6 Quotes by Duncan J. Watts

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories – descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

Roughly speaking, it is the loosely organized set of facts, observations, experiences, insights, and pieces of received wisdom that each of us accumulates over a lifetime, in the course of encountering, dealing with, and learning from, everyday situations.

Bad things happen not because we forget to use our common sense, but rather because the incredible effectiveness of common sense in solving the problems of everyday life causes us to put more faith in it than it can bear.

In any given situation we know the point we’re trying to make, or the decision we want to support, and we choose the appropriate piece of commonsense wisdom to apply to it.

It must have been a magical time to be alive when the universe, so long an enigma, seemed suddenly to have been conquered by the mind of a single man. As Pope himself said, Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.1 For the next three centuries, the knowledge of mankind would swell inexorably, sweeping before it the mysteries of the world.