Podcast appearances and mentions of duncan watts

Welcome to YouTube Festival Spotlight, a three-part podcast series created in partnership with Google, offering an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the festival while highlighting top brands on YouTube.In the second episode of the miniseries, IAB UK's CMO James Chandler meets with Domino's CMO, Sarah Barron and Google's Senior Industry Manager, Duncan Watts, to discuss the fascinating actionable insights Domino's discovered by digging deeper into their YouTube advertising data.YouTube offers advertisers unprecedented performance data. But what data exactly? And why is it so impactful in the right hands? The trio discuss how Domino's proved the power of data-driven decision-making in maximising the effectiveness of YouTube advertising and how running brand and performance campaigns concurrently on YouTube resulted in a 45% higher ROI than either campaign type alone. Discover Domino's YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1328RJ5y-TrR2oRq9fBYw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We find ourselves living in a time of great complexity and flux, where the very fabric of our societies is being rewoven by the rise of artificial intelligence and the interplay of complex systems. How do we make sense of a world that is undeniably interconnected, with increasingly porous boundaries between nature and culture, human and machine, science and art? Paul Wong is reshaping that conversation, drawing on science, philosophy, and art. Origins Podcast WebsiteFlourishing Commons NewsletterShow Notes:Buckminster Fuller (07:40)Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead (09:00)Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin (11:00)Commonwealth Grants Commission (13:10)Range by David Epstein (15:00)David Krakauer (15:20)Claude Shannon and information theory (17:10)Chaos by James Gleick (20:00)Duncan Watts, Barabási Albert-László , and network analysis (24:20)Networks the lingua franca of complex systems (25:20)Stephen Wolfram (25:30)Open Science (28:20)Australian National University School of Cybernetics (28:50)Australian Research Data Commons (29:50)Genevieve Bell (31:20)Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (32:30)Sara Hendren on Origins and Sketch Model (36:30)What he tells his students (38:00)Alex McDowell on Origins (41:00)The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent and Fritjof Capra (47:30)Tao Te Ching (48:20)Morning routine (49:30)Lightning round (53:40)Book: Special relativity and Dr. SeussPassion: MusicHeart sing: Stitching together cybernetics, complexity, and improvisation Screwed up: Many thingsFind Paul online: https://cybernetics.anu.edu.au/people/paul-wong/'Five-Cut Fridays' five-song music playlist series  Paul's playlistLogo artwork by Cristina GonzalezMusic by swelo on all streaming platforms or @swelomusic on social media

Yogi Berra once said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Philip Tetlock joins Vasant Dhar in episode 31 of Brave New World to discuss what  superforecasters do consistently well -- and how we can improve our judgement and decision-making. Useful resources: 1. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction -- Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. 2. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? -- Philip Tetlock. 3. Daniel Kahneman on How Noise Hampers Judgement -- Episode 21 of Brave New World. 4. Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer -- Duncan Watts. 5. The Hedgehog and the Fox -- Isiah Berlin. 6. What do forecasting rationales reveal about thinking patterns of top geopolitical forecasters? -- Christopher W Karvetski, Carolyn Meinel, Daniel T Maxwell, Yunzi Lu, Barbara A.Mellers and Philip E.Tetlock. 7. Terry Odean on How to Think about Investing -- Episode 23 of Brave New World. 8. Reciprocal Scoring: A Method for Forecasting Unanswerable Questions -- Ezra Karger, Joshua Monrad, Barb Mellers and Philip Tetlock. 9. The Signal and the Noise -- Nate Silver. 10. FiveThirtyEight.

