This is a book about common sense. Specifically, it’s about how when you’re told a fact it seems obvious — common sense — that it’s true. Interestingly, this can be the case even if that fact is in fact untrue. This is at least partially because common sense is mostly practical, that is it’s more concerned about “getting to the right answer”, preferably quickly, than it is about exactly how it got to that answer. It’s also partially because common sense is cultural, we map new situations to things we’ve seen previously to infer the correct answer. Different cultures have different experiences and so therefore have different common sense.
The book spends a chapter discussing the ways that humans make decisions, and how logic isn’t really the answer. We instead imagine ourselves in the projected situation and then work through what will happen. This means that we’re bad at seeing attempts to anchor our thinking, or other forms of bias. We also tend to think that incentives will work better than they actually do in the real world. That is, we are bad at predicting what factors will be important in someone’s decision making process and then apply ineffective incentives. Then in hindsight we declare the correct factors to be obvious, and then guess the next round incorrectly once more.
A good example of only looking at the attributes of something successful is considering why Facebook became the dominant social network. Its common to look at the attributes of Facebook and declare those to be why Facebook succeeded, but that’s not true. That’s just a list of the things which make Facebook the most like Facebook. You need to examine the attributes of the failed social networks as well if you’re to see why Facebook was the winner. Worst, we can’t re-run the experiment with different conditions to test theories, we only get to run history once. Therefore its not possible to validate our assertions about what mattered and what didn’t.
An interesting point made by the book is that our scientific knowledge is broken into layers: physics; chemistry; biology; and so on. While the layers are internally consistent and must not violate the rules of the layers below, it is generally not possible to derive the rules of an upper layer from the rules of the layers below it. This is apparently called “emergence”, and is an interesting idea to me. Its a particular problem for psychologists because while they may be able to reason about how individuals act by themselves, it falls apart when you try to extrapolate to groups of people. An example of this is provided in the form of social media influencers — data from Twitter shows that its actually very hard to predict when a tweet will go viral, and its not nearly as simple as everything from a particularly influential person becomes a hit.
I enjoyed this book, even though I found it a relatively slow read because I had to stop and think a lot.
Business & Economics
2011
335
From one of the world's most influential and cited sociologists, Everything is Obvious shatters the myth of common sense and points the way to a future where science promises to illuminate the shadows of the human psyche.