
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:In the essay “I’m O.K., You’re a Psychopath,” which came out in the June 17, 2011 issue of
The New York Times, Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom reviews Jon Ronson’s irreverent bestseller,
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. Bloom says that the book lists all the items on the standard diagnostic test to help you find out by yourself whether you are a psychopath, including such traits as “glibness/superficial charm,” “lack of remorse or guilt,” and “promiscuous sexual behavior.” Bloom says that a psychologist had told Ronson about that test: “If you are bothered at the thought of scoring high, then don’t worry. You’re not a psychopath.”
Read a review of "The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry" in PublishersWeekly.com now!Read Paul Bloom's "I'm OK., You're a Psychopath" in the June 17, 2011 issue of The New York Times now! THIS REVIEW IS NOW PROTECTED BY A PAYWALL