Duncan Watts, the Stevens University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is a living legend. HIs paper, Collective Dynamics of Small-World Networks, is one of the most cited papers in the history of sociology. (There are Nobel Prize winners who have fewer citations in their career than that single paper by Duncan.) And while his name is not well known outside of academia, he has transformed multiple disciplines with his path breaking work in what is now known as “network science” – a blend of computer science, sociology, and mathematics that has changed the way we think about human behavior. And by “we”, I include me. As a young and aspiring social scientist in the early 2000s, I came across Duncan's work and was blown away by what it seemed to show. Human beings, it seemed, operated as if they were just nodes in a network. And you could no more understand the behavior of a single human, in isolation, than you could understand the human brain by looking at a single neuron. It was the connections between us, and not our individual characteristics, that drive change. And it turns out that, when we look at those connections, human beings are far closer to each other than you might think. Indeed, no matter how big a society gets, human beings seem to follow a rule that has been described as Six Degrees of Separation. This insight, and Duncan's other work on networks, led me down a strange and circuitous path, from law professor to animal rights activist. You'll hear about this in the podcast. But the most important application of his work, in my life, was the formation of the grassroots animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. You see, Duncan's research on networks showed that it wasn't necessarily the most connected people –the Oprah Winfreys or the Barack Obamas – who were driving change. Rather, it was networks of easy-to-activate ordinary people who were causing cascades of change. DxE was an attempt to deploy this research to build a movement for animal rights. This conversation is particularly important right now. I am in my second day of trial, in a felony trial that could land me in prison for years. But the industry, which is attempting to cut the head off the snake, is destined to fail. The reason is simple: they simply don't understand how social change works. It's not the leaders, but the masses of people who form the movement that the leaders represent, who ultimately drive change. And when you take out one leader, new leaders rise up. That is one of the many reasons why, no matter what happens in this trial, the movement will win.There are a lot of other practical tips, about living a good and productive life, that you'll get from this podcast. For example, you'll learn how to think about risk. And how creativity stems from unexpected social connections. And how a legendary social scientist maintains his intellectual humility. But maybe the most important thing we can learn is to stay open. Especially when people are making efforts to hurt you – including imprisonment, in my case – it's easy to stay closed off. But Duncan's work shows us that it's the connections we make, and not the ones we close off, that will ultimately create change. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and RandomnessSix Degrees: The Science of a Connected AgeEverything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails UsMusic by Moby: Everything That Rises

Episode Notes We love to think we know why success happens, but do we really? Duncan Watts is a computational social scientist who is here to discuss his research and his amazing book about how common sense fails us. Whether it's a famous piece of art, a best-selling book, a blockbuster movie, or a successful person, success is far more random than we realize. Follow Duncan on Twitter @duncanjwatts Get a copy of Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer Get your free books by Chris here: https://bit.ly/3vkRsb6 Follow @TheRewiredSoul on Twitter and Instagram Subscribe to The Rewired Soul Substack Support The Rewired Soul: Get books by Chris Support on Patreon Try BetterHelp Online Therapy (affiliate) Donate

Whether teams or individuals are better at accomplishing tasks depends on the complexity of the work according to a new study co-authored by Wharton's Duncan Watts. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Whether teams or individuals are better at accomplishing tasks depends on the complexity of the work, according to a new study co-authored by Wharton's Duncan Watts.

Whether teams or individuals are better at accomplishing tasks depends on the complexity of the work, according to a new study co-authored by Wharton's Duncan Watts.

Steven Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. Early in his career, he worked on a variety of problems in mathematical biology, including the geometry of supercoiled DNA, the dynamics of the human sleep-wake cycle, the topology of three-dimensional chemical waves, and the collective behavior of biological oscillators, such as swarms of synchronously flashing fireflies. In the 1990s, his work focused on nonlinear dynamics and chaos applied to physics, engineering, and biology. Several of these projects dealt with coupled oscillators, such as lasers, superconducting Josephson junctions, and crickets that chirp in unison. In the past few years, this has led him into such topics as the role of crowd synchronization in the wobbling of London's Millennium Bridge on its opening day, and the dynamics of structural balance in social systems. His best-known research contribution is his 1998 Nature paper on "small-world" networks, co-authored with his former student Duncan Watts. It's the sixth most highly cited paper—on any topic—in physics. Strogatz's writing includes five books. His book Sync was chosen as a Best Book of 2003 by Discover Magazine. His 2009 book The Calculus of Friendship was called "a genuine tearjerker" and "part biography, part autobiography and part off-the-beaten-path guide to calculus". His 2012 book, The Joy of x, won the 2014 Euler Book Prize. His latest book is Infinite Powers, which, recounts the history of calculus and explains how it works and why it makes our lives immeasurably better. http://www.stevenstrogatz.com/ 00:00:00 Intro 00:03:20 Who was Herman Wouk and why do you start you book with him? 00:08:38 Should we train mathematicians to be good communicators? 00:16:19 On the significance of time, and the entropy of happiness. Is time the emotional dimension? 00:17:51 Small world theory, and one of the most cited papers of all time. 00:21:30 The thermodynamics of happiness and family size. 00:30:10 Can anyone understand infinity? 00:46:33 Are we becoming too connected? 00:53:44 What do you think about the idea that God in science? 00:57:03 The history of science! Carefully. 01:08:22 Intuition first, rigor later. 01:13:21 Is string theory to beautiful to be wrong? 01:17:12 Final Thrilling Three: Ethical Will, Billion Year Monument, Advice to your younger self. Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php

