An uncommon approach to forecasting and planning.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne
• Position: The Bookshelf

Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer

By Duncan J. Watts

Crown Business

201 352 pages, $26

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The premise of Everything is Obvious is that social sciences are afflicted and diminished by the application of common sense. Of course, Watts' assertion runs counter to the commonly expressed notion that insufficient common sense is applied to matters of public policy. To better understand Watts' point, it first helps to have a definition of common sense. The author cites two features that differentiate common sense from other forms of knowledge. First, common sense is practical--it aims to provide answers of immediate use and is not concerned with the reasons behind an answer. Second, unlike theory-based systems of knowledge, common sense makes no effort to codify knowledge into categories or laws. Rather, common sense is just "known"--drawn from an individual's participation in society.

THE TROUBLE WITH COMMON SENSE

While common sense is very useful for successfully navigating the day-to-day requirements of life in a society, it is less helpful for dealing the complex, multi-faceted questions that characterize the social sciences. Watts describes three main limitations of common sense:

1. When considering individual behavior, common sense focuses on things of which we are conscious, such as incentives, motivations, and beliefs. Cognitive science research tells us that unconscious, less visible factors also have great influential over individual behavior.

2. When considering group or collective issues, common sense relies on "representative individuals" such as "the market," "the public," etc. This over-generalizes the complex interactions inherent to group behavior.

3. When considering past events, we develop stories to explain them.

These stories often oversimplify, ignore different possible outcomes, and otherwise cause us to overlook salient factors and ignore the possibility of unknowable factors that limit the applicability of past events to the future. Hence, we rely more on stories that explain past events to inform future actions than we should.

These flaws of common sense lead to a number of other failings of rationality. Some of the flaws explored in Everything is Obvious include:

* The popularity of a work of art (books, music, etc.) is commonly attributed to the quality of the work itself. However, social science experimentation shows that increasing popularity is often a function of existing popularity or...