Everything Is Obvious (34 page)
Read Everything Is Obvious Online
Authors: Duncan J. Watts
This book has been in the writing for more than three years, and on my mind for twice as long as that. During that time, I’ve been fortunate to work at some incredible institutions and with many equally impressive people. I’m grateful to all of them, but a few deserve special mention.
First of all, I’m deeply grateful to Yahoo! for providing such a stimulating and supportive research environment over the past three years. It is surprising to many people that a major US corporation in this day and age would choose to invest in a research organization that is dedicated to producing and publishing basic science, and yet that is precisely the mission of Yahoo! Research. Not that our more than 100 research scientists don’t make a significant contribution to the corporate bottom line (note to shareholders—we do). Nevertheless, the freedom and flexibility that we experience—including to write books like this one—is remarkable, and a tribute to the leadership of Prabhakar Raghavan, the founding director. I’m also grateful to Preston McAfee and Ron Brachman for their support and encouragement, and to my colleagues Sharad Goel, Dan Goldstein, Jake Hofman, Sebastien Lahaei, Winter Mason, Dave Pennock, David Reiley, Dan Reeves, and Sid Suri, from whom I have learned so much. I’ve yet to meet a group of people who can be so argumentative and yet so enjoyable to work with.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, I spent several formative years in the sociology department at Columbia University and remain
indebted to them for hiring me in the first place (without a sociology degree), as well as for patiently tolerating my ignorance of sociology and educating me in the discipline. I can’t claim to have become a “real” sociologist, but I’m certainly far more of one than I would have been otherwise. In particular, I’m grateful to Peter Bearman, Jonathan Cole, Michael Crow, Jeffrey Sachs, David Stark, and Harrison White for their support and advice over the years; and to my students and collaborators, Peter Dodds, Gueorgi Kossinets, Roby Muhamad, and Matt Salganik. I’m also grateful to the late Robert K. Merton—a towering figure in the history of Columbia sociology—whose encouragement at an early stage of my career was as inspiring to me as the work he left behind.
During my Columbia years, my research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (SES-0094162 and SES-0339023), the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and Legg Mason Funds, while the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, directed by Peter Bearman, provided valuable administrative support and office space. Without these organizations, much of the research described in this book would have been impossible. Subsequently, I’ve also benefited from visiting appointments at Nuffield College, Oxford, which generously hosted me for a two-month sabbatical in 2007, and the Santa Fe Institute—my intellectual home away from home—where I spent a few weeks per summer in 2008 and 2009. Without these critical breaks from my usual routine, it’s unlikely I would have been able to complete such a long writing project, and I’m grateful to Peter Hedstrom at Nuffield and Geoffrey West and Chris Wood at SFI for their support in arranging these visits.
Finally, I’m grateful to a number of people who have helped me realize this book directly. Roger Scholl, my editor at Crown, proved equally adept both as a cheerleader
and a coach, frequently restoring my enthusiasm during the long slog of editing while also steering me clear of numerous traps of my own making. Suzanne Gluck and Eric Lupfer, my agents at William Morris Endeavor, helped immensely in putting together the original proposal and provided valuable input throughout the writing process. Sharad Goel, Dan Goldstein, Victoria Johnson, Michael Mauboussin, Tom McCarthy, Scott Page, and Chuck Sabel were all generous enough to read early drafts of the book, correcting numerous errors and oversights in the process. And to my friends and family, who tolerated years of whining about “the book,” thanks for your forbearance. I know I haven’t been the best at explaining what all the fuss has been about, but I hope it will be clear now. Maybe even obvious …
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