If bail decisions were made by an Artificial Intelligence instead of judges, repeat crime rates among applicants could be cut by 25%. That is because an AI is consistent in its judgements: human judges are not.   This variation in in bail decisions, as well as in sentencing, and many medical diagnoses and underwriting decisions are all examples of what Cass Sunstein calls "Noise" - unwanted variation in professional judgement, which is the theme of his new book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement, co authored with Danny Kahneman and Olivier Sibony. Professional judgement and discretion sound great in theory - especially to the professionals themselves - but in practice they end up creating a lottery in some high-stakes situations. He tells me why there should be statues of the legal reformer Marvin Frankel all across the land; how we can reduce the "creep factor" of AI decision-making; how early movers influence opinion especially through social media, and much more.  Cass Sunstein Cass Sunstein is a professor at Harvard Law School, as well as the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He has written hundreds of articles and numerous books, ranging from constitutional law to Star Wars. He has also served in several government positions, formerly in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in Obama's first administration and currently in the Department of Homeland Security to shape immigration laws. Sunstein's influence is wide-reaching, most notably from his work on advancing the field of behavioral economics, making him one of the most frequently cited scholars. He is also a recipient of the Holberg Prize and has several appointments in global organizations, including the World Health Organization.  More from Cass Sunstein Read “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement” co-authored with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony Read his widely influential 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” co-authored with Richard Thaler, as well as his later book “Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism”  Dig into his work on “norm cascades”, as well as how group polarization works in jury pools  Check out his previous work on jury behavior with Kahneman including “Assessing Punitive Damages” or “Are Juries Less Erratic than Individuals?”  Also mentioned Cass mentioned the 2007 asylum study by Schoenholtz, et al. titled “Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication” I referred to this NBER paper by Eren & Mocan showing that the behavior of judges can be influenced by arbitrary factors, including by the outcome of local sports games.  Cass brought up the work of Sendhil Mullainathan, which includes a study on “Human Decisions and Machine Predictions” and another on “Who Is Tested for Heart Attack and Who Should Be” We discussed the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 which imposed guidelines for criminal sentencing but was essentially dismantled in a 2004 Supreme Court ruling  Learn more about the APGAR infant score  Jim Surowiecki, the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” discusses the weight of the cow parable on an episode of Planet Money Yet the wisdom of crowds phenomenon is often diminished when the group discusses their judgements and are exposed to social influence, as demonstrated by the study: “How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect”  In 2006, Duncan Watts, along with two co-authors, explored how early downloads were instrumental in predicting popularity in their article “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market”  I quoted John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism, “Men often, from infirmity of character, make their election for the nearer good, though they know it to be the less valuable”  Cass referred to Mill's harm principle, something he expands upon here. We also discussed Patrick Deneen's book “Why Liberalism Failed”  The Dialogues Team Creator: Richard Reeves Research: Ashleigh Maciolek Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)

