Reddit reviews Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us

Here's your assigned reading of the day: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Obvious-Common-Sense-Fails/dp/0307951790

tl;dr: Every interesting question in sociology has lots of potentially "obvious" answers before it's been researched. Our job is to find out which one is right and how it fits together. If he'd found that IQ explains 50% of the variance in income, people would say that that was obvious, too.

> I don't think this was the case.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but you're wrong. Since there's nothing unique or special about it, you're attributing the game's success to "what was done to get people to see it and share it." But this, too, was merely luck. Objectively, we know this must be true--otherwise Nguyen would have unlocked the key to creating a popular game, and others (including himself) could have repeated the same steps to generate the same result. Of course, they did not. I know that's hard to accept, because the human brain is wired to look for cause, and will tend to make up answers it finds plausible just to satisfy itself.

Don't worry, though, you're far from alone in this. Duncan Watts writes a great summary of this effect in Everything Is Obvious, a book everyone should read.

Warning: Long excerpt follows

>For centuries, the Mona Lisa was a relatively obscure painting languishing in the private residences of kings--still a masterpiece, to be sure, but only one among many. Even when it was moved to the Louvre, it did not attract as much attention as the works of other artists [...]. In fact, it wasn't until the twentieth century that the Mona Lisa began its meteoric rise to global brand name. And even then it wasn't the result of art critics suddenly appreciating the genius that had sat among them for so long, nor was it due to the efforts of museum curators, socialites, wealthy patrons, politicians, or kings. Rather, it began with a burglary.

> From that point [Peruggia's burglary in 1911] on, the Mona Lisa never looked back. [P]rimarily, it became a reference point for other artists [...]. As Sassoon points out, all these different people--thieves, vandals, artists, and advertisers, not to mention musicians, moviemakers, and even NASA (remember the crater on Venus?)--were using the Mona Lisa for their own purposes: to make a point, to increase their fame, or simply to use a label they felt would convey meaning to other people. But every time they used the Mona Lisa, it used them back, insinuating itself deeper into the fabric of Western culture and the awareness of billions of people. It is impossible now to imagine the history of Western art without the Mona Lisa, and in that sense it truly is the greatest of paintings. But it is also impossible to attribute its unique status to anything about the painting itself.

>This last point presents a problem because when we try to explain the success of the Mona Lisa, it is precisely its attributes on which we focus our attention. [...] To oversimplify only slightly, the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it is the best, and although it might have taken us a while to figure this out, it was inevitable that we would.

> [...] Unfortunately, however, this argument wins only at the cost of eviscerating itself. It sounds as if we're assessing the quality of a work of art in terms of its attributes, but in fact we're doing the opposite--deciding first which painting is best, and only then inferring from its attributes the metrics of quality. Subsequently, we can invoke these metrics to justify the known outcome in a way that seems rational and objective. But the result is circular reasoning. We claim to be saying that the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has the attributes X, Y, and Z. But really what we're saying is that the Mona Lisa is famous because it's more like the Mona Lisa than anything else.

> [...] Although it is rarely presented as such, this kind of circular reasoning--X succeeded because X had the attributes of X--pervades commonsense explanations for why some things succeed and others fail. For example, an article on the success of the Harry Potter books explained it this way [...] In other words, Harry Potter was successful because it had exactly the attributes of Harry Potter and not something else. [...]

> The circularity evident in commonsense explanations is important to address because it derives from what is arguably the central intellectual problem of sociology--which sociologists call the micro-macro problem. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the outcomes that sociologists seek to explain are intrinsically "macro" in nature, meaning that they involve large numbers of people. [...]

> As it turns out, something like the micro-macro problem comes up in every realm of science, often under the label "emergence." [...] Common sense, however, has a remarkable knack for papering over this complexity. [...] By ignoring the interactions between thousands or millions of individual actors, the representative agent simplifies the analysis of business cycles enormously. [...]

>Social influence of this general kind is likely ubiquitous. But unlike the simple threshold of Granovetter's thought experiment [which had determined how many people were needed in a crowd to incite a riot], the resulting decision rule is neither binary nor deterministic. Rather, when people tend to like something that other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called cumulative advantage, meaning that once, say, a song or book becomes more popular than another, it will tend to become more popular still. [...]

