The Myth of Common Sense: Why The Social World Is Less Obvious Than It Seems
This is a guest post by Duncan Watts, a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Labs, and the author of Everything is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer.
The Myth of Common Sense: Why The Social World Is Less Obvious Than It Seems
By Duncan Watts
“Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity.”
–Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly
“This is not rocket science”
–Bill Frist on fixing health care, The New York Times
As these two quotes illustrate, there is something strangely conflicted about contemporary views on government and policy. On one hand, many people are in apparent agreement that government frequently accomplishes less than it ought to, sometimes embarrassingly so. Yet on the other hand, many of these same people are also of the opinion that the failings of government do not imply any great difficulty of the problems themselves—that they are not rocket science, as it were.