SHOWNOTES: 00:17 Geburtstag! Zwei sogar! 40. Sendung! Ein Jahr Podcast! Und wir haben ein sehr spezielles Geburtstagsgeschenk, dass wir vor euch unboxen. 06:04 Wir schauen auf den Nahostkonflikt, aber wollen vor allem auf die soziamedialen Phänomene eingehen. Vom Antisemitismus in Deutschland kommen wir zu Laschet und Maaßen. Am Ende fragen wir wieviel Spott in eine Dallmayertasse passt und wagen eine Tribalismus-Trias. 12:59 Ein unvollständiger und natürlich nicht genug in die Tiefe gehender Rückblick, was gerade im nahen Osten passiert. 19:26 Es ist komplex. 21:27 Wie wurde der Mensch zum Mensch? Koordination, Interaktion, Kommunikation und Gruppenzugehörigkeiten. Friedemann erklärt Tribalismus bzw. Neotribalismus. 31:41 Wie positionieren sich Menschen in Deutschland, kann man sich nicht nicht positionieren und wie verhalten wir uns zum hiesigen Antisemitismus? 39:40 Auch Medienfiguren agieren hochgradig tribalistisch: wir sind bei Maaßen und Laschet. Über die Penrosentreppen-Logik, die in Sackgassen umlenkt und wir wollen gar nicht wissen, was Maaßen im Keller macht. 51:09 Friedemann erklärt inwiefern Laschet ein tribalistischer Hausmeister der CDU sein und alles dafür tun wird an Maaßen zu verteidigen. 57:55 Was haben der Weinabend mit der Freundin, eine Reise nach Sylt, eine teure Espressomaschine und ein kolumbianisches Au Pair mit Tribalismus zu tun? 1:18:32 Wir haben alle eine kleine Käuflichkeit. Samira erklärt das Schwellenwertmodell von Mark Granovetter aus der Diffusionsforschung. ABER ACHTUNG SAMIRA HAT SICH VERSPROCHEN: Mark Granovetter war der erste Soziologie, der das Modell populär gemacht hat. Duncan Watts hat es revitalisiert. (SAMIRA bittet um Entschuldigung!) Wir versprechen: wir kriegen es hin "Und morgen die ganze Welt"!

Hi Everyone! Episode 1 of Noteworthy is now available! For our inaugural episode Duncan and I talk about our mutual love for music, the effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the world around us and how we can look to music and the arts for a ray of hope as we move towards social and economic recovery. New Episodes of Noteworthy will be released every Tuesday evening with new guests, new stories and more music to add to our Quarantine Playlist so don’t forget to subscribe. You can find Noteworthy on Spotify and Apple Music with the addition of Google Podcasts in the next few weeks. Noteworthy Quarantine Playlisthttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/2SIlrZKg1mkGHcEsaxuBbA?si=Pefo5BqHRW6U8qUTQ2dApAOn the Ground by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4165-on-the-groundLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Civil couldn't convince enough people that blockchain and crypto-economics were the answer to journalism’s problems. It didn't even come close to its $8m goal. But, #failure is common in the tech world. And so are pivots. On this episode, Civil Media CEO Matthew Iles acknowledges the screw-ups and explains why the company is still solvent. Plus, the second half of our Twitter and 'misinformation' explainer with research from the Knight Foundation. Can you, lawmakers, or Twitter do anything to stop the falsehoods from flowing? Yes, actually. GO DEEPER: The Knight Foundation's report on Misinformation and Twitter includes unusual and beautiful mapping of tweets. Twitter plans to ban 'dehumanizing speech' and measure 'conversational health'. Civil's mea culpa and Nieman Lab's analysis of the token-sale failure. In his TED talk, sociologist Duncan Watts explains why common sense doesn't apply in the digital world. Learning from the Civic Tech graveyard. The New Yorker's excellent feature on the weird world of crypto. Who You’ll Hear: Manoush Zomorodi (@manoushz) Jen Poyant (@jpoyant) Vlad Barash Matthew Iles (@matthewiles) ZigZag is the business show about being human. Join a community of listeners riding the twists and turns of late-capitalism, searching for a kinder, more sustainable way. Manoush Zomorodi and Jen Poyant investigate how work and business impact our wellbeing and the planet we live on. On Seasons 4 and 5, hear from rebels and visionaries with radical ideas on how we can build stable lives, careers, and companies. **If you’re also interested in Jen and Manoush’s personal story and their adventures in starting their own business with a little help from blockchain technology, listen to the first three seasons, starting with Season 1, Chapter 1.

