Flutterby™! : Everything Is Obvious

On the basis of Lyn's recommendation, I picked up Duncan Watts's Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know The Answer. I have to admit I'm not as excited about it as Lyn, but I am going to go back and re-read the second half of it to make sure I can better quantify why.

Watts makes a good case in the first half of the book that in examining data after the fact we tend to build stories within our mythological structure that reinforce why those correlations exist, and why that data reinforces our worldview. Even when that data happens to be random or made up. He does some decent takedowns of Malcolm Gladwell, and hits the Freakonomics guys with some well-deserved glancing blows.

It's the second half of the book that disappointed me. Not that I take issue with "binning" or some of the other techniques for evaluating consumer behavior, it's that he gets a little too self-promotional about what he's been doing for Yahoo! research, and seems to conflate the online world and the physical one in ways that I'm not sure hold true. As I said, I'll have to re-read.

I also raised eyebrows particularly at his discussion of scenario planning. I've seen some horrendously bad scenario planning by people who claim to have been trained by Peter Schwarz himself, but Watts's critiques of it use cherry-picked anecdotes that seem to be from people who ignored how the scenarios are supposed to be run.

Having said that, I will be re-reading the second part and trying to write up a better critique of it, and there are a few people I'll be sharing it with.