>Commonsense explanations, remember, focus on the thing itself--the song, the book, the company--and account for its success solely in terms of its intrinsic attributes.If we were to imagine history being somehow "rerun" many times, therefore, explanations in which intrinsic attributes were the only things that mattered would predict that the same outcome would pertain every time. By contrast, cumulative advantage would predict that even identical universes, starting out with the same set of people and objects and tastes, would nevertheless generate different cultural or marketplace winners. [...] Likewise, the success of Harry Potter, Facebook, and The Hangover would turn out to be a product of chance and timing as well as intrinsic quality.

>In real life, however, we only have one world--the one that we are living in--thus it's impossible to make the sort of "between world" comparisons that the models say we should. It may not surprise you, therefore, that when someone uses the output of a simulation model to argue that Harry Potter may not be as special as everyone thinks it is, Harry Potter fans tend not to be persuaded. Common sense tells us that Harry Potter must be special--even if the half dozen or so children's book publishers who passed on the original manuscript didn't know it at the time--because more than 350 million people bought it. And because any model necessarily makes all manner of simplifying assumptions, whenever we have to choose between questioning common sense and questioning a model, we do the latter.

As you have done. Something must have been done to get Flappy Bird to go viral. Something must have been done to "get people to see it and share it." But what? Nothing repeatable--Nguyen has not repeated his success, nor have any other indie developers achieved success by repeating Nguyen's steps, whatever they might have been.

What was done to get people to see it and share it? Nothing. It was luck. Or, more accurately, it was luck generated by cumulative advantage.

One might argue that PewDiePie's influence helped generate Fappy Bird's popularity, but this, too, is a fallacy which Watts addresses. I won't type all of that out, but there's examination of how social networks function and react to influencers. But to sum up:

>As with all commonsense explanations, it sounds reasonable and it might be right. But in claiming that "X happened because a few special people made it happen," we have effectively replaced one piece of circular reasoning with another.

There's nothing special about Flappy Bird to make it popular. Nothing unique was done to get people to see it and share it. Its success was merely a random product of circumstance. I know it doesn't seem that way, but the nice thing about the truth is that it's true whether or not we believe it.

One of my favourite books is on this exact topic (it's even subtitled "How common sense fails us"). Take a look at this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307951790. The the book explores what common sense is and isn't good for and what sociologists have to offer instead.

A recent work that would be friends with the other books here is Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer by Duncan Watts. It definitely overlaps with Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, but Watts focuses specifically on how our commonsense explanations for why things happen, often do not usefully reflect reality. He also defends the use of sociology in light of Big Data. I keep meaning to stop just lurking LessWrong so I can write a proper review there.
Amazon link

Edit to add quote: "We claim to be saying that the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has attributes X, Y, and Z. But really what we're saying is that the Mona Lisa is famous because it's more like the Mona Lisa than anything else."

But now... we're still arguing after we have the conclusion. It's still after you (and I) already know the answer. Plus, it looks like we've gone political. I'd like to avoid that.

Let's try a different example, (from a book that I am shamelessly stealing from, Everything is Obvious).

> Lazarsfeld was writing about The American Soldier, a then-recently published study of more than 600,000 servicemen that had been conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the Second World War. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings from the study that he claimed were representative of the report. For example, number two was that “Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.” “Aha,” says Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader, “that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labor than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I could have figured out on my own?”
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>Why indeed.… But Lazarsfeld then reveals that all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study actually found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their Army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place she could just as easily have reconciled them with other things that she already thought she knew: “City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing and social etiquette, and so on. That’s obvious!” But that’s exactly the point that Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious, then, as Lazarsfeld put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness.’ ”

Agreed 100%. Common sense is actually a pretty terrible method of analysis. Good book on the subject, if anyone is interested is Duncan Watts' Everything is Obvious (Link: http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Is-Obvious-Common-Sense/dp/0307951790)

> basic framework of common sense

A small dispute about this phrasing. It's not common sense, it's sense that is confined to relatively few. There is a book about this fallacy. Things are usually self evident in hindsight.