Civil couldn't convince enough people that blockchain and crypto-economics were the answer to journalism’s problems. It didn't even come close to its $8m goal. But, #failure is common in the tech world. And so are pivots. On this episode, Civil Media CEO Matthew Iles acknowledges the screw-ups and explains why the company is still solvent. Plus, the second half of our Twitter and 'misinformation' explainer with research from the Knight Foundation. Can you, lawmakers, or Twitter do anything to stop the falsehoods from flowing? Yes, actually. GO DEEPER: The Knight Foundation's report on Misinformation and Twitter includes unusual and beautiful mapping of tweets. Twitter plans to ban 'dehumanizing speech' and measure 'conversational health'. Civil's mea culpa and Nieman Lab's analysis of the token-sale failure. In his TED talk, sociologist Duncan Watts explains why common sense doesn't apply in the digital world. Learning from the Civic Tech graveyard. The New Yorker's excellent feature on the weird world of crypto. Who You’ll Hear: Manoush Zomorodi (@manoushz) Jen Poyant (@jpoyant) Vlad Barash Matthew Iles (@matthewiles) ZigZag is the business show about being human. Join a community of listeners riding the twists and turns of late-capitalism, searching for a kinder, more sustainable way. Manoush Zomorodi and Jen Poyant investigate how work and business impact our wellbeing and the planet we live on. On Seasons 4 and 5, hear from rebels and visionaries with radical ideas on how we can build stable lives, careers, and companies. **If you’re also interested in Jen and Manoush’s personal story and their adventures in starting their own business with a little help from blockchain technology, listen to the first three seasons, starting with Season 1, Chapter 1.

Are you just six handshakes away from every other person on Earth? Two mathematicians set out to prove we’re all connected. You have probably heard the phrase “six degrees of separation,” the idea that you’re connected to everyone else on Earth by a chain of just six people. It has inspired a Broadway play, a film nerd’s game, called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”...and even a No Doubt song! But is it true? In the ‘90s, two mathematicians set out to discover just how connected we really are—and ended up launching a new field of science in the process. Annie holds one of Milgram’s “Letter Experiment” mailings sent to June Shields in Wichita, Kansas. Accessed at the Yale University archives. (Credit: Elah Feder)     A version of psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “Letter Experiment” mailings. “Could you, as an active American, contact another American citizen regardless of his walk of life?” Milgram and his team wrote. They asked for recipients' help in finding out. Accessed at the Yale University archives. (Credit: Elah Feder)   (Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)   GUESTS Duncan Watts, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age Steven Strogatz, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, author of Sync Andrew Leifer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University   FOOTNOTES Read Duncan Watts’ and Steven Strogatz’s breakthrough 1998 Nature paper on small-world networks. Read Stanley Milgram’s 1967 article about his letter experiment in Psychology Today. Watch Duncan and Steve discuss the past and future of small-world networks at Cornell. Watch C. elegans' brain glow! And read more about the brain imaging work happening in Andrew Leifer’s lab. Browse the small-world network of C. elegans’ 302 neurons at wormweb.org. Read Facebook’s analysis of Facebook users’ “degrees of separation.” Just for funsies, a network analysis of Game of Thrones.   CREDITS This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Annie Minoff and Elah Feder. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Fact-checking help by Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Additional music by Podington Bear and Lee Rosevere. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky. Story consulting by Ari Daniel. Engineering help from Sarah Fishman. Recording help from Alexa Lim. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.  

