Everything is Obvious, Once You Know The Answer
This is a book about common sense. Specifically, it's about how when you're told a fact it seems obvious -- common sense -- that it's true. Interestingly, this can be the case even if that fact is in fact untrue. This is at least partially because common sense is mostly practical, that is it's more concerned about "getting to the right answer", preferably quickly, than it is about exactly how it got to that answer. It's also partially because common sense is cultural, we map new situations to things we've seen previously to infer the correct answer. Different cultures have different experiences and so therefore have different common sense. The book spends a chapter discussing the ways that humans make decisions, and how logic isn't really the answer. We instead imagine ourselves in the projected situation and then work through what will happen. This means that we're bad at seeing attempts to anchor our thinking, or other forms of bias. We also tend to think that incentives will work better than they actually do in the real world. That is, we are bad at predicting what factors will be important in someone's decision making process and then apply ineffective incentives.…