Everything Is Obvious

Duncan J. Watts (born 1971) is an Australian researcher and a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group. He is also a past external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a former professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he headed the Collective Dynamics Group. He is author of the book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age and Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer.

出版者:Crown Business

作者:Duncan J. Watts

页数:352

出版时间:2011-3-29

价格:USD 26.00

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9780385531689

图书标签:心理学社会科学社会学思维科普常识社交网络社科

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Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can CEO’s impact the performance of their companies? And does higher pay incentivize people to work hard?

If you think the answers to these questions are a matter of common sense, think again. As sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts explains in this provocative book, the explanations that we give for the outcomes that we observe in life—explanation that seem obvious once we know the answer—are less useful than they seem.

Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.

It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to have been driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these “influencers” in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.

Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as understand the present—an argument that has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.

读后感

生活中，我们有个词汇，叫“马后炮”，专指一些后见之明的、事后诸葛的家伙。 作为平凡老百姓，我们可以坦然面对这种缺陷，并且一笑了之。但如果说，在严谨的社会学研究界，也大量充斥着很多的马后炮，就不能不让人惊讶了，毕竟，这些家伙可是专业人士啊。 恰恰是专业人士...  

我们有过学问恐慌，有过知识焦虑，如果可以把知识和常识一刀两断的话，那可能还有过常识匮乏。我们的这种担心，来自于一种不足的状态，或者自认为不足的状态，所以出于本能我们会认为，消除或者消减这种担心的唯一办法就是获取、获取、再获取，只有我们学习了更多的知识，掌握...  

上Twitter已有3年，至今仍然天天发tweets，我承认我是社交媒体爱好者，尤其是Twitter——简单又奇妙 ，一条tweet只有140字符，网状的扩散路径却能指数级地放大这微小的蝴蝶振翅。 沉迷于社交网络并不是个别现象，根据皮尤（Pew ）2013年的调查，在美国，73%的成年人（18岁以上...  

用户评价

正如序言中自述的，通篇就是对社会学的一份辩护。讲得零零碎碎没有清晰逻辑严密的骨干，不过读读还是有些启发。

书评已发：别用“常识”理解复杂世界

常识不是一成不变，与特定社会环境有很大关系。对于常识公平与否的判断也很受结果产出影响左右。公民投票观察可以靠民众意见预测，但重大专业意见还是听取一线人员意见更对。

Common Sense篇看完，其中核心点似乎在说明“常识”是人类理解世界的重要框架，但是常识在运用于解释由大量社会成员的活动所造成的现象、事件时，具有很强的误导性，这种误导与人类对于简单因果关系的嗜好，以及对微观与宏观的过渡过程不明有关。

只看了首尾两章