Are you just six handshakes away from every other person on Earth? Two mathematicians set out to prove we’re all connected. You have probably heard the phrase “six degrees of separation,” the idea that you’re connected to everyone else on Earth by a chain of just six people. It has inspired a Broadway play, a film nerd’s game, called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”...and even a No Doubt song! But is it true? In the ‘90s, two mathematicians set out to discover just how connected we really are—and ended up launching a new field of science in the process. Annie holds one of Milgram’s “Letter Experiment” mailings sent to June Shields in Wichita, Kansas. Accessed at the Yale University archives. (Credit: Elah Feder)     A version of psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “Letter Experiment” mailings. “Could you, as an active American, contact another American citizen regardless of his walk of life?” Milgram and his team wrote. They asked for recipients' help in finding out. Accessed at the Yale University archives. (Credit: Elah Feder)   (Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)   GUESTS Duncan Watts, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age Steven Strogatz, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, author of Sync Andrew Leifer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University   FOOTNOTES Read Duncan Watts’ and Steven Strogatz’s breakthrough 1998 Nature paper on small-world networks. Read Stanley Milgram’s 1967 article about his letter experiment in Psychology Today. Watch Duncan and Steve discuss the past and future of small-world networks at Cornell. Watch C. elegans' brain glow! And read more about the brain imaging work happening in Andrew Leifer’s lab. Browse the small-world network of C. elegans’ 302 neurons at wormweb.org. Read Facebook’s analysis of Facebook users’ “degrees of separation.” Just for funsies, a network analysis of Game of Thrones.   CREDITS This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Annie Minoff and Elah Feder. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Fact-checking help by Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Additional music by Podington Bear and Lee Rosevere. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky. Story consulting by Ari Daniel. Engineering help from Sarah Fishman. Recording help from Alexa Lim. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.  

From tweets to scientific discoveries, human behavior is surprisingly predictable. Why do some ideas go viral while others go nowhere? Is it all about reaching that mythical tipping point, or is something else at work? Kellogg Insight talked with two researchers who are starting to find answers by analyzing huge amounts of data. Microsoft's Duncan Watts explains why we should stop worrying about a tipping point, and Kellogg Professor Dashun Wang discusses how human behavior is more predictable than you might think.

Your brain can easily be manipulated. Be careful. Science says you are more likely to buy German wine when German music is playing at the store in the background, and French wine when French music is playing. You are more likely to name Gatorade when you are given a green pen in order to fill out the survey of your favorite sports drink. You are more likely to buy an an expensive couch from a website with a background of fluffy white clouds.    A bit sad (haha) but research shows this is how simple our brains can be when it comes to decision making.   For today's Book-Of-The-Day I was just reading, "Everything is Obvious – How Common Sense Fails Us" by Duncan J. Watts.   The author makes a good point. You can't always just rely on common sense.   The world is too complex.    Too many factors are involved.    "Common sense is bad at dealing with complex social phenomena like political conflicts, healthcare economics, or marketing campaigns..."   Our inborn common sense only works some of the time.    Watts explains, “Urban planners in the United States have repeatedly set out to 'solve' the problem of urban poverty and have repeatedly failed. There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend—the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars—we could wipe out all our slums in ten years.… But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that have become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace..."   Why did those housing experts with good intentions make such stupid mistakes?   It's the effects of the cognitive biases.    “Psychologists have identified so many of these effects—priming, framing, anchoring, availability, motivated reasoning, loss aversion, and so on..."   I would add to this book's list all of the other 25 cognitive biases and 100+ logical fallacies.    If your whole life strategy is to just trust your common sense, you are probably headed for a disaster.    “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."   Common sense is best kept for simple stuff like not petting a growling Rottweiler.   Don't over use it.    It won't work on some of the most important areas of your life   It won't work on your diet. When you eat junk food your bodies "common sense" meter will tell you that it must be good for you because it tastes good.    Wrong.   If you're driving fast and you hit a water puddle and start spinning out of control, common sense will tell you to slam on the brakes.    Wrong.   The list could go on and on.   Learn when to use common sense and when to use higher thinking.   Higher thinking comes only through training.   The world is full of people going to the gym for their body.    But hardly anyone's going to the bookstore to "workout" their brain.   One of the main reasons I created the 67 steps program was to show how you can invert the problem and reverse engineer your own brain.    Put in the work.    Use your common sense for common things and your "trained" brain for the harder things in life.    What's an example of an area in your life where you overused common sense?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duncan Watts discusses the opportunities and challenges posed by big data for research and public policy-making during his opening keynote of the conference "IPP2012: Big Data: Big Challenges".

Duncan Watts discusses the opportunities and challenges posed by big data for research and public policy-making during his opening keynote of the conference "IPP2012: Big Data: Big Challenges".

