Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us, (Paperback)

from ajungherr

Very good popular science account of how one should go about thinking about and doing research on social phenomena.

from tgraettinger

Eh. I enjoyed the chapter about "The Dream of Prediction", but the rest was pretty unsatisfying.

from TomSlee

This book is in two parts. Part One is brilliant and deserves five stars. Part Two is only partially successful and gets three stars. Part One, about how common sense and common-sense-like explanations fail to predict the future and tempt us to see cause and effect where it does not exist, is exc...

from rivkat

Engaging criticism of "common sense" and warning about our ability to narrativize what happened as if the sequence of events were itself causal. Maybe Apple is the most valuable company in the world because of Apple's great decisions-but there are a lot of great decisions that didn't turn out so ...

from mojomomma

Watts shows us why human nature and behavior cannot be ruled by laws like the hard sciences. Watts and his buddies at Yahoo! Use the power of the Internet and social networking sites to test their theories. He finds out that a lot of things that we know and understand...we really don't.