In 1929, Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story suggesting that everyone is connected to everyone else by six or seven degrees of separation. In 1967, Stanley Milgrim did an experiment proving it. And twenty years later, Duncan Watts & Steve Strogatz build the mathematics to describe it. We talk to Samuel Hansen about why this means our friends are more popular than we are.

Duncan Watts discusses how the Internet is beginning to lift a long-time constraint of social science research on emergent collective behaviour: the difficulty of measuring interactions between people, at scale, over time, while also observing behaviour. Social science is often concerned with the emergence of collective behavior out of the interactions of large numbers of individuals; but in this regard it has long suffered from a severe measurement problem - namely that interactions between people are hard to measure, especially at scale, over time, and at the same time as observing behavior. In this talk, Duncan will argue that the technological revolution of the Internet is beginning to lift this constraint. To illustrate, he will describe four examples of research that would have been extremely difficult, or even impossible, to perform just a decade ago: using email exchange to track social networks evolving in time; using a web-based experiment to study the collective consequences of social influence on decision making; using a social networking site to study the difference between perceived and actual homogeneity of attitudes among friends; using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to study the incentives underlying 'crowd sourcing'. Although internet-based research still faces serious methodological and procedural obstacles, Duncan proposes that the ability to study truly 'social' dynamics at individual-level resolution will have dramatic consequences for social science.

Duncan Watts discusses how the Internet is beginning to lift a long-time constraint of social science research on emergent collective behaviour: the difficulty of measuring interactions between people, at scale, over time, while also observing behaviour. Social science is often concerned with the emergence of collective behavior out of the interactions of large numbers of individuals; but in this regard it has long suffered from a severe measurement problem - namely that interactions between people are hard to measure, especially at scale, over time, and at the same time as observing behavior. In this talk, Duncan will argue that the technological revolution of the Internet is beginning to lift this constraint. To illustrate, he will describe four examples of research that would have been extremely difficult, or even impossible, to perform just a decade ago: using email exchange to track social networks evolving in time; using a web-based experiment to study the collective consequences of social influence on decision making; using a social networking site to study the difference between perceived and actual homogeneity of attitudes among friends; using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to study the incentives underlying 'crowd sourcing'. Although internet-based research still faces serious methodological and procedural obstacles, Duncan proposes that the ability to study truly 'social' dynamics at individual-level resolution will have dramatic consequences for social science.

Can web-based social systems with their wide reach, user-generated and user-filtered content harness the wisdom of crowds? Duncan Watts’ recent experiments reveal how popularity based web social systems can throw up fickle, random trends that are essentially unreplicable, and only tangentially related to quality. However, popularity as a way to filter information continues to rise in popularity - replacing hierarchical menus, overtaking tags, and even used in lieu of relevance. Rashmi will link decades of psychology research on group decision making and social influence to what is happening on the web today. She will discuss different models of popularity based filtering such as Digg and YouTube. What are ways to avoid the Watts dilemma - including Google’s model of sociality, tag-based social systems, and object-based social networks. She will present some principles for the design of web social systems and how there were used in the design of SlideShare and discuss how SlideShare as an evolving social system handles popularity. Rashmi Sinha is a designer, researcher and entrepreneur. She is the CEO for SlideShare, a rapidly growing site for sharing slideshows. Rashmi writes a blog at rashmisinha.com. Rashmi received a PhD in cognitive psychology from Brown University in 1998. After moving to UC Berkeley for a PostDoc, she fell in love with the web, and realized that many issues that web technologists think about are problems of human psychology. She switched departments and worked on search interfaces & recommender systems at the Information School, UC Berkeley. Deciding that she enjoyed practical problems more, she co-founded Uzanto, a user experience consulting company. Lately Uzanto has focused on products - their first product MindCanvas (released Nov 2005) - reshapes traditional research techniques like card-sorting, and divide-the-dollar into game-like experiences for remote research. In Oct 2006, Uzanto released its second product - Slideshare, a website for sharing presentations. Now, Rashmi is focused on the business side of things but is still intimately involved with design for both products. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University.